The phone rang with a call from … the ass of the hour.
I answered curtly, “What?”
“You okay?”
“Course I am. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Why are you talking about my fictional relationship with my fictional agent and my not-so-fictional yet excellent ass?”
“You were a hot topic in our Bonking Book Club. Summer can’t believe how lucky she is.”
“Summer?”
“Yeah, the agent character is based on her. We think. This fan fiction author is kind of diabolical.”
“Ah, my non-fictional wife is jealous.”
That tingle over my skin was far too pleasurable. I shouldn’t be talking to him, late at night, like it was a secret.
“I am not jealous. I’m just amazed that you’ve made such an impression in this fictional hockey world when you haven’t even started playing in the real one.”
He chuckled, low, strained through gravel, and I was instantly taken back to simpler times. Playing each other in practice, hanging out over waffles, how our eyes always found each other in every room we entered. Anxious to not become bogged down in the past, I changed the subject.
“How’s your dad?”
He sighed. “He is calm right now, not worrying about people coming to get him.”
“And where does that come from? That paranoia?”
“He has always had a difficult relationship with the powers that be back in the old country.”
“You mean the people who imprisoned him? Jason filled me in some.”
He paused. “Yes. He suffered in his bid to tell the truth and hold them accountable. But things have changed. He is no longer in danger. Those days are past.”
“But in times of stress, this is what he recalls. That fear.”
“The doctor said that he would lapse into these memories. That it’s a comfort for him, because it’s both familiar and signifies a time when he led a more fulfilling life. I don’t really understand it.”
“The mind is a complicated thing. So, I have something to ask you …” I wasn’t sure how to frame it, so I just blurted it out. “Did you play in Russia to help your dad?”
For a moment, I thought he hadn’t heard me. Or understood the question.
“Yes. It was impressed on me that he would be treated better in prison if I played there. Healthcare. Blankets. Nicer food. And once he was out, I worked to smuggle him out of the country. Paid off officials, which was something my father hated—his anti-corruption crusade was now tainted by bribery and backhanded payoffs to get him to safety. But I couldn’t leave him there. Vadim helped.”
“Vadim Petrov?”
“Yes, he still wielded some influence over there, plus he is richer than God. He understood the risks, what it would take. My father had suffered for his cause, but then so had other people. Like my mother.”
She had died just before he came to play at Michigan. “How did she suffer?”
“Targeting by the government apparatus, becoming a social pariah. She died in a car crash which my father claimed was at the hands of the state, though there is no proof of that.”
A chill shivered through me. “You’re sure of that?”
“Who can ever be sure of anything, Lauren? But my father would prefer to believe the worst. It fuels him in the fight.”
I closed my eyes. Alexei’s life had always seemed so blessed—any girl he wanted, a glittering career, adulation from the hockey universe—yet this was much more complex than I had ever realized. I had thought of him as a moody playboy, yet I knew nothing of what he was going through.
