Page 68 of The Last Inch Of Ice
It’s the kind of circular reasoning he’d mock if he saw it in someone else.
* * *
Sunday. The final day.
The official All-Star Game is hours away, but the players are mingling in a massive temporary hospitality suite that’s been set up in one of the arena’s luxury boxes.
There’s a catered spread that no one’s eating, a full bar that several people are definitely using, and about fifteen different conversations happening simultaneously.
Nazar stands by the coffee station—because of course he’s having coffee while everyone else is drinking champagne at eleven a.m.—watching a group of veteran players huddled around a mounted flat-screen, muttering conspiratorially about something.
He pays them no mind. His thoughts are orbiting Vancouver and a certain blond nightmare.
Then, a sudden, collective sharp intake of breath ripples through the room.
The kind of sound that makes everyone stop talking. The kind that precedes bad news or spectacular gossip.
Nazar looks up at the massive television screen mounted over the bar.
It’s showing live sports coverage. TSN, the Canadian network that treats hockey like a religion. The graphic below the anchors is flashing in aggressive red.
The headline reads:‘MID-SEASON BLOCKBUSTER: MAJOR SIGNING ANNOUNCED’
The subtext below it makes Nazar’s heart stop:‘CALLAHAN TO WARDENS’
They cut to video footage. A shot of the official press conference area in Arena in Toronto. And there he is.
Kai Callahan. Dressed in a stark black suit, standing at a microphone with the kind of posture that suggests someone has a gun to his back just off-camera.
The podium logo is the snarling blue wolf of the Toronto Wardens.
The news anchor’s voice cuts through the shocked silence in the hospitality suite: “—a bombshell announcement that’s sending shockwaves through the league this morning. Multiple sources now confirming that winger Kaisyn Callahan has officially signed with the Toronto Wardens. The team, owned by his father, Doyle Callahan, announced the acquisition just hours ago, describing it as a ‘direct personal signing’ rather than a standard trade. The contract is for three years, with player options and—”
Nazar’s world tilts sideways.
The Toronto Wardens.
Derek’s team. The team that destroyed his brother’s career and then his life.
The team Kai had publicly, explicitly, repeatedly sworn he would never join. Nazar remembers reading the interview in The Athletic last year—Kai being asked about Toronto and responding with something like, “I’d rather play beer league hockey in a barn than wear my father’s logo.”
The team that Nazar, with his model behavior and quiet, methodical determination, had always seen as his endgame. The ultimate goal. Get good enough, important enough, that Torontowould want him. Then get inside and find a way to make Doyle Callahan pay for what he did to Derek.
The team Kai knew —knew— meant everything to Nazar.
He stares at the screen. At the clean, expensive lines of Kai’s suit. At the set of his jaw, which looks like it’s carved from marble.
At the Wardens logo behind him, huge and unmistakable.
Nazar can’t breathe. His lungs have forgotten how to function.
It’s impossible. It feels like betrayal. Not just of the team, not just of Kai’s own public statements, but of Nazar specifically. Personally.
Will finally playing on his father’s team give him the influence to block the Wardens from acquiring Nazar? Was Kai even truthful when he said his father disapproved of his career, or was it just a pity tale meant to manipulate Nazar and make a fool of him?
A terrible, blinding surge of emotion crashes over him—confusion, jealousy, rage.
Everything Kai had ever said—the vulnerability in that hotel room, the unfiltered passion in dark corners and borrowed spaces, the confession about the draft and his father—all of it crashes down like a house of cards, proving once and for all that it was nothing but an elaborate performance.
