Page 78 of The Last Inch Of Ice
He can feel his carefully constructed influence with the fanbase starting to slip.
The fans who’d been excited to have him are now starting to wonder if maybe the rumors were right, if maybe Kai really is more trouble than he’s worth.
He leans into the irony in interviews, delivers sarcastic quips that get turned into headlines, but his armor feels thin. Brittle. Like one more solid hit will shatter it completely.
One evening, after a particularly brutal 5-2 loss to the Islanders where Kai was on the ice for three goals against, he makes a pact with himself.
No hockey tonight. No checking scores from around the league. Definitely no looking up how Rykov’s team played.
He puts on some mindless reality television, where people trying to survive on an island with no resources except perfect makeup and designer swimwear. Opens a bottle of wine. And calls the one person in the world he trusts.
“Hey,” his older brother Liam’s voice is warm and steady on the other end of the line. “To what do I owe the honor ofan actualphone call? Did you finally decide to give up this ridiculous puck-chasing hobby and join the family business where you belong?”
“Tempting,” Kai says, swirling the wine in his glass and watching the legs form on the sides. “But I don’t think I have the appropriate level of sociopathy required to be a successful CEO.”
“You’d be surprised how quickly it develops,” Marcus says with a dry chuckle. “I didn’t think I had it either, and now I fire people before my morning coffee without feeling a thing. It’s very freeing.”
They talk for an hour about nothing and everything. Liam’s upcoming business trip to Tokyo where he’ll be negotiating some acquisition Kai doesn’t pretend to understand.
They share a memory of their mother — something about a disastrous family vacation to Cape Cod where it rained for sixstraight days and she’d insisted on making the best of it by teaching them to play poker for M&Ms.
Liam never pushes. Never pries into why Kai actually called. But he has a way of seeing past his carefully constructed defenses that’s both comforting and terrifying.
“You sound tired,” he says quietly after a lull in the conversation, after Kai has finished a story about Bonifazio knocking over a lamp.
“It’s been a long season,” Kai replies. The response is automatic, rehearsed. The same thing he’s said to everyone who asks.
“Yeah,” Liam says. “I know.”
He doesn’t say more. Doesn’t offer advice or platitudes or tell Kai what he should do differently. The simple acknowledgment — the quiet understanding in his voice that saysI see you, I know this is hard, and I’m here— is enough.
“Thanks for picking up,” Kai says after another comfortable silence.
“Always,” Liam replies. “That’s what big brothers are for. Well, that and teaching you how to pick locks when you were seven, which I maintain was excellent life skills education that Mom overreacted to.”
Kai laughs.
After they hang up, he sits on his couch with his wine and his ridiculous reality show and Bonifazio purring on his lap, and feels fractionally less alone.
It doesn’t fix anything. Doesn’t change the losing streak or the media narrative or the fact that he’s apparently engaged in some kind of psychosexual warfare via press conference with a grumpy man he hasn’t spoken to in eighteen months.
But it helps.
24
Chapter 24 Nazar
Nazar walks out of the meeting with his agent, his head buzzing like he’s just taken a hit to the boards without his helmet.
The conversation wasn’t about contract negotiations or endorsement opportunities. It was about damage control.
He can’t believe he let Kai get under his skin like that. Can’t believe he took the bait so easily, responding with coded language in a press conference watched by hundreds of thousands of people. It was reckless. Stupid. The kind of impulsive decision he’s spent his entire career avoiding.
And he can’t stop thinking about it.
He’s obsessed. He’s replayed the clip of Kai’s press conference maybe fifty times in the past week, analyzing it like game footage. Dissecting every word. Every smug, condescending syllable. The lazy drawl. The cold smile. The way Kai knew exactly what he was doing and did it anyway.
Nazar hates him.
