Page 70 of The Last Inch Of Ice
It’s one of the few silver linings of the past eighteen months.
His old teammates—the ones who initially treated him like an annoying rash—had somehow become actual friends. They text. They send each other increasingly unhinged memes. They meet up in the off-season and don’t make him feel like a headline with legs.
It’s a quiet, steady thing that Kai grips like a life raft in a storm he can’t admit he’s drowning in.
He’s also grateful that at their various meetups, one name is conspicuously absent from every guest list.
He doesn’t have to look to know. He can feel Nazar’s stare from across the studio—a familiar, heavy pressure between his shoulder blades, like someone pressing their thumb into a bruise just to watch him flinch.
Kai refuses to acknowledge it. Refuses to turn his head. Ignores the way the fine hairs on his arms stand up.
Eighteen months of this silent war.
Encounters on the ice are brutal. Public events are exhausting.
Nazar Rykov is a legitimate star now. Not just rising talent, but certified, grade-A hockey royalty. He has the mega-contract—eight years, obscene money. He has the Cup ring. He has statistics that make analysts run out of superlatives.
He’s everything the hockey world values: disciplined, relentless, brutally effective, and utterly devoid of scandal.
The righteous grumbler totally won in this life.
“Kai, you’re zoning,” Sam says gently, waving a hand in front of his face. “You okay?”
“Spectacular,” he lies. “Just contemplating whether Antoine’s artistic vision includes me looking dead inside or if that’s just my natural state.”
Later, as Kai is leaving— jacket slung over one shoulder, sunglasses firmly in place despite the overcast Toronto sky—he sees him again.
Nazar is leaning against a black Escalade, arms crossed over his chest, just watching.
He’s dressed simply: dark jeans, a henley that does absolutely unfair things to his shoulders, that stupid baseball cap pulled low. He looks like he’s waiting.
Kai’s heart does something complicated and unwelcome in his chest.
But then Vyachovsky and Sam burst through the door behind him, laughing and shoving each other like oversized children, and the spell breaks.
They’re talking about dinner plans, arguing about whether to get sushi or barbecue, and their presence creates a buffer.
Nazar doesn’t move. Of course he doesn’t. He’s far too disciplined, too aware of optics, to make a scene with an audience.
But his eyes track Kai’s movement across the parking lot with the same intensity he brings to tracking a puck.
Kai slides into his own car—a Taycan he bought mostly to annoy his father—and doesn’t look back.
The memory hits him on the drive home, sharp and humiliating, a phantom limb that still aches eighteen months later.
That night. The awards ceremony.
His own voice, small and desperate, something he didn’t even recognize as coming from himself:“Nazar, please. Take me. Now.”
A part of Kai still replays it on loop with a cruel internal narrator that revels in his moments of weakness.You just had to lose control, didn’t you? You just had to beg like you were dying for it. You just had to show him exactly how much power he has.
He’d known what he really wanted from Nazar. Not just the physical—though God knows he wanted that too, wanted it with an intensity that scared him. But he’d wanted the impossible thing. The thing Nazar would never, could never give him.
He’d wanted Nazar to look at him like he mattered. Like he was more than Doyle Callahan’s disappointing son, more than a scandal with a pretty face, more than convenient.
All he’d had to do was hold on a little longer. Keep the mask in place. Play it cool.
Instead, he’d cracked, shown his hand, and lost the game.
