Page 90 of The Last Inch Of Ice
It’s become the fuel Nazar runs on. This toxic cocktail of want and regret and the memory of one perfect night in Los Angeles that he destroyed with his own stupidity.
The Comets are having their best season in franchise history.
Nazar’s putting up career numbers, on pace for a hundred points if he maintains his current rate.
He should be happy. Should be focused on the playoffs, on the Cup, on all the things he’s worked his entire life for.
Instead, he’s in his hotel room at two AM, watching a streamable clip of Kai Callahan fighting a Bruins defenseman who hit him from behind.
Kai loses the fight — he always does, he’s just not built for fighting — but he doesn’t back down. Just takes his five-minute penalty and skates to the box with blood on his chin, looking more alive than Nazar has felt in months.
He replays it three more times before forcing himself to put the phone down.
This is pathetic. He knows it’s pathetic. Sam caught him watching Wardens highlights last week and made a joke about “scouting the competition,” but there was a question in his eyes that Nazar didn’t want to answer.
The league awards ceremony is, as always, a black-tie hellscape of manufactured excitement.
Nazar arrives at the hotel in a sea of other players, everyone performing confidence they may or may not actually feel and clapping each other on the back and talking shit in that particular way hockey players do when they’re pretending last night’s brutal game didn’t happen.
He’s collecting his bag, when something makes him look up.
A flicker of movement. Third floor. An open window.
He shouldn’t be able to tell from this distance, from this angle, with all the chaos happening around him.
But he knows that silhouette the way he knows his own reflection. The way he knows the weight of his stick, the feel of ice under his blades.
Kai.
He’s standing in the window, leaning against the frame with one hand braced on the sill. Not looking down at the circus of arriving players and flashing cameras. Looking out, past all of it, at the skyline going dark in the distance.
For a long moment, Kai is perfectly still. There’s something about his posture that makes Nazar’s chest tighten.
Then, as if sensing he’s being watched, Kai turns his head. His gaze drifts down, across the chaos of the driveway, and lands with unerring accuracy on Nazar.
Their eyes lock across a hundred feet of air.
The connection is instantaneous—a jolt that makes Nazar forget to breathe, forget where he is, forget everything except the fact that Kai is looking at him.
Then Kai steps back from the window and disappears into the shadows of his room.
The spell breaks.
Someone jostles Nazar’s shoulder. It’s Vyachovsky, saying something about dinner plans. Nazar nods automatically, not hearing, still staring at the now-empty window.
“You good, man?” Vyachovsky asks.
“Yeah. Fine. Just tired.”
The party after the ceremony is exactly what Nazar expected: a crush of bodies in expensive clothes, champagne that costs more than it should, and conversations that all blend together into meaningless noise.
He spots Kai across the room almost immediately. It’s like his brain has developed a specific radar for him, so he can find Kai in any crowd, any context, without even trying.
Kai is alone, nursing a drink that might be whiskey or might be cola, standing near a column like he’s trying to blend into the architecture.
He’s in a suit that makes him look like he stepped out of a cologne ad. But his usual energy is gone.
It’s wrong. Kai without his defenses doesn’t look free. He looks exposed. Vulnerable in a way that makes Nazar’s protective instincts surge.
