Finn skates backward in front of him like a human shield, arms half out as if he’s afraid Jules might fucking shatter if someone so much as sneezes in his direction.
Julian snarls—actually bares his teeth at him but Finn just winks and says something I can’t hear, but I read lips well enough to catch it.Careful, pretty boy. You’re not certified for full-speed chaos yet.
Julian’s mouth twists before he growls back,Get the fuck out of my way, chaos rat.
Finn laughs. Of course he does. That feral bastard thinks everything is foreplay.
Across the rink, Luca circles like a shark dipped in diamonds, skating lazily while watching Julian with the kind of interest that suggests he wants to play with him—or bite him, or maybe both.
Julian doesn’t notice at first because he’s too busy proving he can carve through the drills like he wasn’t gutted on this very rink two weeks ago, moving faster and sharper than he should be, anger driving every stride.
But Luca doesn’t like being ignored, so the second Jules cuts left, Luca drifts by close enough to whisper, his mouth moving slow and deliberate, loud enough for every lip reader in hell. “So who tapes you better, pretty boy? The doctor or the goalie?”
Julian stops dead, the ice spraying under his skates like shattered glass as he turns slowly to face him, and the look on his face is so lethal that if it had teeth, Luca would already be a corpse.
Luca just grins.
Kai—ever the hovering bastard—skates over before Jules can commit a felony with his stick. I can’t hear what he says from here, but I see the reaction immediately, the way Jules’ shoulders twitch before he jerks out of Kai’s reach like the man’s palms are lava.
He’s cracking.
And it’s beautiful.
I inhale, slow and deep, eyes dragging back to the screen’s edge where the news ticker still scrolls in its little blood-red ribbon across the bottom corner. “Nathan Grant, captain of the Toronto Vultures, officially on leave. No comment from the team or family. Missing from team housing, residence in Ontario unoccupied. Wife and children unreachable. No public statement issued. Investigation pending.”
Missing.
Not “relocated.”
Not “retired.”
Not “hospitalized.”
Missing.
I take another drag of the cigarette, hold the smoke in my lungs for a moment, and then slowly exhale through my nose. My other hand is on the laptop beside the screen, scrolling through every bit of buried information Misha dug up this morning. Financial inconsistencies. Burner phones. Deleted security footage from the Vultures’ private locker room two days before Game 7. Transfer of funds to an offshore account tied to an anonymous shell corporation.
The signature? Nathan Grant.
I grit my teeth as I stare at the grainy photo attached to the metadata. It’s him—same smug mouth, same captain’s smile, the same man who once looked Julian in the eye and said,I’d never hurt you, baby. Just one more game.The memory alone makes something ugly coil in my chest, and I find myself wanting to cut that smile clean off his fucking face.
He isn’t with his team, he isn’t with his wife, and he isn’t anywhere he’s supposed to be—which means he’s hiding.
And if he’s hiding, that means I go hunting.
I glance back at the feed just long enough to check the ice again. Julian’s skating hard—fast, controlled, not high and not broken, just angry—and the sight of it settles something cold and focused inside me. Good. He’s going to need that anger. Because when I find Nathan, I’m bringing a piece of him back in a box—just enough for Julian to burn.
The knock is quiet—for Misha—but it still makes the door rattle like someone tried to body-slam it politely.
I flick the cigarette into the tray, shut the laptop with one hand, and open the door.
He’s leaning against the frame like a six-foot-six monument to blunt-force trauma, hood down, scars out, his eyes narrowed with the kind of curiosity that never actually looks curious until it’s already too late. “You tell me why we hunting Grant now?” Misha asks, his voice low and rough, thick with that Russian bite that makes even jokes sound like war threats.
I lean against the door, my jaw flexing once as the thought settles in. He’s not wrong. Iamhunting him—Grant, the ghost, the golden boy’s old captain who kissed Julian in the dark and then knifed him in the daylight, the man who wrecked his entire fucking life and still walked away with nothing worse than a polite handshake from the League.
The others don’t know any of it. Not about the tape, not about the blackmail, not about the things Julian whispered into my shoulder with tears in his mouth and my name caught between sobs. As far as La Fiamma Nera is concerned, Jules is just the junkie rookie who lost the most expensive game in NHL history. That’s it. That’s all they’re allowed to know and I plan to keep it that way. “Why does it matter to you?” I ask.
Misha grins, sharp and wolfish, the same grin he’s worn since we were kids ripping bones out of grown men’s joints for scraps of territory. “Need to know if we kill him…” he says with an easy shrug of one massive shoulder, looking almost amused, “…or recruit him.”
