Page 24

We lost the second game.

It was a tough one — tight, physical, and the Icehawks came out hungrier than they had in Game 1. Now we’re heading into Halifax for Games 3 and 4 down 1-1 in the series.

The plane is an afternoon flight. Damian wanted us to get there early enough to rest and adjust instead of rushing around. Most of the guys are loud, trying to shake off the loss. I’ve got my headphones on, music playing low, trying to stay in my own head for a while.

Lena couldn’t come with us this time. She’s got a big client booked for the weekend and couldn’t move it. My parents are flying in tomorrow morning instead.

I’m sitting by the window, staring out at the clouds, when I notice Cole has somehow recruited Elias and half the rookies into making TikToks a few rows ahead. Naturally, Santi is right there in the middle of it with his camera in hand, encouraging the nonsense instead of doing the responsible thing and stopping it.

Apparently he’s been here five minutes and already joined the circus, which is fine by me because at least it keeps him away from me.

For a while, anyway.

Then someone drops into the seat beside mine with enough force to jostle my armrest, and Santi lets out a groan like he’s just survived something traumatic. He stretches his legs into the aisle, sinks lower in the seat, and closes his eyes with the kind of commitment that would almost be convincing if he didn’t look completely fine.

Not winded. Not tired. Not even remotely inconvenienced.

Fraud.

I turn my head and stare at him while he continues pretending to recover from whatever horrors Cole apparently inflicted on him. After a few seconds, he finally opens his eyes and looks over at me, entirely too comfortable for someone who has inserted himself into both my team and my personal space with zero invitation.

I leave my headphones exactly where they are, mostly out of principle, even though the music stopped registering somewhere around the moment he sat down. Neither of us says anything. He just looks at me, calm as ever, and I stare back because apparently I’ve decided this is a contest now and backing down would be humiliating.

Then his gaze slips lower.

It’s barely a movement, quick enough that I could almost convince myself I imagined it, except his eyes come back to mine a second later and suddenly I’m paying far too much attention to where they were.

My frown deepens.

Did this asshole just look at my mouth?

Before I can decide whether I imagined it, his lips move. He’s saying something, but between the music in my headphones and the steady roar of the plane, I don’t catch a word.

I sigh, pull the headphones down around my neck, and turn toward him. “What?”

There’s a flicker of satisfaction on his face, which immediately makes me regret giving him what he wanted.

“I said,” he repeats, entirely too pleased with himself, “hello, bonito.”

And there it is.

I stare at him, jaw tightening while my fingers curl around the edge of my phone. He knows exactly what he’s doing. There is absolutely no universe where Santiago Vega accidentally digs up an old pet name, drops it into my lap, and then sits there looking this fucking relaxed about it.

Especially not after I just caught him staring at my mouth.

I should put my headphones back on. That would be the reasonable thing to do. Instead, because apparently I’ve lost all instinct for self-preservation, I stay exactly where I am and keep looking at him.

Santi shifts slightly in his seat, angling himself toward me with one arm stretched along the armrest between us. “You know,” he says, keeping his voice low enough that the conversation stays ours despite the noise around us, “you’re even worse at avoiding me than you used to be. At least back then you were creative about it.”

That gets my full attention. “I wasn’t avoiding you.” The lie comes out smoothly enough that I almost respect it.

Santi clearly doesn’t. His eyebrows lift, and that irritatingly entertained look settles over his face again. “Sure you weren’t. That must be why you spent all of morning practice using Viktor as a human shield and suddenly finding somewhere else to be every time I got within twenty feet of you.”

I open my mouth, then close it again because unfortunately there are witnesses to at least half of that.

Worse, there’s something underneath the joke that I don’t particularly want to examine: he noticed. Not just that I was avoiding him. He noticed every time I did it.

I lean back in my seat and study him for a moment, irritation tangling with something I refuse to name. “What do you want, Santi?”