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Two minutes.

“Oh, come on!” he shouted, and I heard him drop the bag. “I know you’re in there, ice prince. I can hear you not breathing! “

I nearly laughed, truly, and it cost me something to hold it in.

Three minutes.

I have stared down armies. I have watched cities burn. I have stood on the shore at Arkhangelsk and let a Swedish frigate go by without eating a single sailor. I am a very disciplined creature.

I opened the door.

He was grinning, of course. Duffel bag in one hand, jacket on his shoulder, hair all over the place, cheeks pink from the cold. Hazel eyes, dark at the center. A little scar through one eyebrow. A mouth that looked like it had never been told no by anyone who meant it.

“Yo, Maksim,” said Lex.

God help me, I thought, and I had not said those words in nine hundred years.

Chapter 3

LEX

The Roommate Problem

“Yes. I want the room number. I want to stay in the same room as him.”

The guy behind the desk of the Halden Guest House was called Gary, according to his name tag, and Gary looked at the two hundred-dollar bills I’d folded on the counter like they were a religious experience.

“Sir, I can’t just…”

“You can. It’s a clerical error. Computers, right? Total nightmare. It says here Volkov’s alone in 214, but the committee meant to put a Kings player in there for, uh, the international friendship thing.” I said “international friendship thing” with a totally straight face. I’m very good at that. “Be a hero, Gary.”

He picked up the phone. He called 214. From ten feet away I could hear the muffled, low voice on the other end say one syllable, and I could hear Gary say “It came from the committee, sir,” in the voice of a man being slowly strangled, and I laughed so hard I had to hold onto the counter.

Gary hung up and slid a key card across. He looked ten years older.

“He said no,” he whispered.

“I know,” I said, and took the stairs two at a time.

I had made up my mind. From the moment I left that locker room, I had made a decision, and when I decide something, it’s done. I would be on Maksim Volkov’s back for the entire tournament. I would not rest until I saw that face do something, anything, and I’d make his life miserable if it was the last thing I did. A dumb goal, sure. But it was mine.

It took about a minute and five seconds to find the room. Second floor, end of the hall, a door with a brass 214. I dropped my bag and knocked.

Knock, knock.

Nothing.

I waited and checked my phone and knocked again. I imagined his poker face on the other side, working through every scenario, probably calculating whether he could kill me quietly, and I hoped he was. That expression, the way he looked at everyone like they were something scraped off a boot, made me want to punch it right off his face, or at least see it move.

“Oh, come on!” I shouted, after what felt like three whole minutes. “I know you’re in there, ice prince! I can hear you not breathing! “

The door opened.

I hadn’t even finished the sentence. He just… opened it. And there he was, so close, and taller than I remembered, looking down at me with those flat gray eyes like I was something that had crawled in from the snow.

I’d like to say my heart didn’t do anything weird. It did. It did something extremely weird.

“Yo, Maksim,” I said, with a cocky smile.