COLE
Ididn't like Mikhail Volkov.
I wantto get that on the record right away, because everything that happened after is going to make it look like I did. I didn't. He was six-foot-three of cold Russian granite with a scar through his eyebrow and a personality that suggested he'd been raised by glaciers. He'd hit me from my blind side in a preseason exhibition game hard enough to put me in the quiet room for three weeks, and he'd never apologized. Not once. Not a text, not a nod, not even a "sorry I tried to separate your spine from your body" in passing. He just looked at me across the ice with those flat grey eyes like I was a minor inconvenience in his afternoon.
And now he was on my team. Sitting in my locker room. Wearing my jersey.
The hockey gods have a sick sense of humor.
The locker room smelled like tape and sweat and that cheap body spray Jonah kept buying in bulk from Costco, and honestly? It smelled like home. Opening night. Sold-out barn. Third season for the Atlanta Reapers, first season where people were actually taking us seriously. Eighteen thousand people indowntown Atlanta who chose hockey over everything else on a Saturday night.
That still blew my mind. Hockey in the South. My dad would've laughed. My dad would've had a lot of opinions about a lot of things, but I wasn't thinking about my dad tonight.
Tonight I was thinking about Mikhail Volkov. No. Tonight I was thinking about goals.
"Briggs." Jonah slid onto the bench next to me, already taped and laced, which was annoying because I was still working on my left shin pad. Jonah Park was the kind of guy who was always ready ten minutes early and never made you feel bad about it, which made it worse. "You look like you're about to give a TED talk."
"I'm visualizing."
"You're constipated."
"Those are the same face."
He grinned and knocked his knee against mine. "Big night. You ready?"
"I was born ready."
"You were born in Duluth, Minnesota. Nobody from Duluth is born ready for anything except winter."
"Duluth adjacent. And I will not tolerate slander of my hometown on opening night." I finished with the shin pad and stood, bouncing on my skates. Everything felt dialed in. The tape on my stick was fresh. My blades were sharp. My legs felt good.
The energy in the room was electric, the kind of buzzy, jumpy vibe that only happens when a team genuinely believes it has a shot. Guys were chirping, laughing, throwing tape balls. Coach Callahan would come in soon and kill the mood with something intense and motivational, and we'd all get serious. But right now, in this moment, we were just a bunch of guys who loved hockey and couldn't wait to play it.
Except I couldn't stop looking at the corner of the room.
Volkov sat there like he'd been carved from a glacier. Still. Quiet. His dark hair was pushed back, and that scar through his left eyebrow caught the fluorescent light and made him look like a Bond villain, which I'm pretty sure was the vibe he was going for. He wasn't talking to anyone. He wasn't looking at anyone. He was just... there. Taking up space with the kind of deliberate silence that dared you to break it.
Having him on my team, in my locker room, wearing the same jersey? That was a special kind of torture that the hockey gods had designed specifically to test me.
"Stop staring," Jonah muttered.
"I'm not staring."
"You've been glaring at Volkov for thirty seconds."
"That's not staring. That's a tactical assessment."
"It's going to get you benched if Coach sees. Leave it on the ice."
He was right. I knew he was right. I cracked my neck and looked away.
Coach Callahan walked in and the room went quiet. Mike Callahan was built like a fire hydrant and had the temperament to match. He'd coached in this league for twenty years and had exactly zero patience for anything that wasn't hockey. He looked around the room, making eye contact with each of us, and I swear the temperature dropped two degrees.
"Gentlemen," he said. "This is the year."
Short speech. Callahan was like that. He didn't need to say more. We all knew what this season meant. Wild card at minimum. Prove that Atlanta belonged. Prove that we weren't just some expansion curiosity that would fold in five years.
We filed out of the locker room and into the tunnel, and the sound hit me like a wall. Eighteen thousand people screaming, the bass of the intro music vibrating through my skates, theice glowing under the lights. I took my first stride and felt the familiar rush. Cold air. Clean ice. Possibility.