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Chapter Four

Viktor

I’m not really expecting Knova to come with us to the Puck Drop, the official bar-slash-restaurant of the Vegas Venom, which Cooper Harrison, a former player, owns. He and his wife, Toni, live in our parents’ neighborhood. We’ve spent a lot of nights here. Hell, our baby pictures are hung on the walls. But I could tell from how Knova glared at me during her humiliating rendition of the National Anthem that she had no interest in hanging out tonight.

Even knowing that the odds of seeing her are low, I’m still disappointed when I arrive at the Puck Drop and she is, indeed, absent. How am I supposed to convince her to give me a chance if she won’t even talk to me?

“What a shitshow,” Knight says, flopping down into the empty seat beside me. The rest of the players are still trickling in to celebrate our first win of the season. Briggs and Layla sit at one of the other tables, along with the other parents, many of whom still work for the team. Including my dad, who’s been the Venom goalie coach for years.

Cam sits down with his usual golden-retriever energy, followed by Tristan, who slides in like he’s allergic to enthusiasm.

“What part?” I ask him. “I thought we did well. We won our home opener.”

“Oh, yeah, we killed it. I was talking about my sister’s performance.” Knight cocks his head. “Are you guys in a fight or something? She couldn’t take her eyes off you during that awful song. Her glare was lethal.”

“She wasn’t supposed to be up there,” I remind him. “And we both know she’s not musically inclined. Never has been.”

Lenyx winces. “Brutal.”

“You’re the one who called her performance a shitshow! I’m not making fun of her. I just think, with her parents being musical, people expected her to be like them. Imagine if people had grown up expecting us to be great at hockey, like our dads, and we couldn’t skate for shit?”

Knight pauses to consider this, and after a beat, he smirks. “Can’t even imagine it. We came out of the womb with better puck control than half the league.” He rubs his thumb over his lip, watching me too closely. “You and Knova have always been tight. Just wondering if things are… changing.” One eyebrow raises. “You seeing her? Or is this just one of those weird soulmate-but-we-don’t-talk-about-it things?”

I groan. “None of the above.” Technically true, though he’s right: it’s always been complicated with the two of us.

Lenyx shakes his head and lets out a disappointed sigh. “That’s a missed opportunity, my man.” His palm strikes my back twice, hard enough to knock the breath from my lungs, before he pops up from the table and rushes over to do some complicated hand drive with one of our wingers who just walked in.

I sit at the table, mulling over his words and considering just how poorly today has gone. Once again, I failed to score any meaningful time with Knova. I don’t even know how to approach her after today. She was upset by the anthem fiasco on the ice, but I also got the impression that she was mad at me personally.

I open my phone and start scrolling through gifs I can send her. I start typing a message—something real, something like “You okay?”—but I delete it before I even finish. Better to be funny than honest. Funny doesn’t get you hurt. When all else fails, use a meme. I’m trying decide between a heartfelt gif telling her that this will blow over soon and a picture of that weird crying cat with the caption, This Will Be Funny in Ten Years. I know the cat one will make her laugh since she’s a cat person, but I don’t want her to think I was laughing at her. Hm. Decisions, decisions.

“Hey, Viktor.” Coach Metcalfe leans across the table and jerks his thumb toward the bar. “First round’s on the team card. What can I get for you?”

Tristan lifts his head from where he’s been quietly demolishing a burger. “Don’t let Coach buy you anything. He’ll act like it means you owe him your firstborn.”

Coach snorts. “You’re not wrong.”

They fist bump across the table like this is normal. I suddenly remember why nobody wins in arguments with either of them. It’s like trying to out-sarcasm a cat.

“Oh, uh…” My phone slips from my fingers, and I nearly drop it twice before slamming it face-down on the table. What would people think if they realized I was overthinking a message to Knova? Worse than that—a dumb meme? They’d know something was up, and someone would mention it to Knight, and then he’d text Knova, and this would blow up in my face.

“A beer,” I blurt. “Whatever’s fine.”

Coach snickers as he tips his chin toward my phone. “Glad you handled the puck with more finesse than that in tonight’s game, Abbott.”

I make a gesture at him because that’s what he expects. “Rude.” If I thought shacking up with my big sister would get this man who could derail my career off my back, I was wrong. If anything, he only got more annoying.

He responds in kind and takes a few steps backward, laughing to himself before he finally turns to the bar. Jerk. I take a quick look around and then reach for my phone again.

Oh.

Oh no.

Oh no.

Six. Six gifs. All of the same kid with his hands over his ears screaming, “Make it stop!”

Tristan glances over and raises a brow. “Dude, that’s not the vibe. Unless you’re trying to pour salt in the wound.”

I can’t believe I was worried about someone seeing my thread with Knova only to send her… this. It’s not funny, charming, or something we’ll laugh about later. It’s just plain mean. I groan and slump forward onto the table until my forehead taps the already sticky wood surface.

“Whoa there.” Coach has circled back, and he gives my shoulder a hearty squeeze. “You okay, there?”

I tap my head against the wood a few times. “ Noooooo… ”

“Want to talk about it?”

I roll my head to the side and stare up at him with one eye. “With you? ”

“You could.” To my horror, he slides into the chair beside me. “You’ve helped me out. I could return the favor, maybe?”

My phone rings, and I shoot to my feet so fast that my chair rocks back on two legs. “Gotta take this,” I blurt. I can’t tell Coach about this thing with Knova. For one, he’ll mock me, which is fine. But then he’ll do his earnest best to help me, and I’m sorry, but no. He’s old, and he’s engaged to my sister, and he’s a terrible liar. Vivian will hear about our fake marriage before we’ve even left the bar.

And she’ll leave me with a fate worse than death.

Telling my mother.

As I push through the last cluster of people, Tristan leans against the wall, drink in hand. “Don’t die,” he says without looking at me. I shoot him finger guns on the way out. I’m already dying, bro.

It’s cool outside, and the street is mercifully quiet. I shiver when I see the name on the caller ID.

“Hey, Knova!” I chirp, trying to sound like someone who didn’t just send a bunch of rude gifs on purpose. “I didn’t expect to hear from you so soon!”

Maybe this is good. Maybe she’s calling to clear the air. Maybe she laughed at the gif. Maybe—but her tone is the opposite of mine. I can tell she’s pissed. “You must have a death wish!”

“Listen, about that gif…”

“Your gif mocks me, just like you always do. Viktor, why do you always have to add insult to injury? Are you really just that much of an asshole?”

Ooh, crap, this is worse than I thought. I rub my hand over the side of my face and wrinkle my nose when it comes away sticky. Gross. Coop needs to wipe down his tables better.

“I’m not mocking you! There was an accident, and I dropped my phone—”

“Liar.”

“I’m not lying,” I assure her, but the strange noises keep coming. There’s a clatter that sounds like she dropped her phone, interspersed with more curses.

“Dammit! I thought that bag was microwave safe!”

“Knova?” I adjust my grip on the phone, as if that will somehow make it easier for her to hear me. “What’s going on? Are you okay?”

There’s another noise, more muffled but also more chaotic. It sounds like she tripped and possibly knocked over some furniture at the same time.

“Knova?” My voice cracks. “Can you hear me?”

Miraculously, her voice comes clearly through the speaker this time. “Ow! Dammit. I dropped them. Flaming potatoes. Now the chair is on fire. Fuck! And there go the drapes.”

This is so her. Disasters somehow find Knova, and she never blinks. She fights fires mid-sentence and still calls you out like she’s sipping tea. It occurs to me that Knova also might just be messing with me—pranks have always been our thing—but there’s no way she could fake the sheer panic in her voice, or the faint crackle of what must be flames in the background.

“I’m on my way, Knova!” I tell her.

I’ve never run so fast in my life.

* * *

Two minutes into my drive, it occurs to me that I’m not going to be nearly as helpful as the fire department would be. I’m able to use my car’s Bluetooth to call 9-1-1, and they inform me that they’re already responding to an emergency at that address. Of course they are—Knova’s smart enough to call emergency services. The only downside to this information is that it means that the fire was too big for Knova to put it out on her own.

And that’s what wrecks me. The image of her alone, coughing on smoke, trying to fix it herself while I’m too far away to do anything. Being helpless is worse than being burned.

I see the smoke when I’m still blocks away, a thick black cloud rising from my parents’ neighborhood. My panic turns momentarily selfish as I imagine flames climbing the walls of my childhood home, consuming my sisters’ rooms and everything we’ve left there. I belatedly think to call my mom, who answers on the second ring.

There’s a weird dissonance as I wait. One minute, I’m a grown-ass man on the Venom’s top line. The next, I’m back to being sixteen and in trouble for parking my car behind hers. Again.

“We’re fine,” she says breathlessly in lieu of a greeting. “The house is fine. Poor Cash and Kingsley, though…”

I relax, though only marginally. “Are they okay?”

“Oh, yes. I’m out here with them right now.” Mom pauses. “How did you know already? Never mind, of course, Knova told you. The two of you have always been close.”

No comment. “Is she safe?”

“Yes, sweetie, they’re all here. The only damage is to property, thank God.”

I round the corner onto the street seconds later. There are so many fire trucks. Their blaring sirens echo through my car’s speakers in the background of Mom’s call and through the windows at the same time, creating a surreal cacophony of surround sound. I pull into my parents’ driveway, well out of the way of the trucks, and haul ass toward the cluster of people standing in a little circle on the sidewalk. Mom is wearing pink bunny slippers and a matching fuzzy robe because she’s never not a Disney princess. Her blond curls fan out around her shoulders, damp at the ends. She must have been in the bath when they heard the sirens.

Weirdly, dad’s also wearing a robe, and his hair is visibly damp. Ugh, gross. They were totally banging in the tub.

I struggle with the whole ‘geezers getting it on thing.’ On the one hand, I want to still be getting it on when I’m sixty, but I don’t want to think about other sixty-year-olds banging it out.

And especially not my own parents.

When I get closer, I can finally see Cash and Kingsley standing in a small huddle. And then I see her. She’s not hurt. Not really. But she’s pale and shaking, covered in one of those silver emergency blankets. She’s in shock—the kind of quiet that screams.

I slow my stride as I reach Mom’s side. “What happened? How bad is it?”

Cash spins toward me and glares. “What are you doing here, Viktor? You’re like a bad penny. Every time something goes wrong with one of my kids, you just turn up… right in the middle of it.”

I brace for the hit. Cash and I have history, and not the good kind. He’s the one man I’ve never been able to win over. Probably because I’ve never earned it.

“Hey, now.” Mom rests a hand on my arm. “This isn’t Viktor’s fault.”

“Maybe not, but he showed up before my son.” Cash squints at me. “Seems suspicious.”

I grimace and run my hand through my hair. Cash might be a friend of the family, but he’s never liked me. Admittedly, I’ve given him plenty of reasons to view me with suspicion. I may or may not have enabled many of his son’s bad decisions in middle school. And high school. And in the two years since he moved back to Vegas, but who’s counting?

Oh, and there’s also that time I stood his daughter up on our one and only date and took zero accountability.

“We were on the phone when the fire started,” I tell Cash.

“What?” asks my father, at the same time that Cash scoffs and says, “Of course you were. Any idea why she thinks you had anything to do with the National Anthem debacle, too?”

I straighten my spine like I’m back at a team press conference. Keep it together. Don’t react. Don’t make it worse.

I glance over at Knova. “What? That was Marco’s mistake, not mine.”

“That’s not a no.” Cash crosses his arms. “And I trust her instincts.”

“No, I wasn’t involved!” I hunch my shoulders toward my ears. “I didn’t set her up at the arena, and I certainly didn’t sabotage her microwave. We mess with each other, but I would never do anything to hurt her.”

Mom makes a soft noise of assent, but Cash doesn’t seem convinced. “So, why would she suspect you?”

“Because…” I sneak a glance over his shoulder. Knova has turned her back to me, though I can’t tell if it’s because she’s specifically avoiding me or because she’s taking in the smoke still rising from the backyard. I don’t see any damage to Cash’s house, but I can only imagine what’s happened to the backyard, and to the poolhouse where Knova’s been staying since Knight got his own place. “Because she hates me,” I mumble at last.

Cash lifts one eyebrow. “She is the smartest twin.”

“Hey, now,” my dad protests, but his defense is halfhearted at best. I guess that’s fair, given all the trouble I’ve caused over the years. Even if this current disaster isn’t on me, I get why they’re giving me side-eye.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

And that was possibly the worst idiom I’ve ever thought in the entire history of thoughts.

I hold up both hands, accidentally shrugging off my mom’s touch in the process. “I just want to talk to her. To make sure she’s okay. I’m not going to do anything to make this worse, I promise.”

Cash continues to size me up for a long moment before, at last, he steps aside. Mom gives me an encouraging nod, and I shuffle past Cash, maintaining vigilance just in case he changes his mind. This man has sprayed me with a hose more than once, always aiming for the crotch so I look like I pissed myself. He even bought a bean bag launcher to defend his precious lawn from the tread of my shoes.

But he makes no move to stop me, and a few seconds later, I’m at Knova’s side. It breaks my heart to see how small and shaken she looks. The Knova I know kicks ass twenty-four/seven. I don’t expect her to be strong and stoic all the time, but I feel a little guilty that one of my rare sightings of her vulnerable side is happening under these conditions.

Let me help you . Let me take care of you for once.

I’m smart enough to bite those words back. I used to think love meant swooping in and fixing everything. Now I know better. Sometimes it means showing up. Staying close. Letting her lead.

Nothing will upset Knova faster than acknowledging the parts of her I’m not supposed to see, even if I want nothing more than to know every part of her, the good and the bad.

Good God, I am in so deep.

But maybe deep isn’t bad. Maybe deep is where the good stuff lives—if I don’t drown first.