Page 3 of Cross Check
That's not what I asked.
I leaned against the doorframe and honestly considered the question. Was I okay with Nico Varis sleeping fifteen feet from me? With monitoring a grown man's daily life and reporting back to management like some kind of corporate informant? With the media circus that would inevitably descend the moment the trade went public?
I'll handle it.
Keep it professional. Don't let him get under your skin.
I almost laughed. Luca Moretti, the man who'd spent a year pretending he wasn't in love with his rookie, telling me to keep things professional.
When have I ever let anyone get under my skin?
Just be careful.
I set the phone down and went to the kitchen to put the kettle on. The water would take four minutes to boil. The tea would steep for three. These were the rhythms I had built my life around. Small, controllable. Mine.
Tomorrow, all of it would shift.
The kettle began to hiss. I pulled a mug from the cabinet, chose the Assam, and waited for the water. On the counter, my iPad sat open to the sports feed. Nothing yet about the trade. Tomorrow morning, every outlet in hockey would have it. Ansel Rowe would lead with it on the evening broadcast. He always covered Storm trades with that blend of authority and warmth that made people trust his take before they'd even heard it.
I brewed my tea, carried it to the couch, and pulled up film.
Not Storm film. Minnesota film. The last forty games Nico Varis had played before the scandal broke and his ice time vanished.
I wanted to know what I was dealing with.
The footage told me two things immediately. First, Varis was fast. Not just quick, but genuinely fast in a way that made the other players on the ice look like they were skating through mud. His edges were elite, his hands were soft, and his hockey sense bordered on prescient. On one play, he read a developing two-on-one from the opposite side of the ice and backchecked through three lanes of traffic to break up the pass. The defensive awareness was rare for a forward. Most of them couldn't see behind them. Varis seemed to feel it.
Second, he was contained. Even in the older footage from before the investigation, there was a carefulness to his game. He took calculated risks, not reckless ones. He didn't celebrate goals with anything more than a raised glove and a head nod. No celly, no theatrics, no sliding on his knees to the corner. Just a nod, like scoring was expected rather than exceptional.
A man who'd learned to take up as little space as possible.
I watched an hour of film. I drank two cups of tea. And by the time I turned off the tablet and headed for bed, I had formed exactly one opinion about Nico Varis.
He could play.
Everything else remained to be seen.
2
NICO
The flight from Minneapolis to Chicago lasted ninety minutes. I spent eighty of them staring out the window at a grey sky that looked exactly like the one I'd left behind, and the other ten pretending to read the safety card so the woman in 14C would stop trying to make conversation.
She recognized me. I saw it happen in real time, the glance, the double-take, the slight widening of her eyes before she schooled her face into something neutral. Then the phone came out. She angled it toward me, trying to be casual, thumbs moving across the screen. Texting someone.Guess who's on my flight.Maybe posting it. The twenty-first-century version of pointing and whispering, and I'd been on the receiving end often enough to recognize the choreography.
I turned toward the window and pressed my forehead against the cold plastic. Below, the farmland of southern Wisconsin stretched out in squares of brown and green.
My phone vibrated in my pocket at the gate. My lawyer, Sarah.
"Nico. Did you land?"
"Just taxiing."
"Good. Listen, I talked to the league's office this morning. The investigation is still active, but the trade doesn't change the timeline. You cooperate, you keep your head down, and we let the process work."
"I've been cooperating for eleven months, Sarah."
"I know." Her voice carried the patience of someone who'd said as much many times. "But you're in a new market now. New media. New scrutiny. Chicago's press corps is aggressive. They're not going to give you a honeymoon period."
