Chapter 19 — Center Ice

POV: BEATRIX

The flour clip kept climbing for most of that week, with millions turning into tens of millions, and strangers still stopping me on the street even as the numbers began to level off.

Somewhere in the middle of all that noise, over coffee one morning, Nikolai mentioned that the team had a home game that Saturday and that he wanted me there properly this time. 

Not slipped in quietly through a side door, the way his office usually handled things that needed managing. In the owner's box, next to him, where anyone with a camera could see exactly where I stood in his life now.

The owner's box was nothing like I'd expected. I'd imagined something quiet and removed, with glass separating us from the noise. Instead, there were easily thirty people packed into a space meant for maybe twenty, staff refilling trays of food nobody had time to eat, and a television commentator's voice drifting low from somewhere overhead. 

It was loud, crowded with staff and sponsors, and a wall of screens showing replays from six angles at once, while Nikolai moved through it all like he'd been born standing in that exact spot.

This was his world. Not the penthouse, not the boardroom.

He introduced me to the players as they filed past before warmups, men twice my size who all seemed slightly nervous as they shook my hand, like meeting the owner's wife carried its own kind of pressure. 

One of them was a broad-shouldered defenseman who looked like he could bend a car door with his bare hands. I blushed when Nikolai introduced me as his wife. 

"Nice to meet you, ma'am," he said, then immediately looked like he wanted the ice to open up and swallow him. 

Another person asked, with complete sincerity, whether I'd taught Nikolai to cook, apparently after already seeing the flour clip. I told him I was still working on it. He laughed like that was the best thing he'd heard all week.

Nikolai knew each of their names without hesitation, asked one about his daughter's recital, and asked another how his shoulder was holding up. A trainer stopped him briefly to discuss a lineup change, and Nikolai gave his opinion in three clipped sentences that ended the conversation faster than any meeting I'd sat through in his office. 

I had never seen him move through a room this easily anywhere else.

"You're different here," I said after the last player had gone.

"Am I."

"You smile more. You're louder. You look like you're actually having fun instead of managing things."

He considered that for a second, watching the ice through the glass. "This is the one place nobody expects anything from me except to win. It's simpler than most of my life."

"I like this version of you," I said before I'd really thought about saying it out loud.

He glanced at me, something unreadable passing behind his eyes. "Which version is that?"

"The one that isn't performing for anyone."

He didn't answer right away. He just kept looking out at the ice, something shifting behind his expression that I couldn't quite name, and I let the silence sit there instead of pressing him.

Ivy came with us that night, wearing a tiny jersey with her father's name across the back, bouncing on her toes every time the crowd roared. She had narrated the whole first period, giving me a running commentary I mostly couldn't follow, something about icing and offsides that she clearly understood better than I ever would.

Between periods, Nikolai led us down a private hallway toward the concessions, past a long wall lined with framed photos. Mostly team photos. Championship years. A few candid shots of players celebrating.

I recognized Nikolai in most of them, younger in some, always standing a little apart from the group even in celebration, like some habit of distance had followed him into moments meant for joy.

One frame near the end of the hallway held no photo at all. Just an empty mat and a small brass plate below it, blank, with no name engraved. 

The frame around it matched all the others exactly—the same dark wood, the same careful spacing on the wall—which somehow made the empty space inside it feel more deliberate than any oversight ever could.

I slowed without meaning to. "What's this one?"

Ivy, who had not stopped talking since we left the box, fell completely silent.

Nikolai's jaw tightened slightly. "It's nothing. An old spot they never got around to filling."

I looked at him, then at Ivy, who was now staring hard at the floor, and understood, without needing anything else explained, that I had just walked into something neither of them wanted to talk about tonight. 

Whatever it was, it carried weight. I could feel it in the way the air in that hallway had shifted, the same way a room changes right before someone starts crying, even if nobody has said a word yet. I let it go. Some doors you don't push on the first time you notice them.

"Come on," Nikolai said, a little too fast, already moving. "The second period's about to start."

Ivy took my hand instead of his for the walk back, which she had never done before, and didn't let go until we were back in our seats.

I didn't ask her about it. I just held on and let her lead the way back down that hallway, past the wall of photos, past the one frame that wasn't like the others.

****

POV: NIKOLAI

I have walked past that frame a thousand times without looking at it directly. I have trained myself not to.

It is easier to manage an arena, a board, an entire organization, than to manage one empty space on a wall that used to hold Elena's photo, back when she still came to every home game and the staff still called her the second owner, half joking, half not.

She used to sit exactly where Beatrix sat tonight, three rows back from the glass, closer to the ice than the sponsors ever wanted her to be. 

Ivy has no real memory of her. I have too many, most of them from this arena, which is exactly why I stopped bringing myself to look at that wall.

I bought this team two years after she died, mostly because I did not know what else to do with the restlessness that comes from having more money than purpose. In some ways, it has been the only thing that has consistently made sense to me since.

I took the nameplate down myself four years ago, on a night I never discussed with anyone, including my own daughter. I have never decided what to put there instead.

Leaving it empty felt, at the time, more honest than pretending I knew how to fill it.

Arthur once told me, not long after, that grief was inefficient, and that I should replace the photo with something useful, a sponsor plaque or a schedule of upcoming games. 

I did not speak to him again for three months after that. It remains one of the longest silences I have ever managed to hold against him, and one of the few I do not regret.

Watching Beatrix notice it and Ivy go quiet—the way she always did when we passed that particular stretch of hallway—I knew I would have to explain it eventually. Not tonight, though. Tonight belonged to something simpler, and I was not ready to give it up for a conversation I had been avoiding for four years.

We won, in the end, three to one, and the mood in the private lounge afterward was relaxed in a way postgame events rarely are when we lose.

Beatrix had cheered louder than anyone in the box during the third period, on her feet for the final goal, and I realized I had spent more of that period watching her than the game itself.

Sponsors moved around with drinks, a few reporters stayed near the edges hoping for a quote, and I kept one hand near the small of Beatrix's back the entire time, a habit I had stopped questioning weeks ago. 

Priya had briefed me earlier on the guest list, including the names of donors and sponsors I needed to greet before the night ended. Evelyn Thorne's name was not on it. Her father's was. I made a note to ask Priya, quietly, how that particular oversight had happened.

That was when I felt Beatrix go still beside me.

I followed her line of sight across the room and found the reason immediately. 

Evelyn Thorne was dressed as if she had been invited months in advance, one hand resting on Julian Vance's arm as if it belonged there. Neither of them looked surprised to see us. Neither of them looked as though they had arrived by accident. 

Evelyn's father sat on the board of one of our largest sponsors, which meant I could not simply have them removed the way I had wanted to at that dinner weeks ago. It also meant Julian had chosen his entry point into this building very carefully.

A cold weight settled low in my chest, the same stillness I knew from negotiations just before someone tried something they shouldn't.

"They're here on purpose," Beatrix said quietly, not quite a question.

"Yes," I said. "They are."

Julian's eyes found mine across the room, and he smiled, easy and practiced, the kind of smile a man wears when he believes he still has a card left to play. I did not smile back.

Whatever he had come here to do tonight, I intended to make sure he regretted it before the evening was over. I did not yet know what that would look like. 

I only knew I would not leave Beatrix alone in a room with either of them tonight, no matter what it cost me to stop it. 

I kept my hand steady at the small of her back and began planning exactly how I meant to handle the rest of the evening, still watching Julian across the room and still waiting to see which one of us would move first.