Still Guilty

CASPIAN POV

The booming voice of my father catches me just as I'm about to round the corner toward the player exit  first game back from my suspension, bag over my shoulder, ready to disappear into the night and never think about this evening again.

My *undeserved* suspension. Because  in a shocking turn of events that absolutely no one should be surprised by  the second test came back negative. Because I don't use drugs. Of any kind.

Like. I. Said.

Not that it changes much. Coach pulled me aside before warm-ups to let me know that random testing for the remainder of the season is basically a guarantee now. Something about the Cyclone Kings maintaining a clean program, the league watching, optics, whatever. I get it. I do. Doesn't make the whole thing sting any less.

My name rings out again  that particular tone my father uses that isn't really a request.

*Fucking hell.* Not now. Please, not now.

I already played like absolute garbage tonight. The last thing I need is to cap it off with a visit from Dad, but there's no clean exit here, so I rearrange my face into something neutral and turn around.

Both of them. Of course it's both of them.

My mother and father stand near the wall looking exactly as they always do in public  pressed, polished, impeccable. Two people who wandered into a hockey arena by mistake and haven't quite recovered from the confusion. Mom's got that particular expression she wears when she's somewhere she'd rather not be, a kind of carefully maintained blankness that could be genuine discomfort or just the Botox. Hard to tell anymore.

My father just looks like my father.

"Mom. Dad." I stop a few feet short, not quite closing the distance. "Didn't know you were coming tonight."

"Of course we came, darling," Mom says, the smile not quite reaching her eyes.

My father skips the pleasantries. "Remind me again the reason  you didn't just take up boxing? You clearly enjoy using your fists. At least there it would be intentional."

My jaw tightens. I breathe through it.

After all these years, I know better than to expect anything different when he shows up to a game. Win or lose, there's always a comment. Something to file down whatever good feeling I managed to scrape together on the ice. He's never understood hockey, never wanted to, and I stopped waiting for that to change somewhere around age fourteen.

And fine , tonight he's not entirely wrong. I spent time in the sin bin twice. The first was a hit that, if I'm being honest with myself, landed harder than it needed to. The defenseman went down face-first and the officials called it, which half the refs in the league wouldn't have, but I got the set I got tonight and that's that.

The second was a fight, and I don't regret a single second of it. A winger put me and Riven McKenzie both on the ice with one check, and then had the nerve to skate past me after the goal and say it loud enough for me to hear  *cheating juicer.* I was done. The bloody nose he left with was the least he deserved. Honestly I hope it's broken. Run your mouth about things you know nothing about and see what happens.

"You know me," I say, keeping my voice even. "Overachiever. Why settle for one sport?"

"Why bother with any of it?" he says. "It's a childish game, Caspian. A waste of your time and everyone else's."

There it is. Right on schedule.

"I don't know, maybe because it makes me happy?"

"Does it?" His eyes move over me slowly. "You don't look very happy."

*Observant.*

"We lost," I say flatly. "It's hard to be thrilled about that."

"Losses happen. In every aspect of life. A man who falls apart every time things don't go his way—"

"I'm not falling apart."

"is a man who needs to reassess his priorities." He straightens his jacket, unhurried. "Which is something I've been saying for some time now. There are responsibilities waiting for you, Caspian. Real ones. The kind that don't disappear when the season ends."

And there's the real reason they came tonight. Not to watch the game. Not even to dig at my performance. He came to remind me, in person, in front of my mother, that the clock is ticking on the life he's planned out for me. The business. The succession. The whole carefully arranged future that has nothing to do with anything I've ever wanted.

Being benched this past week hammered something home for me  I am genuinely miserable without hockey. Standing in the stands watching my team get shut out in back-to-back losses, knowing I couldn't do anything about it, was its own particular kind of torture. I felt every goal against like a punch. And yeah, some part of me knows the losses weren't entirely my fault. But the guilt sat there anyway, the way it always does, uninvited.

Hockey is the only place I've ever felt like myself. The idea of trading that for whatever my father has mapped out makes my chest go hollow.

"One more season," I say, grinding the words out through clenched teeth. "My team needs me."

His brow lifts just slightly. "Did they tonight?"

Low. But not inaccurate.

Because here's the thing about tonight the loss wasn't about my absence. It was about my presence. I could feel it the second Coach announced I'd cleared the test and was suiting up. The shift in the locker room. The way certain guys went quiet, or busied themselves with their gear just a little too deliberately. Out on the ice it was the same  that sideways energy from opponents and teammates both, that particular kind of judgment that doesn't need words.

Proven innocent, and still guilty in everyone's eyes. Still the guy who got flagged. Still the stain on the Cyclone Kings' clean record.

I'm being iced out of my own team and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

The only one who's treated me like a normal human being since I came back  and I'm aware of how strange this sounds  is Orlov. Which I'm choosing to interpret as guilt over the fact that he got my captaincy when there was no legitimate reason for it to leave my hands in the first place. Not some sudden change of heart. Because Dmitry Orlov does not have sudden changes of heart.

Either way, I don't have the bandwidth for my father's version of a pep talk right now.

"Is that it?" I say quietly. "You came to remind me you disapprove, I'm replaceable, and I'm wasting my time. Because if that's everything, I'm going to head out."

I don't wait for an answer. I haul my bag up and move for the exit, and I keep moving even when I hear both of them call after me. A glance back shows my father pacing  contained, controlled, furious in that bloodless way of his but not following. Good.

I've got nothing left for them tonight. No fight, no argument, no attempt to make him understand something he's spent twenty-two years refusing to understand. I'll let him think whatever he wants. I've gotten used to being the problem in other people's narratives.

I round the corner.

And walk straight into Orlov.

He's against the wall  or he was, until he saw my face  and the look on him tells me everything I need to know about how much of that conversation he just heard. His complexion has gone a shade or two lighter than usual. He's not smirking. Not coiled up ready for a fight.

He's looking at me like he feels sorry for me.

*Pity.* From Dmitry Orlov, of all people.

"Caspian."

Just my name. That's all. But the way he says it — quiet, careful, like I'm something that might shatter — crawls under my skin and stays there. He's never spoken to me like that. Not once in the four years I've known him.

I hate it.

I hate this whole day, and I want it to be over.

I move to push past him. He lets me go and then falls into step beside me.

"Caspian."

"Don't." I don't stop. Don't look at him. Keep my eyes on the exit at the end of the hall.

He reaches for my arm. I shake him off. He tries again, and this time his hand closes around my wrist and I feel it , the contact, warm and firm  and something in me snaps clean.

I spin and shove him back into the wall, forearm against his chest, and get in his face. "Don't fuck with me right now, Orlov."

He doesn't flinch. Doesn't push back. Just looks at me steadily and says, "I need to talk to you."

And that's when it hits me  the resemblance. Not in any physical way, not even close. But in the way they both carry themselves. My father and Orlov. That particular brand of certainty, like the world is already arranged around them and everyone else is just finding their place in the layout. Like attention is something owed rather than earned.

The difference is my father looks at me like a problem he's tired of having.

Orlov is looking at me like something else entirely. And I don't know what to do with that.

"Whatever you have to say  it doesn't matter."

"Just listen—"

"What did I just say?" I pull back and step away from him. "I'm leaving. Don't follow me."

He doesn't.

The hallway stays quiet behind me  nothing but my own footsteps on the concrete floor  and I don't know why that lands the way it does. The fact that he actually listened. That when I said *leave it*, he left it.

Gold star for the golden boy.

"Caspian."

My teeth find the inside of my cheek. I taste copper.

I don't answer. I don't stop. I don't look back.

I hit the exit doors and push through into the cold, letting the night swallow me whole