Puking My Hockey Rival

Chapter6

POV: Luca

I stepped back first. My shoulder hit the cold concrete wall and I used the pain to anchor myself, to pull back into the version of myself that knew how to think clearly. Ronan did not move immediately. He stood in the middle of the corridor with his hands loose at his sides and his breathing slower than mine, and I hated him a little for that. For the fact that whatever had just happened had not visibly cracked anything in him the way it had cracked something in me.

The figure was gone. The far end of the tunnel was empty, just shadow and the distant sound of the building settling around us.

Neither of us spoke. I looked at the exit where the figure had been. I measured the distance with my eyes the way I measured angles on the ice, calculating, sorting, trying to build something useful out of a situation that was already moving in a direction I could not fully control.

"We should go," I said.

My voice came out flat, which was what I wanted.

Ronan looked at me for a moment. Not a long moment, but the kind that carries weight. Then he nodded once and turned and walked toward the opposite exit without a word. No explanation, no plan, no attempt to resolve what sat between us like something dropped and not yet picked up.

I stood alone in the tunnel for a while after his footsteps faded. My hands were not shaking this time. That felt important, though I was not sure why.

++

The next morning came in gray and cold and I was at the facility before anyone else. I ran drills until the first other players arrived, then I kept going because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant returning to the tunnel over and over the way you probe a bruise to confirm it still hurts.

My assistant Marcus found me in the corridor outside the equipment room just before nine. He was twenty-six, efficient, and had learned in his first week that I did not want conversation before I was ready for it. He stood with a clipboard and waited.

"What is it?" I asked.

"Facilities log from last night." He held the clipboard out. "You asked me to check who filed early-exit forms after ten."

I took it, One name..Cole, Daniel. Exit filed at eleven fifty-one. Part-time maintenance, ice crew.

"Pull his full file," I said. "Employment record, references, everything."

Marcus nodded and left without asking why.

I went to my office and sat with the door shut and the lights off for a few minutes. The habit was old, born from the years when my father used to say that a man who could not sit in the dark without flinching was a man who was afraid of himself. I did not know anymore whether that was wisdom or just something he needed to believe to sleep at night.

Marcus came back in twenty minutes with a thin printed file.

Danny Cole, Twenty-three years old. Eighteen months with the facility. Two references, both solid. No disciplinary notes. A part-time schedule that put him in the building three nights a week.

I read it twice. Nothing unusual. Nothing that explained why he had been in that tunnel at that hour.

Then I turned to the last page. Marcus had attached a social media summary the way he always did for new or flagged staff, a precaution we had started using after a locker-room image leak two seasons back.

I stopped reading.

The cold moved through me slowly, starting somewhere in my chest and spreading outward to my hands.

Danny Cole had recently followed an account called IceLevelInsider on three separate platforms. I knew the name. Everyone in professional hockey knew the name. IceLevelInsider had broken the story about a Phantom's captain's substance issue two seasons ago. They had published the locker-room argument between two coaches before either team's management had been told. They had three hundred thousand followers and a record of stories that could only have come from people inside facilities, inside locker rooms, inside the specific quiet corners of arenas where cameras did not reach.

I set the file down on my desk. I pressed my palms flat against the surface and looked at the wall and breathed through the thing moving in my chest, which was not panic, I did not panic, but which sat in the same neighborhood.

A twenty-three-year-old who needed money. A gossip account that paid for access. A tunnel at eleven forty-three at night and two men standing closer than rivals stand.

I picked up my phone. I held it for a long time.

Ronan's number was in my recent calls. Three entries down. I looked at it and thought about what it would mean to call him, to say: I have a name, I have a connection, we need to move on this together. I thought about the way he had stood in that tunnel and looked at me like he was not surprised by anything that had happened, like he had been walking toward it for long enough that landing there felt like arriving.

I put the phone face down on the desk. He was the captain of a rival team. We were two weeks into preseason with a regular season that mattered more to my franchise than I had allowed myself to admit. The last thing I needed was to start coordinating crisis management with the man who had just kissed me in a maintenance corridor.

That was what I told myself.

I told myself it clearly, in the straightforward internal voice I used when I needed to believe something.

I knew it was not the real reason.

The real reason was smaller and harder to look at directly. It was the fact that calling Ronan would mean treating this like something shared. Like something that belonged to both of us. And I was not ready to do that yet because doing that meant admitting that the tunnel had not been an accident, that the three years before it had not been competition, that the feeling I had when I was in the same building as him was not a problem to be managed but a truth I had been managing instead.

I picked up my phone again and called Victor Hale. He answered on the second ring.

"I need you to look into a facilities worker," I said. "Quietly. Name is Danny Cole."

Victor was quiet for one second. "How bad?"

I looked at the social media printout. At the name of the account that had broken three stories this season from inside places like this one.

"I don't know yet," I said.

But I was already starting to..