The Rival Between Us

Chapter Seven

Roman found out about the archived photograph three days later, in the worst possible way - from his brother, over a tense lunch that had started as a casual check-in and quickly devolved into something else entirely.

"You need to be careful," Viktor Volkov said, turning his coffee cup slowly on the table without drinking from it, a habit Roman recognized as his brother's version of nervous energy. "With the reporter. Elena. I saw the press conference clip."

"Everyone saw the press conference clip, apparently."

"I'm serious, Roman." Viktor's jaw tightened in a way that made Roman look up from his own plate, surprised by the intensity in his brother's voice. Viktor had never been an emotional man - he'd built a career and a life around control, first as a player himself before a knee injury ended things early, then as a scout, then as whatever quietly influential role he currently held within hockey circles that Roman had never fully understood and never asked too many questions about. "The past is the past. There's no reason to dig it back up."

"I'm not digging anything up. She's covering the team. It's her job."

"And you're going to be around her constantly for the next two months, at minimum." Viktor's eyes were fixed on his coffee cup. "That's a lot of proximity for two people who clearly haven't dealt with whatever happened between you."

"Nothing happened. She left."

"Right." Something flickered across Viktor's face, there and gone so fast Roman almost missed it, buried under the coffee cup and the careful neutrality his brother had perfected over years of never quite letting anyone see what he was actually thinking. "That's what happened."

Roman studied his brother for a long moment. There was something in Viktor's tone, something careful and rehearsed, that snagged against Roman's attention the way a loose thread snags against fabric. He thought about the private investigator's file sitting in his condo drawer, the bank transfer he'd never been able to explain, the burner phone that had made calls to a number no one could trace.

"Viktor." Roman set down his fork. "Do you know something about what happened with Elena?"

"Why would I know anything about that?"

It wasn't a denial. Roman noticed that immediately, the particular skill of a lifetime spent around his older brother teaching him to hear the difference between no and a question that avoids answering. Viktor had always been like this - careful, controlled, the kind of person who answered questions with questions when the truth was inconvenient.

"Because you're being weird about it," Roman said. "Weirder than usual. And you've never liked talking about Elena, not once, not in five years, and I never really thought about why until right now."

"I don't like talking about a painful time in your life. That's not weird, that's called being a supportive brother."

"Sure." Roman kept his eyes on Viktor's face, watching for another flicker, another c***k in the careful control. "You know, I hired someone. A couple years ago. To look into what happened when she left."

The coffee cup stopped turning.

It was brief - half a second, maybe less - but Roman saw it, the way his brother's hand went still, the way something shifted behind his eyes before the careful mask slid back into place.

"Why would you do that?" Viktor's voice was even, but there was something underneath it now, something Roman hadn't heard from his brother in longer than he could remember. Fear, maybe. Or guilt.

"Because none of it ever made sense," Roman said quietly. "She loved me, Viktor. I know she loved me. And then one day she just vanished, no explanation, no fight, nothing. People who stop loving someone don't usually vanish that cleanly. They fight. They cry. They say cruel things to justify leaving. Elena didn't do any of that. She just disappeared like she was running from something."

"Or someone finally saw sense and moved on with her life," Viktor said, but the words came out rougher than he probably intended, and he covered it by finally taking a drink of his cooling coffee.

"What did the investigator find?" Viktor asked, after a silence that stretched a beat too long.

"Nothing conclusive. A bank transfer. A burner phone. Enough to make me think something happened that I don't understand." Roman's eyes stayed locked on his brother's face. "Do you know anything about it?"

"No," Viktor said. "I don't."

It was the fastest, flattest answer he'd given all lunch, and it was, Roman realized with a slow, sick certainty settling into his stomach, the first outright lie his brother had told him in longer than he could remember.

Roman drove home from that lunch with his jaw clenched the entire way, Viktor's carefully worded non-answer replaying over and over in his mind. He tried, and failed, to construct an innocent explanation for his brother's reaction - a busy week, unrelated stress, anything that didn't point toward the possibility he'd been actively avoiding since he'd first opened that investigator's file two years earlier.

He didn't sleep well that night. He lay awake staring at his ceiling, running through five years of small, unexplained oddities he'd never bothered connecting before - Viktor's persistent reluctance to discuss Elena, the strange tension that entered every family gathering whenever her name came up, even in passing. He'd always attributed it to his brother's general discomfort with emotional conversation. Now he wasn't so sure.

He sat alone at his kitchen table long after Viktor's car had pulled out of his driveway, the untouched bottle of scotch still sitting between them like an accusation neither of them had been ready to make. He thought about calling Viktor back, demanding a clearer answer than the careful non-denial he'd been given. He picked up his phone twice, and twice set it back down, some instinct warning him that pushing too hard, too fast, might only drive his brother further into the practiced evasion that had clearly served him well for five years.

Instead, he opened his laptop and pulled up the investigator's file again, the one he'd told himself he'd never revisit. He read through it slowly this time, no longer searching for answers about Elena's disappearance in isolation, but scanning specifically for any detail that might connect back to Viktor - a name, a transaction, anything that might explain the particular quality of his brother's discomfort. He found nothing explicit, nothing that would hold up as proof of anything. But he found himself noticing, for the first time, how carefully the burner phone's purchase had been arranged, how deliberately untraceable the whole operation had been constructed. That kind of careful planning didn't sound like the work of a jealous ex or a random stranger. It sounded like someone who understood, intimately, exactly what needed to be hidden and why.

He thought about the years since Elena's disappearance - the drafts, the trades, the coaching changes, all the ordinary chaos of a professional career - and tried to remember whether Viktor had ever behaved differently during any of it. He couldn't pinpoint anything specific, no single moment that stood out as obviously wrong. But now, looking back with fresh suspicion, an entire half-decade of small, previously unremarkable moments seemed to rearrange themselves into something considerably more unsettling. Viktor changing the subject whenever Elena's name surfaced. Viktor's uncharacteristic generosity during Roman's darkest post-breakup months, always available, always ready to listen, as though managing some private guilt rather than simply offering brotherly support.

Roman closed the laptop well past two in the morning, no closer to certainty but considerably further from the comfortable ignorance he'd maintained for five years. Whatever the truth actually was, he understood now that he wasn't going to be able to un-know the possibility that his own brother had played some role in the worst chapter of his life.