The Rival Between Us

Chapter Three

Roman Volkov ran until his lungs burned, which was not, according to his trainer, a particularly effective recovery-day strategy, but Roman had never been especially interested in effective recovery-day strategies when his head wouldn't stop replaying a woman's face across a press room.

The treadmill in the Titans' private training facility hummed beneath him, the incline set high enough to punish, and still it wasn't enough to outrun the sound of her voice asking him a perfectly reasonable question about line deployment while every nerve in his body screamed at him to look at her, really look at her, the way he hadn't let himself in five years.

Next question.

He'd meant it to sound bored. Dismissive. He was fairly sure he'd succeeded, at least on the surface, because nobody in that room besides Elena and possibly Noah had any idea that underneath his flat professional tone, his heart had been slamming against his ribs like it wanted out.

He should have expected this. His agent had warned him three weeks ago that Sportsline Weekly was sending a reporter to cover the team through the playoffs, some rising star who'd made a name for herself with sharp, incisive features on player mental health and locker room culture. Roman hadn't asked for a name. He hadn't wanted to know. Some cowardly, self-protective part of him had assumed - hoped - that the universe wouldn't be cruel enough to hand him this particular collision.

The universe, apparently, disagreed.

"You're going to break your ankle running like that," Noah Bennett said from the doorway, arms crossed, watching Roman punish himself on the treadmill with the weary patience of a man who had seen this particular self-destructive ritual before. "Or your heart. One of the two."

"I'm fine."

"You said 'next question' to a woman who used to know your Social Security number by heart. In front of the entire Toronto sports media."

Roman didn't slow down. "It's called being professional."

"It's called being an i***t, but sure, let's go with professional." Noah stepped into the room and leaned against the wall, watching his best friend and captain run like he was trying to escape his own skeleton. "You want to tell me what actually happened between you two? Because in five years of being your best friend, I've gotten exactly one version of that story, and it was 'we broke up, don't ask about it,' repeated approximately four hundred times."

"That's the whole story."

"Roman." Noah's voice had an edge to it now, the particular directness that had made him a good enough friend to survive Roman's worst seasons and worse moods. "You dated Elena Hart for two years. You were going to propose. And then one day she just vanished, and you turned into someone who doesn't talk about his feelings, doesn't date anyone seriously, and apparently still remembers her coffee order five years later, because I watched you flinch when the assistant PR guy handed her a coffee this morning and it wasn't the one she likes."

Roman finally slowed the treadmill, breathing hard, sweat soaking through his shirt. "It doesn't matter anymore."

"It clearly matters."

"She left, Noah." The words came out sharper than he intended, edged with five years of carefully maintained anger that had, if he was honest with himself, always felt slightly hollow, like a wall built around a room he'd never actually finished emptying out. "She left three days before the biggest opportunity of my career, with no explanation, no goodbye, nothing. I called for weeks. I went to her apartment. Her roommate at the time told me she'd moved, no forwarding address, nothing. That's not a story with a complicated middle, man. That's a story with an ending. She chose to go."

Noah was quiet for a moment. "Did you ever find out why?"

Roman stepped off the treadmill and grabbed his towel, pressing it against his face so he wouldn't have to look at his friend while he answered. "I stopped trying to find out a long time ago."

That was, technically, true. What he didn't say - what he had never told anyone, not even Noah, not even his own brother - was that two years ago, in a moment of weakness he still didn't fully understand, Roman had hired a private investigator to find out what had actually happened to Elena Hart in the weeks before she disappeared. He'd told himself it was for closure. He'd told himself a lot of things.

What the investigator had found was incomplete, frustratingly so - bank records showing an unexplained transfer to Elena's account the week before she left, a deleted email account, a series of phone calls to a number that traced back to a burner phone purchased in cash. None of it added up to a full picture. All of it suggested something Roman had never let himself fully consider: that Elena hadn't left him because she stopped loving him.

He had buried that file in a drawer in his condo two years ago and told himself he would never open it again, because the alternative - that he had spent five years hating a woman who might have been protecting him, or running from something, or trapped in a situation he'd never bothered to understand - was more than he could carry alongside everything else he was already carrying. A championship season. A team counting on him. A brother who still flinched slightly every time Elena's name came up, for reasons Roman had never quite been able to explain to himself.

"You still love her," Noah said. It wasn't a question.

Roman didn't answer. He didn't need to. The silence said everything his pride wouldn't let his mouth say out loud, and Noah, to his credit, didn't push any further. He just clapped a hand on Roman's shoulder, the kind of gesture that meant I'm here whenever you're ready to actually deal with this, and left him alone with the hum of the empty training facility and the ghost of a woman's face across a press room, asking him a question he hadn't had the courage to answer.