RIVALS ON ICE

The question came from the back row, the way the bad ones always did.

“Cole, how do you respond to analysts calling the Wolves’ power play the worst in the Eastern Conference this season?”

Cole Mercer leaned into the microphone, and the Hartford press room went the specific quiet of thirty people pretending they weren’t holding their breath. He’d done enough of these to know the shape of the moment: the question designed to sting, the tape rolling, the expectation that he’d either deflect like a politician or bite like a man who’d forgotten about tape rolling.

“I’d say those analysts are being generous,” he said.

The room laughed, relieved. Cole picked up his water bottle and let the next question begin its windup, something about the defensive rotation, and he was already composing the non-answer when every phone in the room lit up at once.

It was the kind of simultaneous glow that meant a trade. Cole had seen it before: some reporter’s face changing before the rest of the room caught up, the little recalibration behind the eyes. He watched it move through the press corps like a wave and then his own phone, face-up on the table because his media coordinator had given up asking him not to, buzzed with a notification from the league wire.

He didn’t pick it up. He kept his eyes on the room and his expression at a setting he privately called “professionally pleasant,” and he waited.

“Cole.” The reporter in the third row, Maggie Soo from the Courant, had the decency to look almost apologetic. “The league just announced that Dmitri Volkov has been traded to Hartford.”

Cole took a drink of water.

He set the bottle down.

“Huh,” he said.

“Do you have a reaction?”

“To Volkov.” He said it flat, like a fact he was confirming for the record.

“To playing alongside him. Given the history.”

There were at least four follow-up questions already sharpening behind Maggie’s eyes, and Cole could feel the rest of the room leaning in, the story they’d all suddenly been handed better than anything they’d come in hoping to write. Five years of the kind of rivalry that generated its own highlights reel. The checks, the penalties, the 2019 playoff series that still had its own Wikipedia section. And now, the same jersey.

“I think,” Cole said, “that Volkov is one of the best forwards in the league and that Hartford just got better.” He paused one beat. “I’m sure it’ll be very smooth.”

Nobody believed him. He didn’t believe himself. But the statement was true, which was the only kind of lie he was willing to tell in front of a camera.

He wrapped it up sixty seconds later with the practiced gratitude and the redirect toward practice tomorrow, and when he walked out he kept his face at “professionally pleasant” until the door closed behind him, and then he stood in the corridor and stared at the water stain on the ceiling tile and thought, very clearly: of course.

---

Three thousand miles west, Dmitri Volkov was inside his locker when his phone buzzed.

He had been in the middle of untaping the photographs from the inside of the door, the small ritual of departure he’d now performed twice in his career. His first year in the league, Calgary to Seattle. Now this. He registered the buzz without looking, finished peeling the corner of the top photograph free without tearing it, and set it on the bench beside him.

The photograph was from last season: the whole Cascade lineup after a Western Conference game, twenty-three men squinting into the arena lights, and Dmitri third from the left looking like he was thinking about something else entirely. Which he had been. He was usually thinking about something else entirely.

He picked up his phone.

The trade notification loaded in the league app, his name and the Hartford Wolves’ logo, and for a moment he just sat with it. The locker room around him was still running its normal noise: skates on the floor, someone’s music through a speaker, the specific percussion of men who didn’t know yet. His agent had called twice in the last hour; he’d let it go to voicemail, which meant the call he’d been half-expecting all week had become the call that happened.

He looked at the notification for another few seconds. Then he smiled.

It wasn’t a big smile. It wasn’t the one he used for cameras or for getting under a defenseman’s skin in the third period when you needed him tilted. It was smaller than that, and it arrived without him deciding on it, which was how he knew it was real. The Hartford Wolves. Cole Mercer’s team, and now, apparently, his.

Cole Mercer, who played like a man with something to prove in every game they’d ever been in against each other, who talked the kind of trash that was actually interesting, who had once checked Dmitri so hard into the boards in a 2021 regular season game that Dmitri had laughed out loud from the ice, which Cole had visibly found infuriating. Cole Mercer, who’d been the only person in two years of juniors who could get open on Dmitri’s setup passes before Dmitri had fully committed to them, like he could read a half-second into the future, which was the kind of thing that was genuinely rare and that Dmitri had spent five years trying not to think about directly.

He put the phone in his jacket pocket. He picked up the photograph from the bench and slid it carefully into the box.

Outside the locker room, he could hear the news spreading: raised voices, somebody saying his name with a question mark attached. In a few minutes they’d be in here, his teammates, the ones who’d been his teammates, offering the handshakes and the genuine-but-complicated goodbyes. He’d receive all of it with gratitude. He had liked it here.

But first he let himself sit for one more minute in the quiet before the noise, in the particular sensation of a door closing and another one, somewhere east, beginning to open. He thought about Cole Mercer’s face when he found out. He thought about what that press conference probably looked like.

He was still smiling when the first of his teammates pushed through the door.

---

By nine that night, Cole had read thirty-seven texts, two emails from the front office, and a message from his mother that said only *interesting!* with the period she always added when she was pretending not to have opinions. He was sitting in his kitchen in Hartford with a bowl of pasta going cold and the league app open to the trade summary, reading Volkov’s stats the way you read something you already knew by heart but couldn’t stop checking.

Forty-two goals last season. Seventeen assists in their head-to-head games over five years, six of which Cole had a specific reason to remember, and not because they were the lowest points.

He closed the app. He ate three bites of pasta and thought about the 2019 series, which was something he made a point of not doing anymore, and the fact that as of Monday he would be sharing a locker room with the man who’d been on the other side of it. He thought about the nature documentary his teammates would make of the first practice. He thought about what Volkov’s face had looked like in that tunnel before game seven, turned toward him, starting to say something.

He put the pasta in the fridge.

He didn’t let himself finish the thought. He’d gotten good at that part over five years, the early redirect, the cut before the frame. What he had instead was the knowledge that Dmitri Volkov was a problem he’d managed from across the ice for half a decade, and that the ice had just run out.

His phone lit up again. Maggie Soo, a text this time: *Very smooth, huh?*

He turned it face-down on the counter.

Somewhere in Seattle, if he knew anything about the man, Volkov was already thinking three moves ahead.

Cole Mercer had always been faster.