Breakaway

ALEXEI

EVERY MONSTER WAS SOMEBODY'S SON FIRST.

Ice. Blood. Noise.

Twenty thousand people screaming my name, and I can't hear any of them.

All I hear is the puck.

Crack.

A gunshot against the frozen expanse. The only language I've ever understood. It comes off the boards hot and spinning and I'm already there, already moving, because I saw it before it happened. I always see it before it happens. My legs drive. My blades bite. The ice bows under me like it knows who I am.

"ROCK-ET! ROCK-ET!"

They chant it like a prayer. Like I'm a saint.

They have no idea.

Number 44 comes at me from the left. Big kid. Rookie. Twenty years old, two hundred and thirty pounds, eyes too wide behind his visor, the kind of eyes that still think hockey is a game.

He's going to try to put me into the boards. I can tell by his shoulders, by the way his weight shifts onto his back foot a half-second before he commits. Nobody taught him to hide it. Nobody taught him anything except hit the Russian, kid, hit him hard.

I let him come.

At the last second I drop my shoulder and pivot, and all two hundred and thirty pounds of him hits nothing. He sails past me. And on his way by, I lift my elbow.

Not much. Two inches.

Two inches is all it takes.

I feel his jaw go through my pads. A wet, splintering give, like stepping on a frozen branch. He spins once and goes down face first, sliding across the ice into the boards.

He doesn't get up.

The puck is still on my stick. I don't look back. I carry it in, deke the goalie left, go right, and bury it top shelf.

The horn blares. The lights spin red. Twenty thousand people lose their minds.

I lift my stick, and while they scream, I look back down the ice at the kid.

The trainers are on him. He's on his side. Blood seeps from under his visor, bright red against the white, spreading in a slow, perfect circle.

I can smell it.

Over the sweat and the rubber and the cold. Copper and salt. Warm.

And something in my chest, something I've never had a name for, lifts its head and breathes.

They don't call a penalty. They never call a penalty. Not on me. I'm The Rocket. I'm on the cereal box. I'm on the billboard over the expressway, shirtless in a ninety-foot underwear ad, stick over my shoulder like a rifle. The league doesn't suspend the cereal box.

In the locker room, Coach slaps my back and says, "Hell of a game." The reporters ask about my goal, my speed, my contract year. Not one of them asks about the jaw.

"You see that pivot?" Dmitri grins from the next stall. He's twenty-two, from Yaroslavl, and thinks I hung the moon. "You turned him inside out, brat."

"He'll learn."

"He'll learn through a straw," somebody says, and the whole room laughs.

I laugh with them.

That's the thing about being a monster with a good smile. Nobody asks you to stop.

I'm unlacing my skates when my phone lights up on the bench. A single gold envelope, the animation so expensive it shimmers.

The Volkov Foundation cordially invites you to its Annual Winter Gala, honoring ALEXEI VOLKOV.

Honoring.

Me.

At my father's house.

Seventeen months since we buried him, and the foundation still sends invitations in his font. Gold on black. The family crest at the top: a wolf's head with its mouth open.

It looks like a gilded leash.

My thumb hovers. One swipe and it's gone. Tell my assistant to send flowers and a check. Tell the board I'm sick, I'm traveling, I'm dead.

I don't swipe.

Something low in my stomach turns over, hard, like a fist closing. Not dread. Worse than dread. Pull. The same pull I felt on the ice when I smelled the kid's blood, and something in me woke up.

Go, it says.

It's not a suggestion. I don't know who's giving the order.

I only know I'm going to obey it.

Outside, the snow is coming down hard, big wet flakes spinning in the arena lights like diamond dust. Pavel holds the car door. He's driven for my family since before I could skate, sixty years old and built like a refrigerator, and he has never once asked me a question he didn't need the answer to.

"Where to, Alexei Mikhailovich?"

"Home."

The word sticks in my throat. Pavel watches me in the rearview mirror for a long second, then puts the car in drive and doesn't say anything for forty minutes.

It gives me time to remember.

The Volkov estate sits on two hundred acres of black woods north of the city, the way my father wanted it. Far enough from neighbors that nobody hears anything. Close enough that he could reach it before breakfast. I learned to skate on the frozen pond behind the house when I was four. Learned to throw a punch in the garage at seven. Learned at fifteen what my father did for money, when he took me down to the basement, handed me a hammer, and showed me a man tied to a chair who owed him two million dollars.

"You're a Volkov," my father said. "This is what we are."

I didn't hit the man.

I want that on the record somewhere. Fifteen years old and shaking so hard the hammer rattled. I didn't hit him.

My father did.

Then he made me watch, and then he made me clean it up, and then he sent me upstairs to eat dinner with my mother as if nothing happened. I ate every bite.

The next morning I broke a kid's collarbone in a practice drill.

Coach called it intensity.

I've been intense ever since.

The faces flicker past in the dark glass as the car climbs the drive. The man in the chair. The defenseman in Montreal whose knee I took apart my rookie year. The goalie in Detroit who never played again. The fiancée in Moscow I left in a hotel room with a ring in her hand. The kid tonight, his jaw hanging wrong.

A spectral jury.

My father built an empire on broken people. I told myself I'd be different. I'd have the ice instead.

And here I am, coming home to a party in my honor with a stranger's blood still in my nose and that thing in my chest still awake.

I'm not becoming my father.

I'm worse.

At least he knew what he was.

The gates rise out of the snow, a maw of wrought iron, twelve feet tall, wolves twisted into the bars, their teeth bared. They swing open as we pull up, and for one second, in the headlights, the iron wolves look like they're moving.

That house never promised me sanctuary.

It promised me a reckoning.

It's lit up like a cathedral tonight. Every window gold, torches lining the drive, valets in black coats running through the snow. Through the tall front windows I can see the ballroom: chandeliers dripping crystals like frozen tears, women in silk, a string quartet playing something sad and expensive.

Pavel stops at the foot of the stone steps but doesn't unlock the doors.

In a low voice, he says, "Your mother is not here. She sends her regrets."

"Of course she does."

"The board is here. Many people who owed your father." He pauses. "And some I don't know."

I meet his eyes in the mirror. Pavel has never once told me something I didn't need to hear.

"What does that mean?"

His hands stay on the wheel.

"There are people in your father's house tonight," he says, "who did not come for the canapés."

The locks click open.

Inside, it's warm and gold and loud. Hands grab mine. Flashbulbs pop. A board member with a face like a boiled ham claps me on the shoulder and says, "Your father would be so proud." A woman in red diamonds kisses both my cheeks, leaving lipstick and the smell of gin. Someone puts a glass of champagne in my hand. I don't remember taking it.

I smile. I shake. I nod.

I'm not here.

The pull is stronger now. Not in my stomach anymore. In my chest. In my teeth. Like a hook set under my ribs, and somebody on the other end of the line is reeling me in, slow and patient, one crank at a time.

So I do what I do on the ice. Read shoulders. Read weight. Find the gaps.

That's how I spot them.

Four people in an alcove by the terrace doors. Two men, two women, in evening clothes that fit a little too well, like uniforms. None of them is drinking. None of them is talking. A woman with silver-blond hair and eyes like chips of ice stands at the front, and while everybody else in the room is looking at me, the guest of honor, the cereal box, she isn't.

She's looking past me.

At something behind me.

The hawk-nosed man beside her, gray at the temples, says something without moving his lips. She nods once.

My father taught me to spot a crew. Men who come to collect. Men who come to watch the door.

These four came to do both.

The quartet finishes a song, and in the hush between notes, the room shifts.

Not the people. The air.

It goes cold. Not winter cold. Older. Like opening a cellar door that's been shut for a hundred years.

Every candle along the walls bends sideways. All at once.

Then straightens.

Nobody else notices.

I turn.

She's standing at the far end of the ballroom, under the portrait of my grandfather.

Alone.

Not alone. A fat industrialist from the board is talking with his hands beside her. A waiter is holding out a tray. But they're smudges, like someone took a photograph and she's the only thing in focus.

Midnight silk. Black hair so dark it eats the light, pinned up off a neck as pale as marble. Diamonds at her throat. Not many. She doesn't need many.

The waiter offers champagne. She doesn't look at the tray. She lifts one gloved finger, and he backs away as if she burned him.

Then she turns her head.

And looks at me.

Her eyes are violet. Not blue. Not gray. Violet. The color of a bruise at the very bottom, where it goes deepest.

The whole ballroom goes silent.

It doesn't, of course. The quartet is still playing. The ham-faced man is still laughing. But I can't hear any of it. All I hear is my own heart slamming against my ribs so hard it hurts.

And from across the room, from her, a sound I've never heard in my life.

Nothing.

She doesn't have one.

No heartbeat.

The thing in my chest, the thing that woke up on the ice tonight, goes still. All the way still.

It isn't afraid.

It's hungry.

She tilts her head a quarter inch, like she's heard every word I just thought.

Then she smiles. Small. Cold. Slow. It doesn't reach her eyes.

It isn't welcome.

It's recognition, the kind of smile a wolf gives another wolf across a frozen field.

And for the first time in my life, the predator feels the hunt turn around.