by RJ Scott
Then she sighed, and it wasn’t a happy sigh. “I can only do the twentieth in the day—I’m working otherwise.”
He glanced at his calendar, “I can’t, that’s practice, and I have meetings. And then I’m on a couple of away games.” Alex had to fight the disappointment that curled in his belly.
“Never mind,” she said, lightly. “Where?”
“Where what?”
“The away games.” Her words sounded like she was smiling. He could imagine that soft smile, the one that reached her eyes and made them sparkle.
And now I am completely losing it.
“Florida, Carolina, Columbus two days after Christmas. I’m with my parents for Christmas.” As much as he wanted to see her, he couldn’t submit her to parental questioning that early on. Maybe ten or so years in.
“That’s cool. I’m at home for Christmas when I’m not on duty.”
“How about New Years? There’s a party at Nikita Gulin’s place.” Or at least there was usually; New Year was a big night for the Russian. “Gooly. You met him at the party. Big, angry Russian. It’s just the guys without kids, the others are at the New Year fair by the river, but it could be fun.”
“On duty again. We drew the New Year short straw after having Christmas off.”
Abruptly, Alex felt tired, and a tiny bit resentful that he had games and meetings and training and everything that made the concept of a day off a rarity. All he wanted to do was see Jo again, and none of that was working.
“I could come to you if I got the chance. Just for half an hour, somewhere, if you’re at your place.”
“No, when I say home I mean home-home, back with my mom and sister.”
“Where’s home?” He perched on the side of the nearest chair. He wanted to talk all day. He never wanted to stop talking. Crazy, stupid feelings. He imagined her with her feisty sister in some house in the suburbs, and wondered what her mom was like. She didn’t mention a dad, and he didn’t ask.
“Just outside the city, lots of family obligations to get through,” she said vaguely. “So, is it Vancouver you’re heading to for Christmas this year?”
He shook his head, then realized she couldn’t see him. “No, it’s too tight to get back, but they’re coming here, I hope. I sent them tickets.”
“Looks like we just have the phone, then,” she said. Then before he could answer, she kept talking. “I have to go—shift is in fifteen, and I’m sitting here in my jeans still. Take care, Alex.”
Alex smiled as he answered. “Take care, Jo. Stay safe.”
“I always do.”
They ended the call, and Alex stared at his phone for a while before realizing he was grinning like a sappy, lovesick fool when he had important shit to do.
Like get a tree, make an effort for his parents’ visit, and try not to dwell on the great Russian smack-down he had in his future.
Alexey Vasiliev walked into the dressing room, subdued but focused, shaking hands with guys he knew and being introduced to those he didn’t. It soon became very obvious that he and Gooly weren’t going to be interacting much, which was fucking awkward given they’d likely be working the second line together.
There was one small but heated exchange in Russian when their paths crossed near the large dragon logo in the center of the room, but they separated to their own stalls. The conversation looked like it might have been along the lines of I hate you, and Don’t fucking talk to me or come near me. All with added cursing and violent gesticulations. Then silence. But that was okay, as long as they skated well at morning skate.
They skated like it was the last game for the Stanley fucking Cup—angry, focused, absolutely intent on one-upping each other.
They didn’t say a word.
Not one freaking word.
Which was awkward, given that coach had put Vasiliev on Gooly’s right wing. Their play was dramatic; Alex couldn’t think of another word to describe the way they checked each other. Which didn’t bode well for the next game, which was against the Islanders.
Loki cornered him after the skate, and he didn’t have to say anything, he simply looked at Alex, and all Alex could do was shake his head and shrug. Hell if he knew what to do.
“Simba, my office,” Coach Barton called from the door. “Gooly, Vaz, you as well.”
Loki held Alex’s gaze and gave an answering nod. Loki had his back for whatever the hell was going on, but Gooly’s story wasn’t his to tell. Not yet. Not unless there was a really good reason he had to.
Coach gestured for them to close the door, and the three big hockey men ranged themselves in front of the desk, with Alex squarely in the middle.
“Gooly?” Coach said first. “You have anything to say to me?”
“No, Coach,” was all Gooly said.
“Vaz? You want to tell me what the fuck is going on here?”
Vasiliev, or Vaz as he was known in the game, said the same as Gooly, only in much better English. “Nothing to say, Coach.”
Coach sat back in his chair and stared at Alex.
“Fucks sake, Simba?” he asked.
“It’s going to be okay,” Alex assured him. A lot was left unspoken in that small exchange.
Coach threw up his hands. “We have a shit hand. Deal with it. Don’t kill each other on my watch. Get the hell out of my office.”
All three of them left. Alex pressed a hand to Gooly’s chest as Vaz stalked ahead. “Tell me your focus is on the game.”
Gooly nodded. “New Year, I’m promise,” he said.
Alex didn’t know what to say to that. Seemed like Gooly was taking the New Year ultimatum deadly serious but wasn’t going to give it a real chance when it came to it.
“Please,” was all Alex said.
Gooly left without answering, and Alex sought out Vaz. He realized he was looking at the man with jaded eyes. Gooly was his friend. Vaz was some new guy who’d just joined the team, and Alex had no loyalty to him other than that of a captain to his team members. Was he coming over as unwelcoming?
“Vaz?” he began, and there were a hundred questions in that single use of Vaz’s name.
“It won’t affect my play,” Vaz said. “What is happening is my fault. It always was, and it always will be.” He looked defeated, not like the six-four, two-twenty-pound winger Alex knew he was. No, the man in front of him looked like he had a world of fear and regret in his eyes, and Alex wished he knew what the hell to say.
With his captain hat on, he reached out and clapped Vaz on the arm. “We’re a team…” he began.
“I didn’t want to come to the Dragons,” Vaz murmured. “It isn’t fair on Nikita.”
“You’re here now, so let’s make this work.”
The tall, broad Russian nodded, then headed for the showers.
Whatever the issues were, in the game itself Vaz and Gooly pulled together the most impressive showing of the Dragons’ second line of the last few years. They were gold together, spotty at first and then finding a rhythm that the Islanders blue line found hard to beat.
And the win, five to three, was a win the Dragons deserved.
The first message he saw post-game was from Jo, and it made him smile.
We had a call, I couldn’t watch you, but apparently you won. Yay Dragons.
And the best thing about the message?
There was an x on the end.
Chapter 10
The scene was scarlet and orange against the dark sky, and weirdly, the first thing Jo noticed about the scene was all the snow melting in a perimeter around the building as the heat expanded. Dennison shouted orders, the senior on site until the second engine arrived, and the fire was bad enough that a third rolled up not long after.
The old cinema, long abandoned, was self-destructing in front of their eyes. Only the main part of it, where the screens would have been, was intact enough for Askett to immediately suggest it be searched. Old buildings like that, in gentrification areas, were the kind of places that homeless souls chose
to sleep.
“It went up like a bomb,” the guard said, nursing cuts to his cheek where he’d been hit by flying debris. His eyes were wide, and Jo didn’t need training to see shock. “I was walking back, and it just exploded.”
“Sir, is there anyone inside?”
The guard blinked, shook his head, “I don’t know… Sometimes yes… I didn’t think it hurt to let him sleep in there.”
Askett leaped into action. “Dennison, take Glievens and Smith, check out the back, find us a way in.”
Jo ran after Dennison, Smith by her side, adrenaline pumping, their ingress blocked by two solid metal fire exit doors. The chains outside were intact, but that meant nothing. Just because the door was blocked didn’t mean a person looking for somewhere safe to sleep hadn’t got in another way, probably by an ingress destroyed by the initial explosion.
Askett’s voice echoed in her ear. “Dennison?”
Dennison backed away from the chained door and gestured for Jo and Smith to come forward with the bolt cutters. Between them, they had the doors open. They were taking a chance—the fire was right there—but the door was cool to touch, the snow unmelted where it had piled up against the door. An explosion spoke to there being escaped gas or a buildup of some kind of toxic material.
There was no fire yet that far back, and Dennison was first in, Jo and Smith on his heels.
“Stay close,” he ordered as smoke thickened deeper in the structure. The maze of doors and corridors was endless, smoke making it difficult to see, but it was Jo who spotted the prone form of a man. Unmoving, his eyes wide, it was obvious he was dead, not from the fire, but the fact his head was beaten in and the bloody mess of it was all around him. The clothes he was wearing marked him as a street guy—long winter coat, and layers upon layers of material.
Fuck knew what they were walking into.
Dennison reported what he’d found.
“Get out of there, Dennison,” Askett ordered. “Fire is heading your way.”
They backtracked. Dennison scooped up the body of the dead guy, and all three of them made their way through the smoke and out of the open doors. They went straight to the front of the building, Jo watching the flames that leaped up to meet the sky, wincing as the entire structure groaned and swayed, imploding.
She glanced at the crowd that had gathered, likely from the new multi-million-dollar apartment building opposite the burning cinema. She recognized one of the guys; he’d visited the firehouse a while back with Kat’s brother Loki.
Drago? Was that his name? All she could recall was that he was the goalie on the Dragons team. He was front and center of the small group of people, chatting with one of the cops, but when he spotted her, he called her over.
“Hey, sexy,” he said, completely inappropriately, and rather loudly.
She shook her head, and he looked chagrined.
“Sorry,” he mouthed. Mitch was reassuring that the fire wouldn’t spread to their million dollar apartments and he turned to listen.
A new crew arrived almost as fast as the cops did, and the team from the firehouse spent a good few hours getting the fire under control and damping down the area. The crowd dispersed, and she didn’t see anything more of Drago.
The medics checked their dead guy. At first look, he’d died from something heavy being used on his head and face.
The guard looked like he was going to be sick. “Eddie,” he murmured. “Never hurt a fly, just wanted to be warm.” Then he seemed to realize what he’d said in earshot of the police. He was admitting that he’d turned a blind eye to a homeless guy using one of the buildings he was supposed to be guarding, so he shut down, changed his story when it came to the cops, and said he hadn’t known a thing.
Jo felt unaccountably sad that officially the body had no name, and exchanged a look with Dennison, who warned her off with a shake of his head. She clearly had a lot to learn.
Daylight came, and so did mid-morning, and it was lunchtime before they made it back to the firehouse. Exhausted, and feeling introspective and sad, she wasn’t surprised when Dennison cornered her in the bathrooms.
“I passed on the intel to the cops—the name and what the guard said. We’ll let him work it out. But probie, you don’t go gabbing about shit you hear if it isn’t relevant to the fire itself.”
“I don’t get why.” And she didn’t; Eddie deserved a name.
“What if the guard realizes that you spoke out? You want to make enemies?”
She drew herself up tall. “Just because I’m a woman—”
“Fuck that,” Dennison said, and the anger was real. “This has nothing to do with being a woman; it’s about making it personal. This is a team, and by doing that we make sure all intel is from the firehouse, not a team member.”
“Sorry,” she apologized, because the insistent push of fear about being treated differently had somehow moved front and center.
Dennison clapped her on the shoulder. “It’s always bad to lose someone, probie, but at least we gave Eddie his name.”
“That’s all I wanted, sir.”
Dennison looked so damn serious. “Get a shower, go home for Christmas, you did well.”
Even after two showers, Jo could still smell smoke on herself, and wouldn’t her mom love that?
“You okay?” Mitch asked as he sprayed deodorant liberally. Like her, he probably wanted to cover up the smell of fire that pervaded his skin.
“Yeah,” Jo said, and pulled on her BFD sweatshirt. “That was intense.”
“Good work tonight, prospect,” Mitch said with a wide grin and a wink. “We’re over at Bert’s for beer. You coming?”
“Can’t tonight; I need to go now to get back for Christmas.”
There was a text from Alex on her cell. He wasn’t playing tonight, but she knew his parents were at his place.
Actually, she knew a lot about Alex and what he did, because he told her, from texting her to say his coffee machine was broken, which was cruel and unusual punishment according to him, right up to a play by play of a game they’d played in Florida. He texted her good night, he texted her good morning, he told her about places he wanted to take her, and about Fly, who said the new menu was hanging in there alongside the old favorites. She texted him back, told him about things that happened at the firehouse, about pulling a double shift, and exhaustion.
Going home now, she’d texted. Ready for Christmas Xx. The x’s were a promise, because right then she’d like nothing more than to be kissing Alex. Anything but going home.
The text she’d just received simply said, Drive safe, and there were the requisite kisses at the end.
Just a shame that was the only kind of kissing she was getting from him.
Rose was waiting for her at the front door, coming out as soon as she parked on the gravel drive.
“Mom is in one of her moods,” Rose warned, wrapping her arms around her chest. “Pissed at you.”
Fuck, that was the last thing Jo needed. “Already? I’m not even inside.”
“She saw the news.”
Jo lifted out her bag and straightened her spine. The best way to deal with her mom was to fake confidence and hope to hell it worked.
“Josephine,” her mom exclaimed from where she stood dramatically clinging to the banister at the bottom of the wide, curving stairs. She was always good at standing just so, with the perfect expression. Hell, she’d have made a wonderful tragic actress if she’d ever chosen to work at anything but being the perfect society wife. “You’re safe,” she added, and pressed a trembling hand to her chest.
Jo wanted to launch into a speech about how she was part of a highly-trained team. She didn’t. Instead, she crossed to Iris Glievens and kind of half-embraced her. It was impossible to pull her into a full hug, because her mom didn’t do that kind of thing; she liked to air-kiss, but there was no way Jo was doing that.
“Did you not shower?” Iris asked, and added another dramatic flutter of her hands. “Why must you put
yourself in danger? Don’t you know it would destroy me to lose another person in my life?”
And that was the rub. Jo’s irritation at her mom vanished, because Dad hadn’t been gone that long, and Iris was in mourning.
“I was perfectly safe, Mom,” Jo reassured her.
“Rosemary and I saw the news.”
Jo decided to change the subject. “Am I in my old room?”
Rose nodded and took the cue, picking up Jo’s bag. “The Hetheringtons are here at eight,” she reminded her.
Jo went with the pantomime. “I need a bath.”
Iris seemed undecided between laboring the whole my-daughter-is-going-to-die thing and wanting her to smarten up for dinner.
“Go—wear something beautiful. Keith will be so happy to see you.”
“Keith is coming?” Keith was the son of friends of the family, and he was a complete prick.
Oh, joy.
“He’s home this Christmas. Isn’t that wonderful?” Iris gave her first real smile. “He was asking about you.”
“Why would he do that?” Jo asked, “He’s married with twins.”
“Such tragedy,” Iris murmured, and wouldn’t quite look her in the eye. “He had to get a divorce.”
Jo didn’t want to hear any more. How any woman put up with Keith, she didn’t know.
“I need that bath,” she said, walking past her mom.
“Tonight is important to us, Josephine, our first real event; please try as hard as I am and wear something nice,” Iris pleaded as they went by.
“I will, Mom.”
Only when she and Rose were safely in Jo’s old room did the full story come out, Rose telling it with limited detail. “I heard he was fucking around on her—Keith, I mean—so Esme filed, and he’s wearing his heartbroken expression like people will believe it wasn’t his fault. He’s on about wanting sole custody of the twins, but he’s fucked, because Esme has things on video, and her dad is worth millions more than Keith’s is.”
