Prologue

PROLOGUE

Nikolay Brotnik—Santa

Mid-October

Stupid Charlie Heart with his stupid fucking name.

He's taken so many things from me over the years, and now he's just trying to take one more. The most important one.

I won't let him.

This team is my family, and I don't care if he wears a black sweater with a pirate on his chest, he's not taking them from me. Not ever.

He was already retired for fuck's sake. What the hell is he doing? Signing a contract with the Pirates for one more year in the League?

What else could he possibly want from the NHL?

They've already given him every fucking award available. He even took the MVP from Jules one year. Granted, it was when Jules was only a twenty-year-old, but he was still better than eighty percent of hockey players back then .

What is there left?

Maybe he's as opposed to retiring as you are .

That stupid, reasonable, boring, emotionless voice in my head can go fuck itself. I'm not opposed to retiring. I just have no reason to retire. I'm in tip-top shape. No other man is in better shape at thirty-two. Well, my nose resembles a Z, and I can never go skiing again. According to my orthopedic surgeon I should also never play contact sports again, but what the hell does he know, anyway?

I have ten fucking abs, I can bench press two fifty on any given day, and I can still take a slam against the boards like a bull—and give one back.

Those are literally the requirements for my job, so why the hell should I stop working?

If I die from a punctured lung on the ice, then I die on the ice. It would be my preferred place of rest anyway.

The ice is where I really lived .

The ice gave me a life that a little boy from a small town north of Moscow could never have dreamed of. It gave me enough money so my parents had a good life... The last years of their lives were good, I made sure of that.

I managed to move them to Vegas, get them into a good care home, and see them constantly before...

Before.

I've made this city my home. I've been here for almost fifteen years. This is my city, not Charlie Heart's, and he better be ready for me to remind him of that every single day of that one year contract .