He chuckled to himself and clicked out of the story, shoving his phone into his bag as he turned the corner to get to his assigned locker. Christensen was already there, early for once, sitting on the wood bench.
“Well, if it isn’t my long-lost brother,” Ian said, dropping his bag on the bench with a loud thunk. “Did you see that shit story in the Post? Man, you think they could have made up that we were going out or something?”
For once in his life, Christensen kept his mouth shut. Just sat there looking down. The first hint of unease creeped in, making him aware of the inside of his ears. It was always like this before a check he barely caught out of his periphery or before the puck came sailing his way. It was like his sixth sense and the common cold were unlikely twins.
“Dude.” He stopped in front of Christensen. “No one is going to believe we’re actually brothers.”
“Ian.” His best friend looked up, the muscle in his jaw working overtime. “I asked Lucy to buy me some time.” Christensen rubbed the back of his neck, hard, his movements jerky. “I figured for sure she could make it happen. She always fixes everything.”
A bone-deep survival instinct shoved away most of what had just come out of Christensen’s mouth, as if it were radioactive. Instead, he focused on the rest, grabbing hold of it and refusing to let go.
“Petrov,” he said, his voice harsh. “You always call me Petrov. You’ve never called me Ian.”
Christensen rolled his eyes and threw up his hands. “That’s what you want to focus on right now? That I’m using your first name?”
“Yeah,” he said, squaring up in front of his friend—and that’s all he was, a friend.
“Fine. Petrov,” Christensen said, emphasizing the last name. “I never meant for you to find out this way. I meant to tell you, but the timing always sucked, and Dad didn’t want me to, and—”
“Your dad,” he interrupted, desperate to keep the facts—and they were facts—straight.
“Our dad,” Christensen said, slow and deliberate.
No. That wasn’t it. It couldn’t be. Petrov refused to even consider it. Palms slick, white noise screaming in his ears as his blood pumped through him at triple speed, and gut churning, Petrov tried to hold on to the world as he knew it. His parents were divorced, but they’d been married for decades. He had two sisters, Kayla and Ashley. His dad was the usual kind of jerk who came with the world thinking he was a hockey god and a shit father, but he wasn’t a has-a-secret-family kind of asshole.
“When the chick from The Biscuit told Lucy how a reporter from the Post had overheard the story, I begged her for some time. I needed to tell you myself, to explain.”
“Explain what?” Because it couldn’t be what everyone was trying to sell. He refused to let it be.
“Your dad knocked up my mom and we’re brothers,” Christensen yelled, standing up and getting right in Petrov’s face. “All right? Is that in simple enough terms for you? We share that asshole’s DNA.”
He shoved at Christensen’s chest, hard enough to back him up a step. “Don’t you talk about my dad like that.”
“What? Like you’re such a huge fan?” He crossed his arms, his mouth curled into a cruel smirk. “How many times have you said ‘if the world only knew the real David Petrov’? About a billion seems right. He cheated on your mom and paid off mine to keep her mouth—and mine—shut tight.”
“She’s lying,” Petrov said, the words flying out of his mouth fueled by a desperate need to keep his world intact, to protect his mom from the truth, and to maintain at least one illusion about the man who raised him. “She spread her legs for some hockey dick so she could blackmail him and has been keeping it up for years.”
He was up against the lockers a half second later, the metal vents pressed against his cheek, the pain of it feeding into the jagged emotions fighting for dominance.
“Not a single fucking word about my mom,” Christensen said, his face red with fury and his eyes wet with tears. “Not. One.”
And that’s when he knew. He didn’t need a DNA test or confirmation from his dad. Shit. He’d known the moment he’d seen that side-by-side picture. They’d both been sideswiped by the news, and now Dad’s mess was theirs to clean up. He let out a deep breath and nodded to Christensen, who released him and took a step back. They eyed each other warily, both bruised in places neither could see.
“When did you find out?” Petrov asked.
“Middle school.”
Hearing that was like skating at full speed right into the boards. They’d been practically inseparable on and off the ice for three years, and the whole time Christensen had known? Fuck, he really was their dad’s kid. Manipulating and twisting things for his own benefit.
“So you must have had a good laugh when you got traded to the Ice Knights.” Petrov pushed past the other man, checking him with his shoulder as he headed for the door. “Was it fun? Knowing all along?”
“I thought you knew, and then when I realized you didn’t, I couldn’t
