“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.”