Five hole heart, p.1
Five Hole Heart, page 1
Five Hole Heart
Seattle Storm Series, Volume 2
Charlotte A. Smith
Published by DETROY EMANUEL ROBINSON, 2025.
This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.
FIVE HOLE HEART
First edition. December 15, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 Charlotte A. Smith.
Written by Charlotte A. Smith.
Also by Charlotte A. Smith
Seattle Storm Series
Five Hole Heart
Standalone
Das Rematch
La repetición
The Replay
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Charlotte A. Smith
Five Hole Heart
Copyright © 2025 by Charlotte A. Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Charlotte A. Smith asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
First edition
This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy
Find out more at reedsy.com
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 1
Leo’s POV
The puck slid past Ilya Vasiliev’s blocker side—five-hole, slow, the kind of shot a bantam goalie would snag in their sleep. Leo’s grip tightened on his stick as he watched from the bench, the hollow thunk of rubber hitting twine echoing through the practice rink like a funeral bell.
That was the fourth goal in twenty minutes.
“Championship hangover,” Murphy muttered beside him, adjusting his helmet. The veteran defenseman shook his head. “Seen it before. Guys win the Cup, lose their edge.”
Leo said nothing. He watched Ilya resettle into his crouch, methodical as a machine. Technically perfect: knees bent, glove positioned, stick blade flush with the ice. But the predatory grace that made him a Vezina finalist last season—the instinct that let him read plays before they developed—was gone. He moved like someone going through the motions of being alive.
Shaw lined up for another wrist shot from the circle. Clean release, decent velocity, glove side high. Ilya tracked it, his movements correct, his timing half a second too slow. The puck grazed his glove and dropped into the net.
Five.
Leo’s jaw clenched. In the press box above the ice, three suits sat with clipboards. The GM’s silver hair caught the fluorescent lights as he leaned toward the men flanking him, his mouth a thin line. One of them wrote something down. The scratch of pen on paper might as well have been a death sentence being signed.
“Marchand!” Coach’s bark cut through the sound of skates on ice. “My office. Now.”
Leo glanced once more at the crease. Ilya was methodically fishing pucks from his net, his back a wall of tension beneath the Storm’s practice jersey. He didn’t look up. He never did.
Coach’s office smelled like stale coffee and the wintergreen muscle cream every NHL training room stockpiled. The door closed with a decisive click. Coach Bennett dropped into his chair with the heavy sigh of a man who’d been in the league thirty years and hated politics more with each passing season.
“Sit.”
Leo sat. His leg bounced—nervous energy he couldn’t quite contain. Bennett’s eyes tracked the movement, then flicked to Leo’s face.
“You know what’s happening out there?”
“Ilya’s in a slump.” The words felt inadequate. Slump didn’t capture the way Ilya moved like a ghost wearing his own skin.
“Management’s making calls about Sorensen.” Bennett said it flat, no preamble. “AHL goalie. Twenty-three, hungry, posted a .927 save percentage last month. They want him up here by the end of next week if Vasiliev doesn’t turn it around.”
The bottom dropped out of Leo’s stomach. “They can’t—he won us the Cup eight months ago.”
“They can and they will.” Bennett leaned forward, elbows on his desk. “This league has the memory of a goldfish and the mercy of a loan shark. Ilya’s got ten games to prove he’s not broken. He’s played two. Lost both. Let in eleven goals on forty-two shots.” He paused, the numbers hanging like an indictment. “You know what his save percentage was last season?”
“.921,” Leo said quietly. Everyone knew. Ilya’s stats were the kind that made highlight reels and Hall of Fame discussions.
“Yeah. Right now he’s at .738 and dropping.” Bennett scrubbed a hand over his face. “I need him back, Marchand. The team needs him back. And you’re going to help me get him there.”
Leo blinked. “Me?”
“You’re his new shadow. Drills, film sessions, gym, meals. Hell, I don’t care if you follow him to the bathroom. You get in his head. You find whatever’s broken and you fix it.”
The weight of it settled on Leo’s shoulders like a full gear bag. Being near Ilya was one thing—he’d been half in love with the silent Russian since the Storm drafted him two years ago, though he’d never been stupid enough to say it out loud. Watching Ilya play was poetry. Watching him exist in the world with that devastating economy of movement and those slate-grey eyes that seemed to see through everything made Leo’s chest tight in ways that had nothing to do with hockey.
But being responsible for saving him? That was different. That was terrifying.
“What if I can’t?” The question slipped out before Leo could stop it.
Bennett’s expression softened, just for a second. “Then we lose the best goalie this franchise has ever had. And you’ll have to live with knowing you didn’t try.” He stood, came around the desk, and gripped Leo’s shoulder hard enough to bruise. “He talks to you more than anyone else on this team. Maybe he’ll actually listen.”
Leo almost laughed. Ilya didn’t talk to him. Ilya existed in proximity to him, occasionally grunted acknowledgment of his presence, and once, exactly once, had told him “Good goal” after a hat trick against Vancouver. That was the extent of their relationship.
But he nodded anyway. “I’ll try.”
“Two weeks,” Bennett said. “That’s all the time management’s giving me before they make the call permanent. Don’t let me lose my goalie, kid.”
The locker room smelled like sweat, tape adhesive, and the faint chemical tang of the equipment manager’s cleaning solution. Most of the guys had already showered and cleared out. Ilya sat alone at his stall, methodically unbuckling the straps on his leg pads. His hair was dark with sweat, plastered to his forehead. The pads hit the floor with a heavy thud—forty pounds of leather and foam that had become extensions of his body.
Leo approached slowly, like Ilya was a wild animal that might bolt. “Coach says I’m your new best friend.”
Ilya’s hands stilled on the chest protector straps. He didn’t look up. “I do not need a friend.” His accent wrapped around the words, sharp consonants and broad vowels that made even dismissals sound like they carried weight.
“Need someone to take shots at practice?” Leo tried for lightness, for the easy charm that usually defused tension. It landed flat in the empty room.
Finally, Ilya looked up. His eyes were the grey of Seattle’s winter sky—the kind of grey that pressed down on the city for months, heavy and bleak and unrelenting. The exhaustion carved into his face went deeper than a bad couple of games. It looked like something that lived in his bones.
“I need you to go away.”
The dismissal was absolute. Leo felt it like a hip check into the boards—sudden, bruising, designed to remove him from play. The smart thing would be to listen. To back off, give Ilya space, try again tomorrow when the sting of practice wasn’t so fresh.
Instead, Leo sat down on the bench next to Ilya’s stall and started unlacing his own skates. His hands trembled slightly, adrenaline or fear or something else entirely making his fingers clumsy.
“Tough luck,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “You’re stuck with me.”
The silence stretched. Leo focused on his laces, on the familiar routine of loosening the knots, on anything except the massive presence of Ilya Vasiliev radiating rejection two feet away.
Then Ilya’s hand shot out and wrapped around Leo’s wrist.
The touch burned. Ilya’s grip was firm, calloused from years of catching pucks, and scorching hot against Leo’s pulse point. Leo’s breath stalled in his chest—not from fear, but from the sudden electric awareness of every point of contact between them.
Ilya leaned in close enough that Leo could smell his deodorant failing under practice sweat, could see the gold flecks in those grey eyes that cameras never quite captured. His voice dropped to something dangerous, something that vibrated through Leo’s bones.
“You wish to help?” The question was almost mocking. “Fine. Be here at 5 AM tomorrow.”
Leo’s throat went dry. Ilya’s thumb pressed against the inside of his wrist, whether deliberately or accidentally finding his racing pulse, Leo couldn’t tell.
“Do not be late.” Ilya’s grip tightened fractionally, then released. He stood, gathering his gear with sharp, precise movements. “And Marchand?”
“Yeah?” Leo’s voice came out rougher than intended.
Ilya paused at the threshold of the locker room, his back still to Leo, the Storm logo stretched across his shoulders. “Bring coffee. Black. No sugar.” Then, so quiet Leo almost missed it: “Please.”
The door closed. Leo sat alone in the empty locker room, his wrist still burning from Ilya’s touch, his assignment suddenly feeling far more complicated than Coach Bennett had made it sound.
He looked down at his hands. They were shaking.
Two weeks, he thought. I have two weeks to save Ilya Vasiliev’s career.
The weight of it pressed down on his chest, heavy as goalie pads, relentless as the Seattle rain.
He pulled out his phone and set an alarm for 4:30 AM.
Chapter 2
Ilya’s POV
The ice at 5 AM belonged to Ilya alone.
No teammates chirping in the corners. No coaches dissecting his angles. No suits in the press box measuring his worth in save percentages and trade value. Just the hum of refrigeration units keeping the surface frozen, and the echo of his skate blades carving lines that would disappear when the zamboni made its first pass.
Sacred. Silent. His.
Ilya stepped through the gate and onto the ice, his gear already weighing him down—forty pounds of pads and leather and the accumulated failure of two games where he’d let his team down. The cold bit through his practice jersey. December in Seattle meant the arena felt like a meat locker before dawn, but he welcomed it. Cold kept him sharp. Cold kept the memories at bay.
Except it didn’t. Not anymore.
He positioned himself in the crease, tapped his posts twice, left, right—and settled into his stance. Knees bent, glove positioned at his hip, blocker resting against his leg pad. Textbook form. His body knew these movements the way other men knew breathing. Thirty years of repetition had carved these grooves into muscle memory so deep that even when his mind betrayed him, his body remembered.
But bodies could fail too.
The shooting machine sat at center ice, loaded with pucks. Ilya had programmed it last night before he left—random intervals, random locations, high and low, glove and blocker. No pattern. No predictability. The way real games worked.
He triggered the remote.
The first puck came fast, blocker side, top corner. His arm snapped up. Leather met rubber with a satisfying smack. The puck dropped harmlessly to the ice.
Good.
Second shot. Glove side, mid-height. He tracked it, caught it, absorbed the impact.
Better.
Third shot—
The sound of the puck leaving the machine merged with another sound in his head. A crack that echoed across fifteen years and eight thousand kilometers. The frozen pond outside Novosibirsk. His brother’s leg snapping like kindling when the older boys had checked him into the boards they’d fashioned from scrap wood.
Ilya had been in goal then too. Twelve years old, wearing pads two sizes too big that his father had bought secondhand. Misha had been skating toward him, laughing, the puck on his stick, and then—
The third shot sailed past Ilya’s glove. Five-hole. He hadn’t even moved.
Blyat.
He shook his head, forced the memory back into its box. Focus. The machine fired again. This time he made the save, but barely. His timing was off by fractions of a second—fractions that in the NHL meant the difference between a highlight reel stop and a goal that ended up on every sports network’s blooper compilation.
Another shot. Another save. Another near-miss.
The doctors had said Misha would never walk without a limp. His father had looked at Ilya in the hospital waiting room—not at Misha, at Ilya—and said, “You had one job. Protect your brother.”
Ilya had failed then. He was failing now.
The machine fired continuously, and Ilya worked. Sweat soaked through his undershirt despite the cold. His thighs burned from the constant crouch-and-spring of proper goaltending technique. When pucks slipped past him, he didn’t allow himself to react. He simply reset, tapped his posts, and prepared for the next shot.
This was his penance. This was his prayer. If he worked hard enough, suffered long enough, maybe his reflexes would return. Maybe he could save his career the way he’d failed to save Misha’s.
He didn’t expect the rookie to show.
The invitation—if it could be called that—had been a test. A way to make Leo Marchand leave him alone by proving that Ilya’s darkness was deeper than the kid’s relentless optimism could penetrate. Nobody showed up at 5 AM for someone else’s training session. Nobody wanted to be dragged into another person’s private hell.
But at 4:58 AM, the arena door banged open.
Ilya’s head whipped around. Leo Marchand walked through the gate carrying two paper cups, his Storm jacket zipped against the cold. Even in the dim arena lighting, his smile was visible—too bright, too alive, completely inappropriate for the pre-dawn gloom.
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t offer cheerful commentary or ask how Ilya was feeling or make any of the meaningless small talk that people used to fill uncomfortable silence. He just skated to the boards, set one coffee on the ledge near Ilya’s water bottle, and took his position at center ice.
Stick in hand. Puck at his feet. Waiting.
Ilya stared at him. The coffee steamed in the frigid air, its bitter scent cutting through the usual arena smell of ice and rubber. Leo had remembered. Black, no sugar.
“You did not need to come,” Ilya said finally. His voice echoed in the empty space.
Leo shrugged, his expression easy. “I know.”
“I will not talk.”
“Okay.”
“This is not...” Ilya struggled for the English word. “.... Social. This is work.”
“I know,” Leo said again. He tapped his stick against the ice. “Ready?”
Ilya wasn’t ready. He would never be ready for Leo Marchand’s particular brand of stubborn patience. But he nodded once and settled back into his crouch.
Leo wound up and fired.
For an hour, it was just sound.
The crack of Leo’s wrist shot. The thwack of puck hitting pad. The scrape of skate blades on ice as Leo repositioned between shots. The hollow thunk when Ilya missed and the puck hit the back of the net.
That sound-that thunk—was becoming too familiar. It followed him into sleep, into waking, into every moment when his mind wasn’t occupied with something else. The sound of failure.
Leo didn’t speak. He retrieved pucks when they scattered too far from the shooting zone. He adjusted his angle without being asked, moving from the right circle to the slot to the left boards, giving Ilya different looks, different timing. His presence should have been an irritation—an itch Ilya couldn’t scratch, a distraction from the focused suffering that was his morning ritual.
Instead, it was... something else. Something Ilya didn’t have words for in English or Russian.
Leo’s shots were good. Better than good. The kid had quick hands and a release that gave Ilya only a fraction of a second to react. In games, Leo buried those shots past opposing goalies with regularity. Here, Ilya stopped most of them.
