🔥 The Bar in Chicago 🔥

An Exclusive Bonus Chapter from Pucking Around in Sin City

Thank You for Reading! 🖤

You made it to the bonus content — which means you’ve survived Wyatt and Lev’s journey from that locker room to the throne. Thank you for giving their story a chance.

This exclusive chapter is the scene readers have been asking about since Chapter One: the night in Chicago. Three years before the events of the book. The hotel bar. The elevator. The room. The night that changed everything — told in full, uncut, and far too hot for Amazon.

The Bar in Chicago

Wyatt’s POV — Three Years Before the Events of the Book

The hotel bar at the Peninsula Chicago is the kind of place where the ice cubes are spherical and the cocktails cost more than my per diem.

I shouldn’t be here. I should be in my room at the team hotel — a perfectly adequate Marriott on Michigan Avenue — resting before tomorrow’s game against the Blackhawks. I should be doing recovery stretches and drinking electrolyte water and going to bed at a reasonable hour like a responsible professional athlete.

Instead, I’m three bourbons deep in a five-star hotel bar because the hollow place is screaming tonight and the only treatment I’ve found that works is noise, company, and bad decisions.

The bar is half-empty. A Tuesday in November. Business travelers and tourists and the occasional couple celebrating something expensive. I’m at the far end, perched on a stool that’s too small for my frame, wearing jeans and a black henley that my former teammate’s wife told me makes my arms “morally reprehensible.” I’ll take it.

The bartender knows what I am. They always know — the size, the scarred knuckles, the way I move through civilian spaces like a bear in a china shop. He’s been pouring my bourbons with the generous hand of a man who either likes hockey or likes tips. Probably both.

I’m talking to a woman named Stephanie from Naperville who sells medical devices and is celebrating the end of a three-day conference. She’s pretty and funny and has the specific, confident energy of a woman who goes to hotel bars alone because she enjoys it, not because she’s looking for something. I like her. I’m not going home with her, and she seems fine with that.

“So you actually punch people for a living,” she says, stirring her martini.

“I do other things too. Skating. Checking. Occasionally I handle a puck.”

“But the punching is the main event.”

“The punching gets the loudest reaction.”

“Do your hands hurt?”

I look at my knuckles. Split. Swollen. The permanent state of an enforcer’s hands — rebuilt so many times the scar tissue has its own scar tissue. “Not anymore. They stopped hurting a few years in. Now they just look like this.”

“That’s either very badass or very sad.”

“Can’t it be both?”

She laughs. Genuine, warm, the kind of laugh that cuts through bar noise and makes you feel temporarily less alone. I grin at her and signal the bartender for another round.

That’s when I see him.

He’s sitting four stools down. Alone. I don’t know how I missed him — except that I do know, because the man is designed to not be noticed. He occupies space the way a shadow occupies a wall: precisely, completely, without drawing attention to the fact that he’s there.

Dark suit. Not black — charcoal, cut close, the kind of tailoring that suggests either old money or criminal enterprise or the particular European sensibility that treats clothing as architecture. White shirt. No tie. Top button open, revealing a triangle of pale throat. His hair is dark, swept back, not a strand displaced. His face is —

I stop.

His face is the most compelling thing I’ve seen in a room since the last time I watched a puck cross a goal line.

Sharp. Angular. The kind of bone structure that doesn’t occur naturally outside of Scandinavian genetics and architectural renderings. High cheekbones. A jaw that could cut paper. A thin scar running along the left side of it — old, healed, the kind of scar that has a story and the story isn’t pleasant. His eyes are pale — grey, maybe, or light blue, hard to tell in the bar lighting — and they are focused on a glass of clear liquid with the concentrated attention of a man who is deliberately not looking at anything else.

He’s wearing gloves. Black leather. Indoors. In a heated bar. Drinking a cocktail with gloved hands.

The gloves are what do it. The gloves are the detail that tips the whole image from “attractive man in a bar” to “problem I need to solve.”

“Excuse me,” I tell Stephanie. “I need to go make a terrible decision.”

She follows my gaze. Sees the man in the suit. Looks back at me. Grins.

“Go get him, slugger.”

I take my bourbon and relocate four stools to the left.

The man doesn’t look at me. He’s holding his glass — vodka, neat, the drink of someone who isn’t here for pleasure — with both gloved hands, and his eyes remain fixed on some middle distance that exists between the glass and the back wall of the bar.

I sit down. The stool creaks under 235 pounds.

“Hi,” I say.

Nothing.

“I’m Wyatt.”

Nothing.

“Callahan. Wyatt Callahan. I play hockey for —”

“I know who you are.” His voice stops me mid-sentence. Low. Precise. Accented — Eastern European, Russian maybe, the consonants sharp and the vowels carefully controlled. He speaks English the way a surgeon uses a scalpel: with absolute command and no wasted movement. “You’re the enforcer for the Red Wings. Number forty-four. You have thirty-seven fighting majors, a career-high twelve points last season, and a reputation for reckless behavior that has cost your franchise approximately $340,000 in fines over the past three years.”

I stare at him. “That’s… specific.”

“I am specific.” He still hasn’t looked at me. His eyes remain on the glass. The vodka catches the light — crystal-clear, untouched.

“So you follow hockey?”

“I follow certain aspects of certain hockey operations.”

“That’s vague.”

“I am also vague when it suits me.”

“It doesn’t suit you. You look like the kind of man who’s never been vague about anything in his life.”

Now he looks at me.

The impact is physical. His eyes — grey, definitely grey, pale and clear and absolutely devoid of warmth — track from my face to my shoulders to my hands and back to my face in a sweep that takes approximately one and a half seconds and feels like being cataloged for a museum. Every detail inventoried. Every measurement taken. Every variable assessed and assigned a value in whatever calculation is running behind those colorless irises.

“You’re larger in person,” he says.

“I get that a lot.”

“Your knuckles are split.”

“Occupational hazard.”

“You’ve had three bourbons.”

“Four, counting this one.”

“You should be at your team hotel.”

“Probably.”

“You’re here because you can’t sleep and the silence in hotel rooms makes you uncomfortable and you’re looking for stimulus that will quiet whatever noise exists in your head.” He says it the way he says everything — precisely, clinically, without judgment or sympathy. A diagnosis. Not an opinion. “The woman at the end of the bar was insufficient. So you’re trying me.”

The accuracy of the assessment is so complete, so casually devastating, that I forget to breathe for approximately three seconds.

“You’re good at that,” I say.

“At what?”

“Seeing through people.”

“It’s not a skill. It’s a habit. Most people are transparent.”

“And me?”

“You’re transparent and loud about it. A rare combination.” He lifts his glass. Takes the first sip of vodka since I sat down. The motion is precise — the glass to his lips, a measured quantity consumed, the glass returned to the exact position it occupied before. Even his drinking is controlled. “You should go back to your hotel, Mr. Callahan. You have a game tomorrow.”

“Have a drink with me first.”

“I’m having a drink.”

“Have one with me. Not alone. There’s a difference.”

He looks at me again. The second assessment. Longer this time. I feel it traveling — not just the physical inventory but something deeper. The kind of look that reads your posture and your breathing and the micro-expressions you don’t know you’re making and constructs, from the data, a comprehensive profile of who you are and what you want and how dangerous you might be.

Whatever he finds in the profile makes his jaw tighten. A fractional movement. The kind of reaction a man has when the data presents a conclusion he didn’t want.

“One drink,” he says.

One drink becomes two. Two becomes the bartender refilling without being asked.

His name is Lev. He doesn’t give a last name. He’s in Chicago on business — the kind of business he describes in terms so deliberately vague that the vagueness itself becomes information. He’s Russian. Thirty, maybe — it’s hard to tell; his face has the ageless quality of a man who has never allowed himself the luxury of a relaxed expression. He drinks vodka. He doesn’t eat bar food. He doesn’t smile.

He also doesn’t leave.

I talk. It’s what I do — fill silence, populate emptiness, construct a wall of noise between myself and the hollow place that lives in my chest and gets louder in hotel rooms and quiet bars and any space where the absence of stimulus forces me to confront the fact that I am twenty-four years old and I don’t know who I am when I’m not hitting someone.

I tell him about the game tomorrow. About the rookie who’s been taking my ice time. About the coach who thinks I’m a liability and the GM who thinks I’m an asset and the specific, exhausting purgatory of being valued exclusively for my capacity for violence.

He listens. Not the way most people listen — with half their attention on their phone, their drink, the exit. Lev listens with his entire body. Still, focused, every atom of his attention directed at the source of the sound. Being listened to by Lev is like being observed by a satellite — constant, comprehensive, inescapable.

“You’re not what I expected,” he says after I finish a story about my goalie who once ate an entire rotisserie chicken during the second intermission and then posted a shutout.

“What did you expect?”

“From your statistics, your penalty record, and your public reputation: a simple man. Aggressive. Low emotional intelligence. The kind of athlete who uses violence as a substitute for personality.” He pauses. Takes a measured sip of vodka. “You are not simple.”

“I’m extremely simple.”

“You are the opposite of simple. You are a complicated man performing simplicity because the performance is easier than the truth.”

The words land like a check I didn’t see coming. Blindside. Full contact. I feel them in my sternum — a physical impact that has nothing to do with force and everything to do with accuracy.

“What’s the truth?” I ask. My voice has gone quiet. The bourbon-loud, bar-noise voice has been replaced by something I don’t use often. The real one.

“The truth is that you are intelligent, observant, and deeply lonely, and you have organized your entire life around the avoidance of stillness because stillness forces you to feel things you have no framework for processing.” He sets down his glass. “And the truth about me is that I should not be having this conversation because you are —” He stops.

“I’m what?”

His jaw tightens. The scar catches the light. His gloved hands are flat on the bar surface, precisely positioned, and I realize that the precision is not a style. It’s a containment strategy. Every controlled gesture, every measured sip, every perfectly placed word is a wall. A defense. The careful, continuous management of something underneath that is not controlled, not measured, not precise at all.

“Dangerous,” he says. “You are dangerous to me.”

“I’m a hockey player. I’m dangerous to everyone.”

“Not physically.” His eyes meet mine. The grey is darker now — the pupils expanding, the iris contracting, the physiological response to arousal or fear or both. “You sat down uninvited. You talked until I had no choice but to engage. You have been —” He pauses. Selects his words with the deliberation of a man defusing an explosive. “— charming. And I do not permit myself to be charmed.”

“But you are.”

“I am aware of the irony.”

The air between us changes. A pressure shift. The specific, charged, electric alteration of atmosphere that occurs when two people stop performing their public selves and begin, tentatively, catastrophically, to show each other what’s underneath.

“Come upstairs,” I say.

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because if I come upstairs with you, I will do things I have spent my entire adult life not doing, and the consequences will be —” He stops again. His gloved hands press flat against the bar. “— significant.”

“So let them be significant.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“Then tell me.”

He looks at me. A long, devastating, final assessment. The kind of look that contains a decision — not the calculation of risk, not the weighing of consequences, but the simple, binary, irreversible choice between the life he has constructed and the thing sitting on the barstool beside him offering to demolish it.

He takes off his right glove.

Finger by finger. Slowly. A ceremony I don’t yet understand but can feel the weight of — the deliberateness, the gravity, the sense that what I’m watching is the equivalent of a man removing armor in the presence of someone he has decided, against every instinct and every protocol, to trust.

His hand is bare. Pale. Elegant. The fingers are long and the nails are short and there’s a callus on his trigger finger that I notice without understanding.

He places his bare hand over mine on the bar. His skin is cool. The contact — skin to skin, the first ungloved touch — sends a current through my arm that reaches my spine.

“Room number,” he says.

The elevator ride is seventeen floors of compressed silence.

We stand side by side. Not touching. His glove is back on — he replaced it immediately after the contact at the bar, as if the bare hand was a breach that required immediate repair. But the breach happened. I felt it. He felt it. The glove is a formality now.

The doors open. My room is at the end of the hall. I walk. He follows. His footsteps are measured and precise and I can hear them over the carpet — the particular cadence that I will, three years from now, recognize in a locker room and feel the floor drop out from under my entire life.

I open the door. Step inside. Turn.

He’s standing in the doorway. Silhouetted by the hall light. His face is in shadow but his eyes catch the light from the room — pale, reflective, the eyes of a predator deciding whether to enter the trap or the territory.

“Come in,” I say.

He crosses the threshold.

The door closes.

And Lev — contained, controlled, armored Lev, who has spent the last two hours maintaining the most rigorous emotional distance I have ever encountered in another human being — puts both gloved hands on my chest and pushes me against the wall and kisses me with a ferocity that rewrites every assumption I have ever made about the relationship between composure and desire.

His mouth is demanding. Not tender, not exploratory — claiming. His teeth catch my lower lip. His tongue sweeps mine. His gloved hands are on my chest, pressing, pinning, and the leather against my henley is a friction I feel through the fabric and into my skin. He kisses me like a man who has been starving and has just been presented with the only meal that matters.

I grab his waist. Pull him against me. The size difference registers — I’m four inches taller, fifty-five pounds heavier, and none of it matters because the moment my hands close around his body, the power inverts. He’s smaller. He’s in control. The paradox is instant and absolute and the most arousing thing I have ever experienced.

He breaks the kiss. Steps back. One step. Enough to look at me.

“Take off your shirt,” he says.

I take off my shirt.

His eyes travel. The same inventory from the bar, but slower now. More detailed. My chest, my arms, the tattoo sleeve — he traces it with his gaze the way a man traces a map, following the lines of ink from my shoulder to my wrist. The compass on my hip, just visible above my jeans.

He removes his jacket. Folds it. Places it on the chair. The folding is meticulous — a man who cares for his possessions the way he cares for his composure, with obsessive, architectural precision.

His gloves come off. Both of them this time. Finger by finger. Left, then right. He places them on the jacket. The ritual takes approximately ten seconds and I watch every one of them with the focus of a man watching the last barrier fall.

His bare hands find my chest.

Cool. Precise. His fingers trace the same path his eyes took — collarbone, sternum, the ridge of each pectoral, the valley between. He touches me like a scientist studying a specimen. Like a man memorizing something he knows he won’t be allowed to touch again.

“You’re very warm,” he says. Quiet. Almost to himself.

“And you’re very cold.”

“I’m always cold.” His thumb finds the compass tattoo. Traces the needle. “What does this point to?”

“Nothing. It’s decorative.”

“Everything points to something.” He looks up at me. His eyes are dark now — the grey swallowed by pupil, the composure visibly eroding. “Turn around.”

I turn around.

His hands on my back. My shoulders. The muscles along my spine. He maps me with his fingers the way a blind man reads — by touch, by texture, by the topography of a body that has been built and broken and rebuilt for the specific purpose of controlled violence. His fingers find scars. Old ones. The shoulder surgery. The rib that healed wrong. The unnamed marks from unnamed fights in unnamed bars.

He traces each one.

Then his mouth replaces his hands.

Lips on my shoulder blade. The left one. A kiss so light it’s barely contact — the pressure of a breath, the suggestion of a mouth. Then the right. Then the space between. Down my spine, vertebra by vertebra, his mouth depositing soft, precise, devastating kisses on every inch of skin his hands have mapped.

I am shaking.

Not from cold. Not from fear. From the specific, overwhelming sensation of being studied and worshipped simultaneously by a man who does both with the same controlled intensity and whose mouth on my skin is producing a response that I have never — in any encounter, with any person, in any configuration — experienced.

I turn. Take his face in my hands. Kiss him. He lets me — briefly, a concession, three seconds of reciprocity — and then his hand is on my throat.

Not squeezing. Holding. His fingers wrap around my neck with a pressure that is exactly, precisely calibrated — firm enough to feel, light enough to breathe, the perfect midpoint between restraint and safety. His thumb presses against my pulse point.

“Your heart rate is elevated,” he observes.

“No shit.”

“One forty-two. Approximate. That’s —”

“Lev. Stop counting and fuck me.”

Something in his face shifts. The composure, which has been eroding in stages — the gloves, the mouth, the hands — finally breaks in a way that reaches his eyes. The pale grey goes hot. Not warm — hot. The cold that he carries like a second skin incinerates in a single, visible ignition, and what replaces it is hunger so raw and so naked that I understand, with sudden, devastating clarity, what he meant in the bar when he said the consequences would be significant.

This man has not allowed himself to want anything in a very, very long time. And the want, unleashed, is a force that makes my on-ice violence look like a pillow fight.

He pushes me toward the bed. I go. He follows. His hands work my belt, my jeans — efficient, focused, every movement calibrated. I reach for his shirt and he catches my wrist.

“No,” he says. “Not tonight.”

“Lev —”

“I need to be —” He searches for the word. “— dressed. For this. I need the —”

“Armor.”

He looks at me. The hunger shifts. Underneath it, something vulnerable. Something surprised. The expression of a man who has been seen by someone he didn’t expect to be seen by.

“Yes,” he says quietly. “The armor.”

“Okay.” I release his shirt. Let him keep it. Let him keep the trousers, the belt, the carefully constructed uniform of a man who controls every variable in his environment. “Whatever you need.”

He stares at me for two seconds. The longest two seconds of my life.

Then he puts his hand on my throat again and pushes me flat and what follows is the most intense, the most precisely devastating, the most completely overwhelming sexual experience of my twenty-four years on this planet.

He takes me apart.

Not with chaos — with order. Every touch planned. Every command — and there are commands, spoken in that low, accented voice that bypasses my brain and speaks directly to my nervous system — delivered with precision. He tells me where to put my hands. Where to look. When to breathe. And I obey, not because I’m submissive by nature but because his voice, in this register, in this context, does something to the noise in my head that nothing else has ever done.

It quiets it.

The hollow place fills. Not with adrenaline. Not with bourbon or violence or the temporary, chemical satisfaction of any of the coping mechanisms I’ve assembled over twenty-four years of not knowing what I needed. It fills with the specific, devastating calm of being held in place by someone who knows exactly where every piece goes.

His hand on my throat. His voice in my ear. His body against mine — clothed to my naked, controlled to my chaos, cold to my heat. The contrast is electric. The contrast is everything.

When he finally enters me — prepared with a patience and thoroughness that makes me groan into the pillow — the sound I make is not a moan. It’s a sigh. Deep, complete, the exhalation of a man who has been holding his breath for twenty-four years and has finally found the specific frequency that lets him release.

He fucks me from behind — his choice, the position that lets him maintain control, that lets him set the pace and the depth and the angle without the vulnerability of face-to-face. His hand stays on the back of my neck, pressing my face into the hotel pillow, and his other hand grips my hip with a force that will bruise and I don’t care. I don’t care about anything except the rhythm and the pressure and the low, fractured sounds he’s making behind me that tell me his composure is cracking and the man underneath is just as wrecked as I am.

“Look at me,” he says.

I turn my head. Sideways. Cheek against the pillow. I find his eyes in the dim hotel room — grey and black, wild, the composure in ruins, his hair displaced, his shirt damp with sweat, his face the most honest thing I’ve ever seen.

He comes looking into my eyes. And the sound he makes — a broken Russian syllable, involuntary, ripped from some place beneath every wall he’s built — is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever heard.

I follow. His hand on the back of my neck. His eyes on mine. The hollow place silent, full, quiet in a way it has never been quiet.

After, he dresses immediately.

Not slowly — efficiently. The shirt buttoned. The jacket retrieved. The gloves replaced, finger by finger, the armor reassembled with a speed that tells me this is practiced. This is the exit strategy. This is the protocol for the morning after — or, in this case, the hour after.

I lie on the hotel bed and watch him rebuild himself and I understand, with the specific certainty of a man who has just experienced something that cannot be replicated or replaced, that this person is going to walk out of this room and I may never see him again.

“Stay,” I say.

“I can’t.”

“You can. You just won’t.”

He pauses. Jacket on, gloves on, standing at the foot of the bed. Looking at me. His face is masked again — the composure restored, the walls repaired, the man I saw during sex locked away behind the suit and the leather and the blank, controlled expression that reveals nothing.

But his eyes. His eyes haven’t caught up yet. His eyes are still open, still raw, still holding the residue of whatever happened between us in the last hour. And in those eyes, I see something I will carry for three years, across three teams, through a hundred fights and a thousand empty hotel rooms and the endless, howling silence of the hollow place:

Regret. Not for what we did. For what he can’t allow himself to keep.

“This was an indulgence,” he says. His voice is steady. Clinical. The accent carefully modulated. “It will not happen again.”

“Lev —”

“Good luck with your game tomorrow, Mr. Callahan.”

He walks out. The door closes.

I lie in the hotel bed. The sheets smell like him — cold air and leather and a cologne I don’t recognize. The hollow place, which was quiet for exactly forty-seven minutes, starts screaming again.

But the shape of the silence is different now. It has his handprint in it. His voice. The specific, indelible imprint of a man who held me down and quieted the noise and then left, and the leaving didn’t erase the holding. The holding is permanent. The holding has changed the architecture of the silence, and no amount of distance or time or deliberate forgetting will change it back.

I fall asleep at 2 AM. I dream about grey eyes and leather gloves and a voice that says look at me like it’s the only thing that matters.

I score two goals the next day. Career-high.

I never forget his name.

~ THE END ~

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