Chapter 3

These videos, though, were supposed to be personal and sincere, or at least give the appearance of being so. Maybe it was just an unspoken agreement where both parties understood he wasn’t genuinely invested in a stranger’s birthday, but they all played along and mutually agreed to pretend. Caleb should be good at that, considering he’d spent so many years of his life pretending about several very pivotal things, but he absolutely was not.

It was impossible to relax when he knew he had to be very careful about everything he did when he filmed these videos. It was easy enough when he was home, but when he was at Dmitri’s, he tried to find a plain white wall to stand in front of—except sometimes, a very excitable dog was in the same room as the only unadorned white wall, and Caleb felt awful locking Mila in another room just so he could film a video.

And anyway, he one time he’d tried shutting Mila in the bedroom with Dmitri, hoping to film before Dmitri woke up and spare himself the mortification of being perceived while doing so, it had backfired spectacularly. The dog had woken Dmitri up, and Dmitri had been a little shit that morning, making increasingly ridiculous faces to make Caleb laugh, which had been...well, it had been charming, but it had also been very annoying, because it had taken Caleb nearly an hour to film three very simple one minute videos.

Of course, Dmitri had spent the next twenty minutes very diligently sucking Caleb’s cock, and by the end of it, Caleb had forgotten why he’d been angry at Dmitri, if he’d ever been angry at Dmitri in the first place.

So from then on, Caleb had taken to filming his videos in the gym in Dmitri’s basement, because he had the same weight rack and bench as Dmitri did, and if he angled the camera just so, almost nothing else was in Frame. It wasn’t quite a blank wall, but it served its purpose well enough.

So yeah, StarGreet was...not his favorite thing, but there were quite a lot of small inconveniences—and much bigger inconveniences—that came with playing professional hockey, and most of them he’d come to accept a long time before. Most of it was a relatively minor trade-off for getting paid extremely well to play what was, at its core, an entertaining (if admittedly dangerous) game. Caleb was acutely aware of how many people would give anything to have the career he had, the life he’d built through hockey.

Caleb hated the position he and Dmitri had been put in due to their careers, hated that he couldn’t scream from the rooftops that Dmitri Volkov was the man that he loved. That was the one thing, the one trade-off that all but flayed him of his skin. But StarGreet...he didn’t hate that quite so much. It was a mild annoyance at best, and maybe it actually was a little nice to think that a few minutes of his time might brighten someone’s day.

It was an absolutely ordinary day. That was what Caleb had been thinking, at least, right up until he walked into the locker room and heard, “So, Captain, are you fucking Dmitri Volkov?”

Caleb stopped in his tracks. His blood froze in his veins. His heart somehow both stopped and pounded so loudly that he could hear it thundering in his ears. He forgot to breathe. He felt hot, then cold, then hot again.

“...what?” he managed at last, the single word coming out a desperate squeak. The whole locker room was laughing uproariously, Leclerc legitimately rolling on the floor. Ethan wasn’t laughing, but his eyes were huge, staring at Caleb with an intensity that suggested he was desperately trying to convey something to Caleb telepathically. The problem was that Caleb had no idea what it was Ethan was trying to communicate.

“He’s joking!” Ethan said quickly, his gaze not turning any less intense. “It’s just some weirdos online. It’s literally just conspiracy theories.”

Caleb’s heart slowed a little bit, and he could finally breathe. Okay, whatever this was, it wasn’t a disaster, then. His relationship with Dmitri hadn’t been exposed to the world against his will. But he didn’t know **what**it was then.

“I don’t know...” M.M. began, barely able to speak through his laughter. “**whitvolkovfiles** on Ember does have some...compelling evidence...”