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"Don't get riled," Price says as Ilya stares at his hotel mattress. Which is, thanks to Auder and Moose, folded double in his room's shower cubicle, which is in turn missing its head and gushing water unapologetically over the bathroom floor. "Happens to all the rookies. Don't take it personally."
Ilya punches the useless knobs on the shower. Maybe the tenth time's the charm. The lid is missing from the toilet cistern. His dress shoes, which should be in his flight bag, are inside. He thinks he deserves to take this a little personally. Thinks it's permissable to let a small, strangled part of himself think, this wasn't supposed to happen here, not with the team, not in the one place he'd always known how to be popular.
He spent pre-season camp diligently picking up pucks and complaining about how much he wasn't smoking and making impressed noises at the vets' indentikit houses. He bought rounds of tasteless diet beer and noticed the right kind of girls and let Cads talk to them first, even though he was awful at it. He put money on the board for his first game and doubled in when he scored; when he played his first game in Detroit because social media found a picture of him aged nine, wearing a Federov shirt his father had promptly confiscated; when the Raiders played Philly the week their equipment manager died and they ran a collection for the Heart Association. He nodded politely when Feller talked about buying his mom a house and how important it was to help out family once you got paid, and then vounteered to wash the dishes when Feller's ten-year-old whispered "Dad, his mom's dead," and ushered in an awkward silence. He'd submitted to Feller's subsequent uptick in captainly encouragement without saying he didn't need to be babied. He'd listened to Hanny's breakdown of his defensive failings without talking back. He'd asked for an English tutor and an American roommate and spent countless hours smiling for the marketing team's camera while eating studio-tempetature seafood and carefully perfecting the rhythm of a joking insult in English.
And still, this.
It didn't have any rhythm, and it didn't feel like a joke.
It feels, as Ilya rolls the smooth stone of his anger in his mouth and tries to decide who to spit it at, like the sort of thing Alexei would do, angry at Ilya for staying in hockey after he was cut or for making Alexei's friends laugh when he'd been told to keep quiet. A tax paid for making success look too easy.
"If they get a rise out of you they'll do it every road trip," Price warns. "Is your room service tag gone?"
"What tag?"
Price ducks out of the bathroom and inspects the door of Ilya's hotel room, complete with the layer of chewed gum stuck in the lock. "The hanger on the door, you use it to order breakfast?" He sighs. "Yeah, gone. You're going to get a five am wake up call with three of everything on the menu, sorry."
Based on the bill he got for his wrecked room in Colorado, Ilya is going to get hit with a four figure fee for this bullshit, plus the cost of whatever overpriced room the hotel moves him into, and then money on the board for his first Canadian game tomorrow in Vancouver followed by the rookie party when they get back to Boston, which Kaner says cost him six grand last year, and - Fuck it. Fuck this happening here. Here, where finally everyone is supposed to be good enough not to be intimidated by him.
Ryan Price is surprisingly quick for a man his size. Ilya appreciates this on the ice but he thinks it's absolute bullshit when Price is using that size and speed to get between him and the fire extinguisher he plans to beat Auder and Moose to death with. "Motherfuckers," Ilya yells to the corridor in general, because there's no way they weren't in on it. "You think this is funny? You think it's funny when I don't pass to you all fucking season too, yes?"
Three doorways down, a slit of light appears in a doorway and Ilya hears Auder's dickhead cackling. He pushes forward but Price has one freakishly meaty arm hooked round his chest and the other round his waist and is hauling him backwards, even as Ilya throws out a thoughtless elbow and gouges at his hand.
"C'mon, c'mon, settle down," Price is yelling, which Auder has the nerve to snidely agree with and Ilya is going to cave his fucking face in -
Feller emerges from his room, rumpled. "Will you fucks simmer down," he says with all the weary authority of someone who has captained this circus since Ilya was playing under-12s. "Auder, you're a piece of shit. Rozy - get another room, man. You can afford it. If we get banned from another hotel I'm beating all your asses."
Ilya ends up taking the unoccupied bed in Price's room, where he wrings out his shirt and tries to swallow the humilation burning at the back of his throat. "It is very funny," he says, flatly. "I am enjoying these jokes. I am being a good sport. I love to pay damages to every hotel. Is good for your poor sad American economy."
"They do it to everyone," Price repeats, as if Ilya is just anybody and that makes it ok.
"They don't do it to Kaner. He tells me. They don't do it to Vince." Is it because I'm Russian, he doesn't ask. Is it because my father was right.
"Desjourneys is threatening to send Kaner back to juniors already. Vince is a bubble guy, he'll be down in the A before the end of the season. Hell, Moose is probably going to be sent down before the trade deadline, and Aud's not getting his contract renewed." Price gives a glacial shrug, and Ilya wonders for a second if this is something that anyone ever dared do to him or if he's always been as huge and isolated as he is on the Raiders. "You're going to be outearning all of them in a couple of years. You're going to be the face of the team."
There's a certain satisfaction in that. It feels true; it feels like Ilya can make it so.
"They're fucking with you because you can take the hit in the long run, and they'll get bored when the next guy comes along. All you can do is eat it."
Ilya bites his tongue and eats.
He eats with sloppy enthusiasm, grabbing two slices of sashimi and smearing them across the otherwise-empty platter, says "Yes, yes of course," when Beaker asks if he was raised by wolves.
"Was big news in Russia. They find him, they train him like dog," says Kovy, then stabs the back of Ilya's hand in defense of his hamachi slices. "Ilya, fetch puck. Ilya, score goal. Then treats."
Cads eats, albeit more slowly, chopsticks tangled like the legs of a baby deer and a determined expression on his face.
Auder and Moose eat like people who have been stung by Vancouver's sushi scene before, housing sockeye and roasting Hanny about the fact his supposedly under the radar spot is on Trip Advisor.
At the other end of their table - the other end of the restaurant, practically, with 20 guys between them - Hanny is attempting to get Kaner to eat, with limited success. "You eat chicken and rice every day, dude," he's saying, fond edge wearing off his exasperation. "How is this any different?"
"That's dead," Kaner says, mournful.
"This is dead, Jesus fuck. It's just raw. You never eat a vegetable? A fruit?"
Kaner makes a face that suggests those things have only happened under similar duress, then manfully submerges an entire nigiri into a dish of soy sauce.
"You don't want to do it like that, you don't want to just taste the sauce."
"I don't want to taste any of it."
"Ignore him," John-boy, the Raiders' other Vancouver transplant, tells a passing waitress. "This is delicious. He's an animal. After you bring the cheque we're gonna take him out back and shoot him."
"And would you like the cheque now?" she asks, to a scattering of snorted laughter and at least one "Nice knowing you bud," aimed at Kaner, who looks like he'd welcome death if it meant people would stop asking him to eat octopus.
"We would love that now," John-boy confirms, already pulling his toque from the sleeve of his jacket and tossing his credit card in. "Hey, everyone. Credit card roulette. And I'm watching you Auder, you better put in, you fucking cheat. Rozy, watch him."
"Wolfman will bite you," Kovy warns, and Ilya snaps his jaws menacingly before throwing his card into the hat along with the others and handing it to the returning waitress.
"We need you to pick the lucky winner," he tells her. "If there is justice, it will be Kaner."
"I barely fucking ate anything," Kaner wails.
"I'll do my best." When Ilya holds out the hat she gamely reaches to the bottom and makes a show of jumbling up the credit cards until Moose starts an impatient table top drum roll, then pulls out a credit card with a little 'ta-da!' motion. "Did I pick a good tipper?" she laughs, handing Ilya his own card.
Ilya does not let himself look back at the number of empty platters along the table behind him, or wish the menu had prices on, or even open the sleek leather wallet the waitress brought their cheque in. "The only good one," he assures her. He gestures expansively, nearly knocks Kovy in the face. "These assholes are the cheapest guys in all of hockey. You are so lucky you picked me," he says, and prays his card doesn't decline.
Alexei eats. Presumably. Certainly he has appetites.
When Ilya is being particularly rebellious - when he says he will send money tomorrow rather than tonight, or fifteen thousand rather than twenty, or tries to say that he's already paid their rent - Alexei likes to snap I have a child to feed, as if Ilya's money is going on caviar and Kamchatka crab for his two-year-old neice rather than straight up Alexei's nose or into the pockets of whoever holds his gambling debts.
"I looked after you our whole fucking lives, you ungrateful little shit," Alexei is saying this time. "And now I have a family to take care of, Ilyushka, a child who depends on me, not that you'd know what that's like."
Ilya thinks he does, actually. He thinks he spends most of his time caring for a large, angry child, one composed entirely of fists and teeth, one that bites and bites and screams when you try and prise its jaws apart.
So Ilya sets up another dummy account in the name of another distant relative and transfers as much money as his new bank in Boston will allow; he pays an invoice to what is, on paper, his Russian manager but is, in reality, just another of Alexei's endless red, screaming, starving mouths; he pays Alexei's wife to look after his Moscow apartment and hopes she doesn't tell him.
"You should be embarrassed to get paid this much to play a game," the mouth on the end of the line says. "You have no idea what it's like for the rest of us in the real world."
Ilya remembers being fifteen and getting jumped in the street by people Alexei owed money to, remembers the heel of a boot coming down on the back of his hand, remembers trying to shoot left handed for the rest of the season rather than tell his coach that Alexei was a large, stupid, hungry child who did not care who got hurt when he bit off more than he could chew. He remembers it all feeling very real when his aching hand spasmed on his stick and threw his shot off, threw his season off, threw his coach and his father and his teammates into a rage he couldn't say he didn't deserve.
"It's coming, it's coming," he promises, as three different banking sites warn him Think before you transfer your money! Do you trust this account? "Everything is chocolate. You can eat as much as you fucking want." He hangs up, and lets the cursor hover over the Compete transfer button for just a second, imagining a world in which he didn't press down. A world in which he didn't have to field calls from an accountant whose accent he could barely understand about spending habits that weren't even really his. It's an idle thought, a childish bit of imagination. Alexei does have a family, after all.
His father eats.
Ilya knows this because he pays a service to do all the things that Polina won't deign to: stock the fridge with meals and beat the rugs and make sure everything is arranged just so.
In this way, Polina gets to believe she's reached the station in life she deserves, and the distinguished Gregori Yaroslavovich Rozanov gets to pretend he can still navigate their spacious apartment unaided and would remember where he had to be without a soft-spoken driver, selected for his loyalty to GUVD Moscow and paid extra for his discretion, gently reminding him where to go and why before handing him a second copy of the speech he'd left, forgotten, on the mantlepiece.
(Ilya doesn't know this yet – he will spend his rookie year having fractured conversations with his father that worry him enough to Google "memory loss old age" but not enough to make him truly scared – but the service will become a nurse, then live-in help, then Alexei when two carers in a row are caught stealing. Alexei will steal too, obviously, but Ilya can rationalise that as the eldest son wresting his birthright back from Polina and her grasping relatives, who will react to poor Grisha's decline with displays of sympathy that border on the ecstatic.
There's no money, Ilya will want to tell them, watching them squabble over who is seen to be handing the invalid his pill or heard talking to him most sweetly. There's never any money. There's only the endless, frictionless glide of grease and palm.)
But none of that has happened yet. For now, Ilya's father eats, and Ilya reassures himself that he is not the sort of son parents regret on their deathbeds.
Ilya feeds his pride too well, he knows.
There is a version of the world where he is braver. In this world he looks at his paycheck, at the impossible sum he's given every two weeks of the season, then its list of deductions – 10% to escrow; 3% to his agent; 5.3% basic tax; health insurance; league dues; meals; tickets; whatever a 401k is; additional taxes paid, for some reason, in states he doesn't live in; a slew of team rates he doesn't really understand – and decides that he does not need the boys to be impressed with him. He can drink cheap beer and drive a sensible car and ignore the constant parade of shoes and watches and designer coats that makes up the pre-game walk-in.
In this world, when someone turns to Kovy and says, "You have such Russian fucking style, man. How many times do we have to tell you, just because it's expensive, doesn't mean it looks good?" Ilya nods and says "I try to make him understand guys, but he's just so fucking dumb. He says 'It's Gucci!' like this is all that matters. I tell him, it's fucking ugly. But his head's too far up his ass to hear."
In this world, he gets a free, sensible car from a local dealership and smiles winningly in their ads.
In this world, after Alexei calls and demands another twenty thousand, another twenty five, Ilya graciously excuses himself from expensive meals and flashy nights out, maybe takes advantage of one of the sympathetic looks Feller sometimes slides him to say my family are difficult, or ask Duby what it was like in the Player Asssistance Program, and how to tell Alexei he needs help. In this world, he tells someone, anyone, that his fuck-you money goes to someone who lives to fuck him over, and that every set of shredded bedding and all-team bar tab and month of rent on his obligatory top-storey apartment comes from a pool of funds that is only half as deep as everyone thinks it is.
But the Ilya from that world would have never left Russia. The Ilya from that world would be too different, too alone, for the team to accept him. So instead he asks Sveta to open him another line of credit and texts a picture of his car to Cads and Duby with the details of a closed track in New Hampshire, and does his best to put his foot through the floor on his first lap.
"You drive like my grandmother," says Duby, looking ay Ilya's lap time. "I know Russia's big but do you not have corners? Your line's for shit."
It's perhaps mean to do this with Duby, who has spent the last season and a half listing from one high-octane hobby to another with the antsiness of the newly sober. But no-one ever accused Ilya of being nice. Soft, maybe. Nice, never.
"You beat my time, I'll carry your bags for the whole year," he offers. "You crash my car, I'll set fire to your apartment."
Duby nods. "Costs about the same," he says and then: "Cads, keep him honest."
"No tricks!" Ilya tells him. "I mean, trunk is full of good, honest bricks…"
"Such a fucking dick," Duby laughs, shaking his head, but straps in, rearranging the plush interior of the car and contorting his ridiculous beanpole frame until he acheives something like an acceptably low centre of gravity. "What does all this do?"
"You are the expert, yes?"
"I'm a country boy, we had real cars, not these fucking computers. How do I turn this off?" By the time Ilya has goaded Duby through the process of silencing his admittedly aggressively communicative dashboard, he's halfway through his third anecdote about giving 'er racing in an empty field years before he got his licence, Cads is cheerfully calling him a hick, and Ilya is watching him set his jaw in tight, competitive line.
"This is what in cities we call 'stoplight', it tells you when you can drive. Green means yes - green is the colour of fields, Duby, someone has taught you this. And the countdown goes from five - you know this because it is Dillon's number. Then it goes to one - that is goalie - then you can drive."
"I'm going to wrap this overpriced piece of crap round a pole," Duby assures him, sweetly, then takes off with a screech that makes Ilya wince for his poor baby. He takes the lap at breakneck speed following a haphazard, weaving line, but manages to overtake three saner men on his way round and arrives back at the start with a look Ilya knows as that of someone helplessly, hopelessly taken.
"You didn't beat my time."
"That was a warm up. Next lap counts."
"What am I, the fucking water boy?" Cads approaches the drivers side door but Duby revs the engine in warning.
"Coffee, two sugars, half and half." He flips Cads off and takes flight again. He is, if not faster, at least more stable this time. Ilya allows his fists to uncleach slightly.
Cads paces, eager. "I'm going to wipe the floor with him."
The next week Vetrova's posts not one but two pictures of their best saleswoman smiling radiantly next to Raiders players and their shiny, new, entirely unsuitable for New England purchases, and enough is shaved off Ilya's tab that he can breathe.
They're like boots in a pair, young and rich and stupid with money. No-one needs to know.
The other thing wants feeding too.
Ilya doesn't have a name for it, or at least not one he wants to speak aloud.
It's there every time he thinks of saying no or staying in or throwing his hands up with a formless, directionless why every time he's asked for something.
It knows the answer. Why is because this is what Ilya is for. This is what Ilya can do. This is what Ilya who always runs away, Ilya who has no real friends, Ilya who can't admit his own failings, Ilya who doesn't know what work is, Ilya who has been coddled and allowed his silly game and his stupid girls and his shameful secrets all his life, this is what he has to give people. Everything else has been eaten out from inside him piece by piece because he was weak enough to allow it, foolish enough not to notice it, even, and now this is what's left.
He doesn't go to Feller. He doesn't say, "Hey, 14, can I ask you something?" when he and Duby are the last ones in the locker room after practice. He doesn't tell Sveta about Alexei or Alexei about Polina or Polina about his father. He doesn't complain. He doesn't complain. He lies very still and lets this nameless thing eat its fill and tries to be grateful for everything he has.
Shane Hollander makes Ilya's teeth ache.
Every time Hollander scores, every time he threatens to overtake Ilya in a race he needs to win to get his end-of-season bonuses, every time he thoughtlessly brags about his investment properties or turns his back to fold his clothes or slides to his knees and lets Ilya's hand close over the back of his neck, Ilya thinks about how easy it would be to clamp down, clench his teeth, squeeze, tear -
He runs his thumb along the pale vulnerable line across the back of Shane's neck, the line that says he's had a fresh cut for the new season, and thinks: you don't even know what you need to be scared of. It makes him jealous, sometimes. Makes him plant his knees and press Shane harder into the mattess, hand on the back of his neck so that he can't turn around and see the ugly, envious expression that crawls across Ilya's face as Shane closes his eyes and moans and thinks the only threat in the world is someone finding them.
But then he thinks, how could nobody tell you? And sometimes, when it's quiet, when Shane is smiling boyishly at Ilya as he puts his own clothes back on and picking up Ilya's reflexively as he goes, Ilya thinks: how nice that nobody had to. He watches Shane potter around backstage at awards, fussing and fretting over nothing as if he can somehow good-boy his way into a world as organised as he is.
There's no such thing as order, Ilya thinks about telling him.
There is only endless chasing and pushing and hoping and deflecting and knowing how to roll with the punches when you have to. There is only weaving too quicky to get hit, ducking from one crisis to another smoothly enough that no-one realises that's what they are. There is only chaos and you have to eat it; all you can do is swallow and scheme and hope for the occasional, temporary ally.
But then Shane is coming closer, pulling Ilya into the warm curve of his body, making a pleased sound as he nuzzles at Ilya's crotch, looking up at him like Ilya is the last thing in the world that could threaten him.
Ilya keeps his mouth shut.