Chapter Text
By thirty-five, Ilya Rozanov knew the difference between pain that mattered and pain that didn’t.
The ache in his left shoulder after practice didn’t matter. The stiffness behind his knee after a travel day didn’t matter either. Neither did the dull pull in his lower back when he got out of bed too quickly, or the way bruises lingered longer now than they used to. Recovery took more work than it had at twenty-eight. More discipline. More planning.
That didn’t matter.
Winning mattered. Control mattered. Routine mattered.
Everything else was noise.
The rink had mostly emptied by the time he went back onto the ice alone, helmet off, hair damp at the nape of his neck. The overhead lights were bright and cold, flattening the whole surface of the rink into white glare. The air smelled like shaved ice and rubber and sweat gone metallic in the cold.
He took one slow lap around center ice, then another. His skates cut clean lines into the surface. His breathing settled into a rhythm that was as familiar to him as prayer.
This part, he still liked. The quiet after everyone else had left. The arena stripped down to its real shape. No music, no media, no crowd. Just the ice and the hum of the building around it.
He turned tightly at the blue line, felt a small protest in his thigh, ignored it, and pushed off again.
“Rozanov.”
He slowed, coasted toward the bench, and looked up. Coach was standing there with a man in a dark overcoat and expensive shoes. League office, probably. Too polished to be anything else.
Ilya rested his forearms on the boards. “What.”
The man smiled, though he already looked wary. “We’re launching a new initiative for next season.”
Ilya said nothing.
“It’s a legacy program,” the man went on. “Veteran captains nearing retirement will each select one rookie prospect to mentor over the course of a year. Leadership development, media preparation, team culture, that sort of thing. The idea is to create continuity within the franchise.”
Ilya stared at him.
Beside the league rep, Coach rubbed one hand over his mouth.
“A legacy program,” Ilya repeated.
The man kept smiling. “That’s right.”
“You want me to choose my replacement.”
The smile tightened but didn’t disappear. “I wouldn’t phrase it like that.”
“Of course you wouldn’t.”
Coach sighed. “Ownership likes it. The league likes it. PR loves it.”
Naturally. Everyone loved a clean narrative. The aging captain. The bright young successor. One final season, framed properly for cameras and sponsors and emotional tribute videos.
Ilya looked back out over the ice.
“I’m not retired,” he said.
“No,” the rep said carefully. “But eventually—”
Ilya turned his head and the man stopped talking.
For a second nobody said anything. The arena ventilation droned overhead. Somewhere in the tunnel, a door slammed.
Coach shifted his weight. “The rookie showcase is next month. You’ll attend, evaluate the prospects, and make your choice after.”
Your choice.
That was the trick, then. Make it sound like power. Dress it up as respect. Hand him the privilege of naming the player who would eventually take everything that had taken him years to build.
“And if I refuse?” Ilya asked.
The league rep hesitated just long enough to be irritating.
“It would be noticed,” he said.
By management. By the press. By fans. By everyone who thought access to his career meant access to the terms of its ending.
Ilya straightened. “Fine.”
Coach blinked. “Fine?”
“You want a name,” Ilya said. “I’ll give you one.”
He pushed away from the boards before either of them could say anything else, skated to the bench, and stepped off the ice.
The tunnel beyond the rink felt too warm. Concrete walls, rubber flooring, the dim echo of equipment carts in the distance. The building smelled different away from the ice, less clean, more human. Sweat, detergent, damp fabric, tape adhesive.
He kept walking until he reached the locker room.
Empty.
Good.
He sat down in front of his stall without taking off his gloves. His gear was arranged exactly the way he liked it. Towel folded. Change of clothes stacked. Water bottle empty and upright. His life was full of systems like this. Things placed where they belonged, tasks done in the right order, variables minimized wherever possible.
It was the only reason the rest of it stayed manageable.
Above his stall, his nameplate gleamed under the fluorescent light.
ROZANOV.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and stared at it.
One year.
The league wanted one year of mentorship, as if a career could be translated neatly into teachable pieces. As if leadership was a seminar. As if he could compress all of it—the pressure, the restraint, the loneliness, the responsibility, the cost—into something a twenty-one-year-old could absorb between practice and media training.
His phone buzzed in the pocket of his jacket. One message from his agent. One from the team’s media director about a photo shoot next week. One from the nutrition staff confirming his adjusted meal plan for the road trip.
Everything normal. Everything moving forward exactly as it always had.
He hated that the world seemed unchanged.
He took off one glove, looked at the red marks pressed into his fingers by the seams, and flexed his hand once.
They weren’t asking him to mentor a rookie.
They were asking him to cooperate with his own disappearance.
—
The showcase was held in Toronto four weeks later in a gleaming practice facility built to impress people who didn’t know anything about hockey.
The lobby smelled like polished wood and espresso. Every surface reflected light. Sponsors were everywhere. Screens. Branding walls. Carefully dressed staff with headsets and clipped smiles. Too much glass. Too much money. Too much performance.
Ilya signed what was put in front of him, gave two journalists nothing useful when they asked how he felt about “guiding the next generation,” and went upstairs to the viewing box reserved for team executives and league personnel.
From up there, the ice looked immaculate. Untouched. Artificial in the way only a perfect rink could.
The rookie groups were already warming up below.
Too much energy. Too much visible effort. Young players trying to look calm and failing. Some were fast. Some were flashy. A few already had that polished confidence people liked to call charisma when they meant marketability.
Ilya sat in the front row, elbows on his knees, hands loosely clasped. One assistant coach sat on his right with a tablet open. Another had a printed list of names and measurements in front of him.
“We narrowed it to twelve,” the one with the list said. “Centers, wingers, a couple defensemen. No goalies.”
“I’ll see,” Ilya said.
He didn’t take the sheet.
Below them, one rookie overhandled the puck in a drill and turned an easy play into something ugly. Another had speed but no patience. One defenseman was physically strong and positionally stupid. Ilya dismissed half a dozen of them before the first game had properly settled.
The noise in the arena shifted as the scrimmage started. Skates. Sticks. Sharp whistles. Shouted instructions from the bench. Executives murmuring behind him in voices trained to sound thoughtful.
The boys on the ice were hungry. You could see it in the way they lunged into plays, the way they chased every touch as if one good shift might rewrite their entire lives. Some of them would be very good. Some of them would vanish in two years. Most of them didn’t know the difference yet.
Ilya watched for what mattered.
How they recovered from mistakes. How they moved without the puck. Whether they lifted their heads before making a pass. Whether they could read pressure early enough to avoid panic. Whether they wasted motion.
That told him more than any highlight ever would.
The first few shifts were forgettable. Then number 24 stepped onto the ice.
Ilya’s attention sharpened almost immediately, though he couldn’t have said why at first.
The player wasn’t louder than the others. He didn’t demand attention. That was part of it, maybe. He moved with a kind of contained purpose that set him apart from everyone around him. No extra flourish. No visible nerves. No sense that he was trying to be seen.
He took a pass cleanly along the boards, shifted his weight, and created half a step of space with something so small most people in the building probably missed it.
Then he used it perfectly.
“Twenty-four,” Ilya said.
The assistant looked down at the roster. “Shane Hollander. Twenty-one.”
Hollander.
The name meant nothing to him. The player did.
He kept watching.
Shift after shift, Hollander made the right read early. He wasn’t the biggest skater on the ice or the most explosive, but he saw the game a fraction ahead of everyone around him. He intercepted a pass before it had fully developed. He slipped pressure without wasting energy. He made decisions that were clean, ugly, efficient, and exactly correct.
Interesting.
“Good hockey sense,” one of the assistants murmured.
“Yes,” Ilya said.
That didn’t begin to cover it.
Hollander didn’t just have good instincts. He had discipline. Even his mistakes were narrow, almost controlled. When a play broke against him, he corrected without visible frustration. When he came off after a shift, his routine never varied, sit, towel at the back of the neck, water, glove adjustment, eyes on the ice.
The exact same sequence. Every time.
Ilya noticed because of course he noticed.
Ritual mattered. Routine mattered. The body liked repetition when the world didn’t.
He kept watching Hollander between shifts, then during the next rush, then through a defensive recovery along the half wall. The player had something precise about him. Self-contained. Not cold, exactly. Just tightly ordered.
Then Hollander looked up.
For the first time Ilya got a proper look at his face beneath the helmet.
Young. Flushed from effort. Freckles across the nose and cheeks. Mouth a little too soft-looking for the rest of him. Dark hair damp and pushed back carelessly with one gloved hand.
His eyes lifted to the viewing box and found Ilya’s instantly.
Not by chance.
The look lasted a beat too long.
Then Hollander looked away and drank from his bottle as if nothing had happened.
Ilya leaned back in his seat.
That was new.
—
By the second period, Hollander had only become more difficult to ignore.
Ilya took the player sheet at last and scanned it without much interest at first.
Shane Hollander. Center. Twenty-one. Good numbers. Nothing obscene. Nothing flashy enough to explain what Ilya was seeing on the ice.
A few notes from development staff stood out. Extremely consistent conditioning metrics. Strong adherence to nutritional and training protocols. High responsiveness to structured systems. Noticeable discomfort with abrupt environmental changes.
Ilya folded the page once and set it back down.
That tracked.
Hollander played like someone who had built himself carefully and did not appreciate disorder.
A smart player, yes. But also a player with patterns. Habits. A private architecture under everything he did.
The game ended with no clear standout performance dramatic enough for television. That was fine. Ilya trusted the quieter things more.
People rose around him, collecting notes and devices, already talking in cautious, practiced terms. High ceiling. Projectable. Good upside. Competitive motor. The usual empty language.
“You already have someone?” one assistant asked as they headed for the corridor.
“Maybe,” Ilya said.
It was enough of an answer that the assistant didn’t ask again.
The hallway behind the rink was warmer and louder than the viewing box. Equipment carts rattled past. Staff moved quickly in branded jackets. Journalists clustered near a stanchion line, waiting for the players who had learned early how to perform charm on command.
Ilya was about to take the side route that would let him avoid the media entirely when he saw Hollander standing alone beside a vending machine.
No helmet now.
Without it, he looked younger, which was irritating. Slimmer too, though not slight. Defined. Controlled. His hair was still damp at the temples. He was holding a water bottle in one hand and staring at the nutrition label on some packaged protein bar with an expression of faint disapproval.
He should have kept walking.
Instead, he stopped in front of him.
Hollander lifted his head right away.
Up close, the freckles were worse. More noticeable. Scattered across his face in a way that made him look unfairly young. His eyes were brown, steady, and entirely too direct.
“Your zone entry in the second,” Ilya said. “Would you make the same choice again?”
No hello. No introduction. No point.
Hollander blinked once. “No.”
Immediate. Certain.
“Why.”
“The outside defenseman committed too early,” Hollander said. “I should’ve held the puck half a second longer and delayed before moving it left. I forced the pass because the winger was already calling for it.”
His voice was calm. Clear. Not deferential.
“It worked,” Ilya said.
“Yes,” Hollander said. “But it wasn’t the best version of the play.”
Ilya studied him.
“You watch a lot of video?”
A tiny pause.
“Yes.”
“Mine too?”
Another pause, smaller this time. “Yes.”
Not embarrassed. Not overeager. Just factual.
Something in Ilya’s chest tightened slightly.
“Oh,” he said.
Hollander nodded once. “Mostly Ottawa from 2018 through 2023.”
The corridor seemed to get quieter around them, though that was probably only in Ilya’s head.
“Mostly,” he repeated.
“Your game changed after the 2021 injury,” Hollander said. “You protect the left side more on entries now. You recover faster with your edges when you feel high pressure from the strong side, and you take fewer unnecessary risks late in close games.”
Ilya didn’t move.
Very few people talked to him about hockey like that. Not the real parts of it. Not the private adjustments. Not the small, unglamorous changes a body made after damage.
Hollander had noticed. Studied it. Memorized it, apparently.
Too much.
“I study a lot,” Hollander added after a beat, his grip tightening once on the bottle. “Sorry.”
Sorry, but not ashamed. Sorry because he understood belatedly that he might have crossed some line.
Ilya should have been irritated. Or flattered. Or wary.
Instead, he found himself noticing absurd details. A drop of water disappearing into the collar of Hollander’s shirt. The faint flush along his cheekbones. The way he kept most of his weight on one leg, probably because the corridor was too noisy and he was bracing himself against it without realizing.
“Clearly,” Ilya said.
Hollander held his gaze.
If he was nervous, he didn’t show it in any recognizable way. There was no obvious performance to him. No polished young-player smile, no strategic charm. Just that same unnerving directness.
“You want someone who can take your place properly, don’t you?” Hollander asked.
Not sir. Not Captain. Not even Rozanov.
You.
Blunt. Simple. Unsoftened.
Ilya stared at him.
“Be careful how you speak to me,” he said quietly.
A little color rose in Hollander’s face, though his expression barely changed. “Okay.”
For one strange second, neither of them moved.
Ilya could hear wheels squeaking somewhere behind him. Someone laughing too loudly by the media line. A staff member calling for tape. The whole building carrying on around them as if this conversation didn’t feel oddly, sharply suspended.
Then Ilya stepped back.
“You read the ice well,” he said.
And before Hollander could answer, he turned and walked away.
He didn’t look back.
He knew Hollander was watching him anyway.
—
That night, Ilya ate dinner alone in his hotel room.
The meal had been left for him by team staff an hour earlier. Salmon, rice, vegetables, sauce on the side. Everything portioned exactly as requested. Easy. Predictable. Contained.
He sat by the window with the city spread out below him in grids of white and amber light. At this height, traffic looked almost peaceful. Abstract. Easy to understand.
His room was silent except for the muted hum of the climate control.
Shane Hollander, twenty-one.
Ilya put down his fork.
There had been players at the showcase who were more obviously talented. Bigger personalities. Easier stories. Players the league would probably prefer to market. Hollander was something else. Less obvious. Harder to package.
Harder to dismiss.
He thought of the game first. The positioning. The discipline. The absence of waste.
Then he thought of the hallway.
Mostly Ottawa from 2018 through 2023.
How many hours of tape did that take? How closely did someone have to watch to notice the exact way his game had changed after an injury he had barely discussed publicly?
Ilya had spent years keeping his private life locked down. He gave the media nothing useful. He lived carefully. Quietly. Deliberately. Hockey already took enough from him. He had never seen any reason to hand over the rest.
And yet this kid had looked at him as if he’d already mapped the edges.
He got up and crossed to the window, pressing his fingertips lightly against the cool glass.
The smartest choice was obvious.
So was the worst one.
For a long moment he stood there, shoulder heavy with old strain, city lights reflected faintly over his face.
Then he went back to the table, picked up his phone, and opened the message from team staff asking for his early impressions.
He typed a single name.
Shane Hollander.
His thumb hovered over the screen.
He knew he shouldn’t choose him.
He sent it anyway.