Chapter Text
For the majority of Ilya Rozanov's life, he has been alone.
He came to America at seventeen, a boy with a suitcase, a dream and a grief so large it lived inside his ribs like a second skeleton. But even before that—before the planes and the billet families and the English words that never quite fit right in his mouth—he had already learned the shape of absence. Learned what it meant to live in rooms that had gone too quiet. Learned what it meant to be left behind by a mother who chose to die and a father who chose, afterward, to behave as though she had never existed at all. He knew what it meant to be alone in a way that follows you, the kind that becomes less a feeling and more a fact, like the color of your eyes or the shape of your hands.
Some loneliness arrives like weather, temporary and passing.
Ilya’s did not.
His settled into the walls, into the silence between rooms, into the foundation of him. He learned early that loneliness was survivable—that if you were disciplined enough, you could build a whole life around it. That you could fill it with noise and money and sex and people who wanted pieces of you without ever allowing anyone close enough to touch the parts that still bled.
He learned, too, that alone was safer. Alone meant no one could leave.
So he built his cage carefully. Made it beautiful. Made it comfortable. Made it so no one would ever guess that the bars were there at all. He made a museum of expensive, sterile leather and cold glass, and called it a home, one entirely too quiet for a man whose mind was perpetually running at a hundred miles an hour and whose soul was slowly starving to death on a diet of his own hollow laughter. He made himself difficult to hold and easy to misunderstand, beautiful enough to want but too hostile to keep. He built walls out of arrogance and spectacle and gave them his own face.
By the time he got to Boston, the cage was already finished, America just gave it better lighting. The first bars had been built much earlier, four thousand seven hundred miles away, in Moscow, in the apartment that became a tomb the day his mother died.
He was twelve years old when he found her.
There were parts of that day his mind had swallowed whole. He did not remember screaming. He did not remember how long he stayed on the floor beside her. He did not remember the funeral, or the way his father's hand had gripped his shoulder too hard, or whether anyone said they were sorry at all.
What he remembered was the silence. The way it pressed against his eardrums, heavy and suffocating, as if the world itself had been wrapped in cotton. He remembered standing in the kitchen afterward, waiting for her voice to drift in from another room. Waiting for her to start singing again, to fill the rooms with something other than the echo of his own breathing ricocheting off the empty walls.
He remembered the day he stopped waiting.
He remembered his father's face, cold and distant, looking at Ilya like he was a reminder of something he wanted to forget. His father never said her name again. Not once. Not when Ilya asked, not when he begged, not even when he stood in the doorway of his study with tears drying stiff on his face and said, please, just tell me something, I need to know she was real. Grigori Rozanov looked at him the way men look at damage they do not intend to repair, coldly. Like grief was an administrative inconvenience. She is dead, he would say. There is nothing to talk about. Stop being weak.
His brother was worse. His brother was what happened when cruelty was given permission to grow in silence. His brother, who was older and stronger and meaner, and smart enough to understand exactly where to press. His big brother, who took their father's silence as permission and their mother's absence as an invitation, and sharpened it into a weapon. He shoved Ilya into walls and called him a disappointment. Told him their mother had left because she could not stand to look at him. Told him, over and over, that he had been too much to stay for. And because children will believe almost anything if it explains the pain they are already in, Ilya believed him.
And that was the worst part, because Ilya could take the bruises, the shouting, he could even deal with the silence. It was not like all of those things hadn't been there before. But at least he had her love wrapped around him, like something he hadn't known was an armor until the moment he was left bare in a world that was too big, too dangerous, and actively trying to buried him next to her.
So the moment he was no longer protected by it, his brother's words shot through his brain like perfectly aimed bullets, sounding much more plausible than they had any right to. Like the missing piece Ilya needed to make sense of his mom abandoning them. Because once you are loved and then not loved, there are only so many conclusions a child can draw. Ilya drew the simplest one.
It had to be him.
If his mother left, if his father looked through him, if his brother hated him with that kind of practiced certainty, then there had to be something wrong with him at the root. Something spoiled. Something unlovable. Something in him that turned affection into rot the second it touched him, something that made love unsustainable.
And so he built his life around that idea.
He made anger his native language because it was easier to carry than grief. Anger was useful, it had a shape he could mold to his will, it could move and hit back and keep him warm when nothing else did. He fed it until it became the truest thing about him, the one companion that never abandoned him, the one thing he could rely on to drown out the quieter, more dangerous voice underneath it. Anger could fill the spaces where love used to live, could press against the inside of his ribs and push him forward when all he wanted was to stop.
He didn't notice, at first, when one became the other—when the heat in his chest stopped being the ache of missing her and started being the burn of wanting to break something. By the time he did, it had already become his shield, one that would not fail him like love did. It was the only thing his father passed on to him willingly, the thing that connected all of them more than their last name ever did. And so Ilya let it replace every soft thing, until he couldn't remember what it felt like to be held without also being braced for the blow.
He was angry at his mother for choosing death over him, for making him feel like he wasn't enough to make her stay. He was angry at his father for his cold silence, for the way he looked through Ilya like he was a ghost already, for how he only wanted him when he was useful, when there was a medal to hang on the wall and a son to display like a trophy before locking him away again. He was angry at his brother for his envy, for his fists, for the words that carved themselves into Ilya's bones and stayed there. He was angry at God, for keeping him alive when he wasn't sure he wanted to be.
And yet, he couldn't help but still love them all. Dearly.
That was what made him angrier than everything else—how no amount of silence or cruelty or indifference could beat the love out of him. How his father's knuckles had been red more times than Ilya could count, and still he had never been able to stop wanting his approval. Had never been able to stop hoping that maybe this time would be different. That maybe this time Grigori would look at him and see a son instead of a disappointment. That maybe this time his mama would wake up.
It was pathetic, really. How desperate he was for them. How he kept coming back, kept reaching, kept loving, even when they gave him nothing in return. Even when they made it clear he would never be enough.
So he turned the anger inward. Because if no one else was going to carry the weight of it, then he would. He made himself the target, the reason and the blame. It was the only way any of it made sense—if he was the problem, then there was a solution. If he was the problem, then the punishments were not just random cruelties but something he had earned, something that kept him accountable. It meant his brother's hatred had a reason to exist. His father's coldness had a justification. It meant the abuse was not senseless.
He told himself he was a bad person; he repeated it so many times until it was the only truth he could accept. Because if he wasn't bad, then he was only broken, and broken was worse. Broken meant there had been no logic to any of it—no reason his mother had swallowed those pills, no reason his father had looked at him like a stain on the family name every time he lost a game, no reason his brother's fists had always found his ribs with such precision. But bad made sense.
The hours on the ice after everyone else had gone home, skating until his legs gave out and his lungs burned. The nights lying awake, waiting for his father's keys in the door and the lecture that would follow about what a disappointment he was to the Rozanov name. The scars on his hands and the ones much better hidden. The way every teammate looked at him with fear in their eyes, the whispers that followed him through the halls—It all had all been earned.
If he was a villain, then at least he had chosen the part. He would much rather be the architect of his own destruction than a victim of circumstance.
In America, he played it well. And since there was no other version of Ilya Rozanov for them to compare him to, he took the opportunity to build an identity that had nothing to do with grief, loss or pity. He sharpened his smile, perfected his game, and called it showtime.
He became the arrogant Russian with a filthy mouth who took cheap shots and gave worse interviews, like he was daring people to hate him and then seemed pleased when they did. He made himself into exactly the kind of man no one expected softness from, because softness had always been the first thing punished out of him. He became the one who pushed and provoked and dared anyone to get close. Because if they hated him, they couldn't disappoint him. If they kept their distance, he couldn't lose them. If he was the villain, then the loneliness was a choice, not a wound that had never healed.
He didn't believe he deserved love, didn't believe he deserved kindness, didn't really believe he deserved anything good, because good things didn't stay. Good things left. Good things looked at him with cold eyes and said nothing. Good things chose death over him.
Hockey was a good thing, though. The first one he never lost.
He loved hockey like an exit wound—like proof that something had made it through him and left him alive—and he loved the ice under his blades, smooth and endless, a world he could control when he couldn't control anything else. He loved winning, loved being the best, because on the ice his body finally made sense. The rage that poisoned everything else became useful there, beautiful even, when speed was not avoidance if there were cameras pointed at it, when violence was not instability if there were rules around it, when hunger was not pathetic if it made you elite.
The rink was the first place he ever felt powerful, and also the first place he ever felt wanted—people wanted goals from him, wins, hits, highlights. Boston wanted his talent, his edge, his danger, they wanted the spectacle of him, and that was close enough to love that, for a while, he let himself mistake one for the other.
But hockey was never only love. It was also a way out.
At fourteen, hiding under his bed and listening for his brother’s footsteps in the hall, Ilya made himself a promise: he would get good enough to get out of Moscow, out of Russia, out of that apartment with its dead air and dead ghosts and the dead shape of his mother still caught in the corners of every room.
And so he did–he got good enough to leave. Good enough to be drafted. Good enough to turn survival into a career and distance into something that looked, from the outside, like success. He ran all the way to North America and still could not get far enough.
His father had wanted a champion, someone to carry the family legacy into the arenas of the world, and Ilya had given him one—but only because winning was the price of the door swinging open. Not for glory, not for Russia, not for the name stitched across his back. He got good because he needed the ticket to his freedom.
He knew it made him a coward, not only for running away but because he never really left at all. No matter how many cars he bought, how many women he slept with, how many cigarettes he smoked or parties he attended, he let his father keep the keys to his cage and returned every summer like a prisoner coming back to his cell. His father would call, and Ilya would go. His brother would sneer, and Ilya would stay. He would walk back into that apartment, and the walls would close in, and the silence would grow teeth, and he would let it.
He told himself each year was the last. Each year, he believed it. And each year, he went anyway.
Because beneath all the anger, the sadness, the cockiness, and the endless love, what Ilya Rozanov was at heart, was a coward. He could skate through a hit that would break another man's ribs but couldn't say no to his father's calls. He could drop his gloves in front of twenty thousand people but couldn't drop the weight of a name he didn't even want. He could stand in front of a microphone and sneer and provoke and dare the world to hate him, but couldn't stand in front of his own reflection and admit that he was still, after all these years, waiting for his mama to come back. He could lift millions of trophies and medals but could not admit he was in love with a man.
So he told himself he was getting stronger. With each year in America, a little more free. He built a life so loud and so bright that maybe, if he tried hard enough, the noise would drown out the silence waiting for him back home.
But grief travels as well.
It crossed borders with him. Sat in the passenger seat. Lived in his throat. Followed him into every summer, every silence, every hotel room, every apartment too expensive and too empty to feel like home. He could outrun countries. He could outrun winters. He could outrun languages.
He could not outrun himself.
The ghost of Irina Rozanova was there when he scored, when he fought, when he laughed too loud and smiled too sharp. She was there in the quiet moments, the ones he couldn't fill with noise and chaos. A weight tied to his soul, dragging him down even as he tried to fly. And the voices never left either. You're not enough. You don't deserve this. Everyone leaves. Everyone leaves.
But then there was Shane Hollander.
Shane looked, at first glance, like the kind of person the world opened itself to—like belonging had been handed to him at birth and never once revoked, like he had never once had to earn his place in a room. A good son, a good teammate, a good man. Everything Ilya had spent his whole life failing to be.
He moved through the world with a kind of precision that made Ilya ache to watch it. On the ice, he was all clean lines and impossible control, every movement deliberate, every choice exact. Nothing in him seemed wasted. He did not fight for command the way Ilya did; he simply had it, the game bending around him as if it understood, instinctively, that he belonged at the center of it.
He watched him from across the rink for years—watched him grow, get better, become the captain of his team, become the golden boy of the NHL, watched the way his teammates looked at him like they would follow him anywhere, watched the way he carried himself like the weight of the world was something he had agreed to carry and would never complain about.
And Ilya hated him for it, at first. For being so good. For making it look so easy. For never breaking, never showing the cracks that he was sure had to be there somewhere, underneath all that polish. The steadiness of him, the way people loved him without fear, without needing to be convinced—it made something ugly twist in his chest every time he watched Shane lift a trophy or give an interview or skate off the ice with that calm, measured grace.
But envy and fascination lived next door to each other, and Ilya couldn't stop watching. He watched him enough that it bordered on obsession, enough that the cracks started to show—not to anyone else, maybe, but to him.
Ilya knew what performance looked like; he had made an art form of it. He recognized the effort in the stillness, the calculation under the composure, the loneliness hidden beneath the structure of Shane's life. He recognized, with the cold shock of something almost intimate, that Shane was not effortless. He was just hiding in the opposite direction—where Ilya had made himself loud and sharp, Shane had made himself quiet and steady. Both of them untouchable, both of them alone.
But with him, somehow, Shane stopped hiding. Not all at once, of course. Nothing between them had ever been simple enough for that. But time did what time does; years passed, edges shifted, they grew older if not softer then at least more legible to each other. Ilya had spent his whole childhood learning how to read danger before it spoke, and that had made him observant in ugly, useful ways—so of course he saw it, the strain beneath Shane's composure, the fatigue, the hunger, the way Shane wanted things so quietly it almost looked like he didn't want them at all.
He saw the way Shane went still when he needed direction, the way he relaxed most when someone else was willing to hold the shape of the moment for him—someone to cut through the noise and tell him, plainly, where to stand and what to do and how to breathe. And Ilya, who had never been good at anything except breaking things, found that he could give him that. He could be the one Shane didn't have to perform for, he could be his anchor, and the voice that cut through the static.
It was terrifying, how much he wanted to be that for him. How much he started to need it.
He started noticing things he had no business noticing—the way Shane's nose scrunched when he was thinking too hard, the way he bit his lip during close games, the way his ears went pink when Ilya said something that landed too close to something real. He started looking for Shane in crowded rooms without meaning to, started tracking him the way he tracked the puck, automatic and hungry.
Shane made him want to be better. Shane, who had appeared out of nowhere when Ilya was seventeen and drowning, a boy with brown eyes and a constellation of freckles and a smile that made him forget, for just a second, that he was supposed to be running. Shane, who made him feel like the boy he thought was buried six feet under next to his mother, forever frozen in the cold landscape of his homeland. That boy wanted to be softer for Shane, wanted to protect him instead of beat him, wanted to be the person he looked for in a crowd.
Ilya didn't know what to do with that—he still doesn't, most days—because he wasn't good at protecting things, at being delicate and careful, his hands were trained to be rough and cold, to grab a stick, to push a puck, to break things. He didn't know how to hold someone's hand, how to gentle his sharp edges.
And that terrified him. Because Shane was everything Ilya wasn't—controlled where Ilya was chaos, quiet where he was loud, careful where he was reckless. Shane built his life around routines and rules, and Ilya broke rules for fun. He was supposed to hate him, supposed to want to wipe that perfect composure off his face on the ice, to prove that chaos always won in the end.
But he couldn't hate him, couldn't even try.
Because he was the first person who ever looked at Ilya and didn't flinch—didn't step back, didn't cross to the other side of the street. Shane looked at him and saw something Ilya couldn't see in himself.
So, naturally, he ran.
He was an idiot and a coward, and running was the only thing he had ever been good at, the thing that had saved him most of his life. He was a fast runner, quick on the ice too—even faster than Shane—and he carried that speed into everything else. He ran from his family, from his country, from every soft thing that threatened to undo him. He ran from the boy whose smile made his chest ache in a way he didn't understand, ran from Shane Hollander before anything could even start.
For ten years, he pushed him away with sharp words and hotel rooms and messages that meant nothing and everything all at once. He pretended he didn't care. He pretended he didn't need. He pretended he was fine.
He was not fine.
Because no matter how fast he ran, Shane was the only thing that made the voices quiet. The only thing that made the ghost of his mother recede, just a little, just enough to breathe. The only thing that made the summers in Russia bearable—the thought of him, the memory of him, the promise of seeing him again in the fall.
Ilya would lie in his childhood bed, the one with the too-thin mattress and the walls that still held echoes of past ghosts, and he would think about Shane. About the way he skated, smooth and effortless. About the way he looked when he was focused, his brow furrowed, his tongue between his teeth. About the way he said Ilya's last name, soft and careful, like it was something precious and not a chain around his neck.
Thinking about Shane was the only thing that got him through those summers. The only thing that reminded him that the world was still larger than that apartment, larger than Moscow, larger than the version of himself that only seemed to exist there—the boy who had learned too young how to make himself smaller in the face of cruelty, who still slept beneath the weight of old ghosts and older humiliations, who could walk into that house at twenty-seven and somehow still feel twelve.
But still, he told himself, over and over, that he did not deserve him. That whatever existed between them could only ever be temporary, because things like Shane did not stay with men like him. He was too steady, too decent, too untouched by the kind of rot Ilya was certain lived somewhere at his center. He had spent too many years believing that anything good brought too close to him would eventually curdle in his hands.
But Shane kept coming back anyway.
Kept looking at him like he was worth the trouble of understanding. Kept trusting him with softness Ilya had done nothing to earn and would not have known how to ask for if it had not been offered freely. Kept reaching for him, again and again, every season and every game, as if he was something safe to return to.
Kept placing his trust and his body in Ilya’s hands as though they had been made for holding rather than breaking. And with every hand at the small of his back, every quiet glance, every impossible act of staying, he became harder and harder to explain within the logic he had built his whole life around.
Shane Hollander kept coming back, every single time, and it proved every voice in Ilya’s head wrong.
***
Ilya was sprawled across his sectional, one leg thrown over the armrest, a half-empty bowl of leftover takeout balanced dangerously on his stomach. He’d been flipping channels for the better part of an hour now, the remote a restless extension of his hand. Sports highlights. A movie he'd already seen. Some reality show about people renovating houses in places that clearly didn't have winter. His phone was face-down on the cushion somewhere near his hip, already proven to be a useless distraction too. Nothing stuck.
It was a Tuesday in mid-February, when the season had settled into that long, grinding stretch between the All-Star break and the trade deadline. The Bears had played in Ottawa two nights ago—a 4–2 win in which Ilya had put up a goal and an assist—and then flown back to Boston for a few precious days of home ice. Next game was Friday, against Montreal actually. The thought had been sitting at the back of his mind all day, a low hum of something complicated that he wasn't ready to examine.
The All-Star break was three weeks behind him, now. Three weeks since he’d stood in a painfully generic hotel room in Tampa and watched Shane Hollander look at him like he was seeing him for the very first time. Three weeks since Shane had smiled at him across that ugly patterned carpet, an expression so soft and impossibly wondering, like they weren't supposed to be rivals anymore. Like that night in Florida had actually meant something. Like they'd crossed a line neither of them knew how to uncross.
They hadn't talked about it, of course they hadn't, that wasn't what they did. What they did was text at 2 AM and pretend the messages meant nothing. What they did was watch each other’s games on nights off and lie to themselves about the sudden, tight anxiety in their chests when the other took a heavy hit. What they did was exist in the agonizing, suffocating space between a blood-feud rivalry and an obsession so absolute it felt like an illness, something Ilya was too much of a coward to name properly in any language.
But the texts had changed, and with them the careful, mocking distance Ilya had spent years perfecting started collapsing into something unguarded and terribly dangerous for his fragile mind. Shane had begun offering up little pieces of himself—a complaint about the freezing rain in Quebec, a photo of his mother's garden in the spring, a good night message that arrived at exactly the same time every evening and somehow always lead to hours of conversation, long past any reasonable bedtime, and long past any pretense of casual. And every time his phone buzzed, Ilya felt his treacherous heart lurch toward the sound like a compass desperately finding north.
He clicked the remote again.
But the next channel made his thumb freeze over the button.
On the screen of his ridiculously expensive TV, an airplane sat in a field. Surrounded by crushed snow, emergency vehicles and the harsh, violent glare of red and blue rescue lights. The fuselage was dark, broken, tilted at an angle that looked wrong in every conceivable way physics allowed. Rescue workers swarmed around the metal carcass like frantic ants, carrying stretchers, moving with the urgent precision of people who did this for a living.
Ilya's hand dropped to his lap. The remote slipped from his fingers, landing somewhere on the cushion. He was too busy trying to steady his heart to notice.
"-emergency landing near Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, approximately forty kilometers south of Montreal," the reporter was saying, her voice carrying the practiced, measured cadence of professional grief. "The regional flight from New York to Montreal experienced a bird strike during final descent, causing a catastrophic failure in both engines. The pilot was able to execute an emergency landing in a frozen field; a maneuver aviation experts are already calling a miracle."
The camera angle shifted, revealing a wider shot of the scene—the plane, dark and broken against the white expanse of the field, rescue vehicles clustered around it like metal flowers blooming in snow.
"Eighty-seven passengers were on board. Early reports indicate dozens of injuries, ranging from minor to critical. Rescue operations have been underway for a couple of hours, with patients being transported to hospitals across the greater Montreal area, including the Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur, the region's Level 1 trauma center."
Montreal.
The word bypassed his brain entirely and landed in Ilya's chest like a puck to the ribs, shattering any hope of calming his racing heart.
He knew, logically, that this was an irrational spike of adrenaline. That metropolitan cities had plane accidents and emergency landings and terrible, senseless tragedies happening all the time. That Montreal was a massive, sprawling area with millions of people, and the mathematical chances of anyone he knew being on that specific flight were-
He did the math anyway. He ran the schedules in his head the way he always did, the way he was pathologically incapable of stopping when it came to Shane.
He hadn’t been in New York—Ilya knew because he knew the Voyageurs' schedule better than his own, because he always knew where Shane was playing, because he was pathetic like that and hopelessly tethered to the man's orbit. Montreal had played at home on Saturday, and since Tuesday was an off-day, Shane was probably safely locked inside his pristine apartment, doing whatever infuriatingly structured things he did on off-days. Cooking those weird, tasteless healthy meals, or reading one of his boring books.
Not on a plane. Not falling out of the sky. Not in danger.
Letting his heavy head fall back against the couch, Ilya exhaled a jagged breath. He told himself to stop being a ridiculous, paranoid idiot, but his eyes remained glued to the screen as he rubbed the back of his neck absently, feeling the fine hairs standing at attention. The primal, animalistic part of his brain completely ignoring logic and schedules and the objective fact that Shane was safely on the ground.
Somewhere deep in his chest, a small, icy thread of unease had begun to wind itself tightly around his ribs.
Ilya'd never really been a big fan of flying. He had it under enough control that it wasn't exactly a phobia per se, but how quickly everything could go wrong, how fast gravity could reclaim you, and the way you willingly surrendered your life to metal and engineering and a pilot you'd never looked in the eye—it all inspired in him a profound, uncomfortable respect. He'd done it hundreds of times, would probably do it thousands more, but he always felt that tiny click of pure relief when the rubber wheels finally screamed against the tarmac. Always.
Not that he’d ever confess that to a living soul. He had a reputation to uphold, after all.
But right now, watching the grainy news footage of ambulances converging on some frozen, blood-stained field outside Montreal, that unease magnified tenfold. Eighty-seven people. Eighty-seven families. Eighty-seven versions of a phone call no human being ever wanted to receive.
Stop it. He told himself, closing his eyes against the glare of the television. You're being ridiculous. Shane is fine.
The shiver returned anyway, deeper this time.
Ilya pulled his phone off the cushion, swiped it open, and stared at the blinding screen. No messages. No missed calls. He opened their chat and typed out a text anyway. Deleted it. Typed it again.
You awake?
His thumb hovered over the send button, trembling almost imperceptibly. What was he even asking? Hey, I know you're fine, but I just watched a plane crash near your city and now my lungs aren't doing what they are designed for, is that weird? Pathetic. Embarrassing. Too transparent.
He deleted the letters, one by one. Then he tossed the phone back onto the cushion beside him as if it had burned him—as if he didn't trust himself not to grab it again and send the message anyway. He rubbed both hands over his face, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes so hard he saw stars, trying violently to scrub the tension out of his muscles. The news anchor was still talking, her voice a relentless drone of tragedy. Ilya changed the channel to something, anything else.
Twenty-three minutes later, his phone started vibrating against the couch cushion.
The sound was small—harmless, even. Barely more than a tiny hum beneath the low murmur of the television. It still carved his whole evening in two.
Ilya's head turned before his mind could catch up—the kind of instinct you only develop for the things you love most and spend your life terrified of losing. He reached for the phone almost blindly, already upright before he had properly registered the name glowing on the screen
Jane
The icy thread in his chest immediately pulled taut, snapping around his lungs the second he read that stupid nickname. He answered on the first ring, bringing the phone to his ear with a hand that was suddenly not quite steady.
"Hollander?"
Nothing.
Just breathing. Shallow, broken little gasps that didn't sound like breathing at all, more like Shane's own body had turned against him. He is panicking, his brain supplied, he is in pain. Something in Shane had gone violently, terrifyingly wrong and Ilya wasn't fucking there to see what.
"Shane." Ilya tried again, his tone shifting instantly, the gentle mockery vanishing, replaced by something firm and unyielding. He was on his feet now, the TV forgotten, the massive, empty room shrinking around him until the only thing that existed in the entire universe was the small speaker pressed to his ear and the sound of the person he cared the most falling apart on the other end. "Tell me what is happening, zolotse. Talk to me."
A gasp. A wet, shuddering inhale that caught on something incredibly sharp in Shane's throat. Then a voice—Shane’s voice, but entirely wrong, scraped raw and thin and gutted by terror—trying to force a thought through his paralyzed vocal cords and failing.
"I-I can't-I can't-"
"Yes you can." Ilya kept his voice pitched low, kept it as steady as bedrock, even as his own heart was hammering a frantic, sickening rhythm against his ribs. "You can breathe. You have done it before. You will do it now. Just-try. Just one word. One breath. Whatever you can give me."
A sound leaked through the speaker. Half sob, half devastated surrender. "Ilya."
"I am here. I am right here. Just concentrate on breathing."
Another gasp. Another desperate, uncoordinated struggle for air. Ilya closed his eyes, pressing his free hand flat against the cold drywall of his living room, grounding himself in the unmoving walls of the house so he could be the immovable object Shane desperately needed him to be.
"I didn’t-I didn’t know who else to call." Shane’s voice was fractured, splintering at the edges, a fragile glass pane cracking under immense pressure. "I just-I saw your name and I-I needed-"
"You call me." Ilya's voice came out harder than he intended—not at Shane, never at Shane—but the fear had lodged itself between his ribs, sharp and immediate. "You call me always. Tell me what is happening. Where are you? Are you hurt?" He didn't want to overwhelm him with too many questions at once, but he needed to know.
Another wet, fractured exhale crackled through the speaker, and despite the distance, Ilya could see him with horrifying clarity. Shane, somewhere, alone, falling apart, his face doing that thing it did when the world got too big, too loud, too much. Shane with his careful, competent little mask split clean down the middle, stripped down to just the terrifyingly vulnerable boy who needed everything to be in order.
His Shane, some treacherous part of him thought instantly, like a reflex he'd never managed to kill.
Except Shane wasn't his. Not really.
And he could never truly be, not the way Ilya wanted. Because Shane was good. Golden boy, captain material, the kind of person who actually called his mother after every game and meant it. And Ilya? Ilya was the arrogant Russian who thrived on chaos, the one whose own father couldn't look at him without disgust curdling his mouth. Shane deserved someone clean. Someone whole. Someone whose hands weren't so rough, whose heart wasn't so careful with itself—someone who hadn't spent half his life learning to want things without ever believing he deserved to have them.
And even if that weren't true—even if, somehow, Shane wanted him anyway—there was still the rest of the world to contend with. The cameras, the headlines, the inevitable fallout when two rival captains from hockey's most bitter national rivalry turned out to be something other than enemies. Shane's career, Shane's reputation, Shane's perfect, pristine image—all of it shattered because he'd been stupid enough to love Ilya Rozanov.
He deserved to love someone without having to choose, without having to measure every touch against what it might cost him. And that person would never be Ilya.
So no. Shane wasn't his. Could never be his.
Not in any way that counted. Not in daylight, not in language, not in the kind of life Ilya had taught himself, over and over, never to ask for. And yet, when Shane made that shattered sound into the phone, something inside him answered like it had been waiting years for someone to finally give it permission.
"My mom."
The two words redirected Ilya's chain of thought so fast they landed like a physical blow. His hand tightened on the phone.
"She was-she was on the plane. The one that-it had to do an emergency landing. She was on it, Ilya. She was coming from New York, she was supposed to-she was coming to see me, and now she’s-she’s-"
The words dissolved into a thin, keening sound, it rose from the back of Shane's throat like an animal cornered and too tired to fight anymore, and Ilya felt his chest crack open because of it. The plane. Montreal. The emergency landing.
Yuna. Yuna was on the plane. Fuck.
"Shane." His voice was rough, the carefully maintained calm slipping just a fraction, because the floor had just dropped out from beneath them both and he was blindly scrambling for purchase. He was already moving, his legs carrying him away from the wall, his eyes tracking across the immaculate surfaces of his home. "Where is she? Do you know? Is she—"
"Sacré-Coeur." The name of the hospital came out wet, smeared heavily with tears. "They took her to Sacré-Coeur. She’s in-she’s in surgery, Ilya. My dad called-he called from the car, and he told me-he told me she has a-her leg, it’s broken, really bad, and her spleen-they had to-they’re operating, and I’m just-I’m just sitting here-"
"Where?" Ilya’s brain shifted into an icy, terrifyingly clear state of tactical hyper-focus. He strode into the foyer, his hand snatching the heavy ring of keys off the console table. The metallic clatter was loud, but on the other end of the line, Shane was too deeply into in his own panic to register the sound. "Where are you right now, Shane?"
"I'm at-" A pause. A shaky breath. "I'm at Hayden's." Okay, he was not alone, that was good, Ilya could work with that. "We were having dinner. Jackie made pasta, but there was-there was so much noise, Ilya. And my dad called, and I just-I went to the guest bathroom, and I’ve been in here for-I don't know how long, and I just-I can’t breathe, the tiles are so cold but my skin is burning, and I can’t think, I just-"
"Shane." Ilya’s voice was an iron rod cutting straight through the spiral. He kicked off his slides, shoving his bare feet violently into the first pair of sneakers he found by the door. He didn't bother with the laces, just crushed the heels down in his haste to move. "You are doing good. You are telling me the facts. That is good. Now-your dad. He is driving from Ottawa?"
A wet sniffle. "Yeah. He was-he was at home when she didn't-when she didn't call after the flight was supposed to land. He saw the news. He called the airline, the hospital, fucking everyone-and then they told him she was-that she was alive but-" Another sob, sharp and devastating. "He's coming. He said it'll take-he said an hour and a half, maybe more with the roads, and he told me to go, to get to the hospital, that he’d meet me there, but I can’t, Ilya, I can’t move, I can’t-"
"Yes you can." Ilya yanked open the hall closet, his free hand blindly snatching the first heavy winter jacket his fingers brushed against. He awkwardly shoved his arms through the sleeves, pinning the phone tightly between his shoulder and his ear so he wouldn't lose Shane's voice for even a microsecond. "You can move. You are moving. You are going to stand up, you are going to unlock that bathroom door, and you are going to let Hayden know what happened. And then you are going to let him drive you to the hospital, and you are going to sit in that waiting room and breathe until your father gets there. Do you hear me?" He yanked open the small drawer beneath the mirror. His fingers bypassed the watches and the spare cash, closing around the smooth, crimson red cover of his Russian passport. He shoved it deep into the inner pocket of the coat without a second thought.
"But I can't-"
"You can." Ilya shoved the heavy front door open, stepping out into the biting, unforgiving cold of the Boston night. He moved toward the detached garage, his unlaced sneakers silent on the frost-heaved concrete. "You are the strongest person I know, Shane Hollander. You have carried an entire franchise on your back since you were twenty-two years old. You can carry yourself to a hospital waiting room. One step at a time."
"My legs," Shane choked out, the words a fractured, breathless scramble over the line. "Ilya, my legs won't-they're numb. Everything is buzzing."
A violent wave of frustration slammed into Ilya's chest, hot and bitter. He knew exactly what Shane needed right now, his hands literally ached with the urge to reach through the cellular network, to grab him by the shoulders, to pull him down to the floor and crush him against his chest until the frantic bird trapped in Shane's ribs finally calmed down. But he couldn't. There were five hundred miles of frozen, dark highway between them. Five hundred miles Ilya was about to try and break with his bare hands.
For now, his voice was the only lifeline he could offer.
"Then you sit on the tiles until the buzzing stops," Ilya commanded gently, absolutely refusing to let Shane spiral back down into the dark. He kept his pace steady across the driveway, the freezing wind cutting through his open jacket, a sharp physical contrast to the white-hot adrenaline burning in his veins. "But you breathe. With me. Right now. Inhale."
For a moment there was nothing but the ragged, uneven static of Shane's breathing—then a small, shuddering sound, like he was trying and failing and trying again anyway.
"Again," Ilya pushed, his voice an unyielding anchor. "You are safe, zolotse. Listen to me. Inhale. One. Two. Three. Four. Hold there. Keep it in your lungs."
A strained, trembling pause carried over the line.
"Now exhale. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Push it all out. Good."
"Tell me what you feel," Ilya demanded softly, forcing Shane's brain to engage with the physical world instead of the panic in his head. "Ground yourself. The tiles are cold. What else?"
"The—" Shane's voice hitched, but he was trying. "The grout. It's rough. My hands are flat on the floor."
"Keep them there," Ilya instructed. He had absolutely no idea what grout meant, but if it was something Shane could hold onto, then it worked for him. The low, rumbling certainty in his voice worked like a splint for Shane's fractured mind—holding him together, giving him something solid to lean on. Ilya listened as the jagged edges of Shane's breathing slowly began to smooth out, the panic dulling into something like exhaustion. "Exhale again," he murmured, reaching the side of the garage. He pressed the button on the wall with numb fingers. "Good. You are doing so good, Solnyshko."
The massive garage door began to rise with a heavy, mechanical groan, a sudden noise that threatened to swallow the silence of the night—Ilya cupped his large hand over the phone's microphone, terrified the noise would hit Shane's raw, overstimulated senses and shatter the progress they had just made. He slipped quickly into the dark space, yanked open the door of his Porsche 911 GT2 RS—the lowest, fastest, most ridiculously overpowered car he owned—and dropped into the driver's seat.
The heavy thud of the door sealed him inside a vacuum of expensive leather and suffocating tension, and when he finally pulled his hand away from the mic, the silence in the cabin was almost deafening.
"Shane?" Ilya asked, his voice dropping instinctively to a softer, far more private register now that he was enclosed in the dark. "Are you with me?"
A long, wavering exhale brushed against the speaker.
"Ilya." His name was a small, devastated whisper. He was still not used to Shane calling him by his first name, and he had certainly never, ever heard him say it this hollowed out and miserable, clinging to the two syllables as if they were the only solid things left on earth. "I'm scared."
Ilya didn't think it was biologically possible for his heart to hurt any more than it currently did. He pushed the ignition button. The flat-six engine roared to life, a guttural, violent vibration that traveled straight up his spine.
"I know, moya lyubov. I know." He said it without thinking, the Russian endearment slipping past his defenses because it was the absolute truth, because it had always belonged there. "But she is going to be okay. She is strong. Like her son."
That earned him a wet, broken sound—something that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been strangled by terror. "You don't know that. You don't know her."
"I know you." Ilya threw the car into reverse, the tires crunching loudly over the ice as he backed out of the garage. "And if she raised you, she must be made of the same stubborn stuff. So she will fight. And you will wait. And your father will arrive soon. And everything is going to be fine."
"Ilya—"
"You can do this, Shane. You do not have any other choice.” Ilya took a deep breath himself, trying to calm his beating heart. “Listen, I want you to get out of that bathroom before Pike punches the door down, and I want you to tell them what happened. That is all you need to do right now. Da? They will take care of the rest. You just have to breathe and get out of the room. Can you do that for me?"
Ilya shifted the car into park. He sat in his driveway, the exhaust pluming in thick white clouds in the rearview mirror, the cold street sprawling out empty before him. He was Ilya Rozanov. He had a game in three days. He was sitting in an idling sports car at midnight, his passport burning a physical hole against his chest, preparing to violate half a dozen protocols in his contract and traffic laws, ready to drive six hours across an international border into a winter storm.
And for what? Because the man who still pretended to hate him on national television had called him from a bathroom floor and couldn't catch his breath, sounding like the world had just caved in around him and Ilya’s first instinct had not been caution, or self-preservation, or even thought.
It had been to move.
Was he really about to do this? Was he truly this far gone, this hopelessly, humiliatingly, irrevocably lost to him?
The answer was a terrifying, undeniable yes. He would drive this car straight through a blizzard, through a war, through the freezing Atlantic itself if Shane had asked him to.
A pause over the line. Then, so quiet Ilya almost missed it.
"Yeah. Okay. I'm going."
"Good boy. Everything will be alright, Shane. I promise."
He had absolutely no right to make that promise. He held no power over the universe, no authority to guarantee survival, much less any control over the fragile mechanics of the human body. If he possessed that kind of power, he would be able to walk down the street holding Shane’s hand without the suffocating fear of the cameras. He would be able to look the boy he loved in the eye and tell him the truth without the constant voices in his head whispering that he was too rough, too broken, too much for someone as purely good as Shane. If he had that superpower, his own mother would be here, alive, breathing, instead of just a ghost haunting the corners of his mind.
But he could still try. He would push his will into the universe, demand it to bend, if only just this once, for Shane. Surely, the cold void of the world would be forced to listen to his frantic prayer just this one time, if it was only for Shane’s sake.
And it didn’t feel like a lie to say it. Not when Ilya knew it was the exact anchor Shane needed to hold onto. Not when he needed to be a fortress of absolute certainty so Shane could afford to fall apart in peace. Not when, out of all the people in the entire world, Shane had called Ilya during a panic attack.
"She is going to be fine," he promised again, his voice a low, gravelly vow, desperately praying that whatever god was listening would hear the absolute devotion in his voice and spare the boy he loved from the agony of grief.
Another pause. Then, so soft it was almost a ghost of a sound:
"Okay."
"Okay," Ilya repeated. He listened intently for a long, agonizing second, tracking the fragile cadence of the static over the line. Only when he was absolutely certain that the ragged, desperate edge had finally faded from Shane's breathing, settling into a heavy but steady rhythm, did he allow himself to issue the final push. "Now go. Go back out there. Your mom needs you."
He didn't hang up. He refused to break the connection until he had proof that Shane was actually moving. Through the tiny speaker of the phone, Ilya listened to the faint, telltale rustle of heavy fabric as Shane finally forced himself off the freezing bathroom tiles. He heard the unsteady, dragging scrape of a shoe against the floor, a long exhale that rattled heavily with leftover anxiety, and then, the sharp, distinct metallic click of the deadbolt unlocking.
"I'm opening it," Shane whispered, his voice sounding terribly small and completely hollowed out against the sudden echo of the hallway.
"I know. I am right here," Ilya murmured to the dark cabin of his car, his grip on the leather steering wheel tightening until his knuckles turned bone-white. "Go to them, solnyshko."
The faint squeal of a door swinging open filtered through the line, immediately followed by the muffled, frantic urgency of Hayden Pike’s voice in the background, asking a rapid-fire string of questions. Shane didn't answer his teammate right away. Instead, Ilya heard the rustle of the phone shifting as he pulled it close to his mouth for one last, desperate second.
"Thank you," Shane breathed into the microphone, a fragile, exhausted little thing.
"Always," Ilya vowed to the empty air.
They murmured their reluctant goodbyes, neither man wanting to be the first to sever the invisible thread holding them together across countries. But inevitably, finally, the line went dead, leaving behind a sterile, synthetic dial tone that sounded entirely too loud in the suffocating silence of the Porsche.
Ilya sat perfectly still in his car. The engine was a low, vibrating hum beneath him, the phone still pressed uselessly against his ear even though there was nothing left on the other end but sterile buzz. For one long, stretched-out moment, he simply didn't move.
The house loomed in his peripheral vision—too massive, too empty, too painfully quiet. The kind of place he’d bought simply because his accountant told him it was a good investment, because it was what star athletes were expected to own, because he genuinely didn't know what else to do with the millions they paid him to chase a piece of rubber. It had never felt like a home. It was just a highly secure vault where he slept when he wasn't living out of a suitcase.
He lowered the phone. Stared at the black glass, the silent, undeniable evidence of a three-minute call that had just fundamentally rearranged the axis of his entire universe.
Yuna. Shane’s mother. In a hospital. In surgery.
And Shane—Shane—alone, trembling, a raw nerve exposed to the air, calling Ilya because there was no one else who could understand the way his brain broke down, because he couldn't make his mouth form the words for anyone else, because—
Ilya’s chest physically ached, a deep, bruising pain behind his sternum.
He turned his head. Looked through the windshield at the dark, sprawling expanse of Boston. The city was asleep, blissfully unaware that one of its most famous residents was about to do something incredibly, monumentally reckless.
Montreal to Boston. He’d made the drive before. Knew the rhythm of it intimately. The highway, the border checkpoint, the endless, hypnotic stretch of asphalt through upstate New York, bleeding into Vermont, and finally crossing into Quebec. A six hours drive normally, but in good weather, driving the speed limit, with no stops, it took roughly five.
Five hours of driving. Five hours of agonizing, helpless waiting.
He thought about Shane, sitting in that sterile, brightly lit hospital waiting room. Shane, who couldn't sit still for two minutes on a good day without tapping his foot or analyzing a play. Shane, whose brain ran like a supercomputer, constantly processing, calculating, catastrophizing every possible outcome. Shane, alone, staring at a set of double doors, waiting for a surgeon to come out and deliver the news that would dictate the rest of his life.
He thought about his own mother.
The memory came entirely unbidden, as it always did, a dark tide rising to choke him. Finding her. The apartment. The absolute, suffocating silence. The way the rotation of the earth had simply stopped in that exact moment, freezing his life forever into a permanent Before and After. For a few terrible, innocent minutes, the young boy he had been thought she was just deeply asleep on the rug, or that she had stumbled and hit her head. But when he had dropped to his knees and touched her shoulder, and she was cold—cold in a terrifying, unnatural way that had absolutely nothing to do with the harsh weather of his motherland—every single pillar holding his world up had violently collapsed at the same time.
He thought about how incredibly, devastatingly lonely he had felt in that exact second. How he had curled his small body down next to hers, hidden his face against her unmoving chest, and just wept until his throat bled, clinging to the only anchor he had, looking for the heartbeat that usually calmed him to sleep, but there was nothing now, only hollow silence. He stayed like that for hours—for what felt like days—until his father finally found them. He thought about how, in the hollow days after, he had desperately searched the cabinets for the pills she'd taken, wanting nothing more than to follow her into the dark. But his father had already sterilized the house, clearing out anything sharp or poisonous, leaving Ilya trapped in a world he no longer wanted to exist in. He thought about how deeply lonely he had been after that day. How lonely he still was, most days, walking through a world that felt hollowed out, like all the color had drained out of it along with her.
How incredibly lonely he had been, right up until the exact moment he met Shane Hollander.
Shane, with his stupid, perfectly symmetrical face and his infuriatingly boring habits and his eyes that sparked with absolute fire when he fought for the things he loved. Shane, who looked at Ilya like he was actually a person worth knowing. Shane, who made the unbearable weight of the world feel a little less crushing just by existing on the same ice as him.
He absolutely refused to let that happen to him.
He didn't want Shane to ever know what it felt like to walk this earth with only half a heart beating in his chest. To have a massive, gaping crater in his life where a person who loved him unconditionally was supposed to be standing. And if, God forbid, the absolute worst happened tonight and Yuna didn't make it—then Ilya was not going to let him receive that news alone. He would not let Shane inherit that specific, hollowed-out loneliness. Not like Ilya had been. Not like Ilya still was, underneath the smirks and the multi-million dollar contracts and the carefully constructed walls of arrogance.
He looked at the glowing digital clock on the dash. 11:58 PM.
Five hours. Unless you drove a machine built for the Autobahn like you actually meant it.
Ilya shifted the car into drive.
The highway unfolded in front of him like a dark, endless ribbon, totally empty at this ungodly hour. Ilya pressed his foot down hard on the accelerator and felt the massive engine respond with a violent surge of power, felt the familiar, intoxicating hum of speed vibrating beneath him, watching the world blur past the windows when you stopped caring about trivial things like speed limits or physics.
Five hours was for normal people. Five hours was for people who didn't have Shane Hollander’s terrified voice lodged in their chest like a piece of shrapnel. Ilya drove like a man fleeing from a ghost. He drove like a man desperately chasing a lifeline. He drove like the difference between the two didn't even matter anymore.
The miles dissolved under his tires. The darkness pressed heavily against the tinted windows. His phone sat face-up in the passenger seat, completely silent, waiting. Every few minutes, his eyes darted to it, praying for a text, dreading what words might illuminate the screen.
Nothing came.
He gripped the leather steering wheel tighter and pushed the car faster into the dark.
The border came and went in a surreal, dreamlike blur of harsh fluorescent lights and sleepy, routine questions from a bored guard. Purpose of your visit? Personal. How long do you plan to stay? I don't know. Any goods to declare? Just myself. The agent looked at the dark blue passport, looked at the bruised, exhaustion-lined face of the man behind the wheel, and looked at the clock. He handed the passport back and waved him through into Canada.
Ilya was accelerating back onto the pitch-black highway before the ink on the stamp could even think about drying, his tires biting aggressively into the asphalt. The roads were mercifully clear, a bone-chillingly cold but pristine stretch of dry pavement, the specific kind of dead-of-winter February night that froze the entire world into something sharp and brittle and unnervingly still. He made terrifyingly good time, pushing the German engineering to its absolute, screaming limits as the car handled the sweeping curves beautifully, greedily devouring the miles in a blur of pure velocity, and Ilya simply let the machine consume the earth beneath them, because every single mile conquered was a physical mile closing the bleeding gap between him and Shane.
If he were a man who still harbored even a microscopic fraction of faith in God, he might have convinced himself that a divine hand was actively smoothing the roads ahead of him, ensuring that no animal would run across, no black ice would form under his spinning tires, that absolutely nothing in this frozen wasteland would be allowed to interrupt his desperate journey. He might have comforted himself with the poetic delusion that his mother's ghost was sitting quietly in the passenger seat, watching over him, fiercely refusing to let her son shatter his own life when he was finally rushing toward the man who held his heart. Not when Shane so fundamentally, desperately needed him.
But Ilya hadn't believed in a benevolent universe since he was twelve years old, since the precise, devastating second his small knees had hit the carpet next to a body that was already surrendering its light to the earth. He knew with absolute, freezing certainty that the universe possessed no morality, that it didn't care one way or another whether a hockey player wrapped his silver Porsche around a concrete overpass or made it safely to a hospital waiting room. And if he were being entirely honest with the ghosts in the car, he didn't really care whether he lived or died either. Not for a long time.
But he cared about Shane, cared with a violent, all-consuming intensity that terrified him down to his marrow.
Shane and his stupid, scattered constellation of freckles that Ilya had memorized under poor light from bedside lamps, Shane and his deeply infuriating, painfully boring routines that somehow grounded the chaotic static of Ilya's mind, Shane and his fiercely intelligent eyes and that blindingly beautiful smile that he guarded so closely, Shane and his unbelievably soft, relentlessly tender heart that Ilya felt completely unworthy of holding. Shane, who had seamlessly rewritten Ilya's ruined internal wiring, who made him feel, for the very first time in a decade of walking through a grayscale world, like maybe there was actually something solid on this earth worth sticking around for.
His mind was entirely devoid of anything resembling rational thought, wiped clean of everything except the rhythmic, desperate cadence of a name that had become the only religion he practiced, the only frantic prayer he was willing to offer to the dark roads as he drove.
Shane, Shane, Shane, Shane, Shane, Shane, Shane
Two hours and twenty-three minutes after leaving Boston, he crossed the invisible, freezing threshold into Quebec.
Two hours and forty-seven minutes after leaving Boston, the first glowing green highway signs for Montreal materialized out of the gloom, reflecting off the hood of the speeding car.
Three hours and twelve minutes after leaving Boston, he was ripping the wheel to pull off the desolate highway and plunge into the sleeping grid of the city, his burning eyes frantically tracking the blue hospital signs pointing the way toward Hôpital du Sacré-Coeur.
Three hours and twenty-eight minutes after leaving Boston—two hours and thirty-two minutes faster than Google Maps would have told you was possible— Ilya Rozanov violently slammed the transmission into park in the starkly lit hospital lot, killed the screaming engine, and found himself completely submerged in a sudden, ringing, suffocating silence.
His heavy hands were painfully locked into rigid, cramped claws from strangling the steering wheel, his lower back radiating a dull, throbbing ache that he completely ignored, his dry eyes burning with a cocktail of pure exhaustion, leftover adrenaline, and a profound, terrifying vulnerability he was nowhere near ready to name.
He had fucking made it. He was physically here.
And as he stared through the windshield at the imposing, clinical brick facade of the emergency room entrance, he realized he was about to do the second most monumentally stupid thing he had ever attempted in his entire life. Second only to driving a sports car like a suicidal lunatic through the pitch-black night on potentially icy roads, wild animals and speeding cameras. But as he forced his cramped fingers to release the wheel and reached for the door handle, every ounce of his self-preservation simply evaporated. The press, his team, the consequences—it all faded into meaningless white noise. The only thing in the entire universe that mattered was waiting behind those glass doors.
He only cared about Shane.
The sliding doors of the Hospital parted with a mechanical hiss, and the blast of sterile, artificially heated air hit Ilya like a physical wall. The emergency room at three-thirty in the morning was a bizarre, purgatorial space. The harsh fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, a relentless, clinical glare that stripped the shadows from the corners and made Ilya’s burning eyes water. The air smelled aggressively of industrial bleach, stale coffee, and the quiet, metallic tang of human desperation.
His body was operating entirely on the fumes of an adrenaline high that was rapidly, violently crashing. His hands, shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket, were trembling with a uncontrollable tremor, his fingers locked into a permanent, cramped curve from strangling the steering wheel for three and a half hours. Every muscle in his back screamed, but he pushed the physical agony aside, forcing his heavy, uncoordinated legs to carry him toward the main reception desk.
Behind the plexiglass, a tired-looking clerk barely glanced up from her monitor.
"Bonjour," she said, her voice flat.
"I need—" Ilya started, and stopped. His brain, fried from the drive and the panic, stubbornly refused to supply the correct English words, let alone French. His tongue felt thick, his thoughts muddied, the language barrier suddenly towering over him like a brick wall. He swallowed hard, forcing his jaw to unlock. "I am looking for Yuna Hollander. She was in the plane. The crash."
The clerk’s fingers paused on her keyboard. She looked up, her professional detachment hardening into a protective shield. "Are you immediate family, monsieur?"
"No. I am..." Ilya’s voice fractured. What was he? A rival? A ghost Shane kept locked in the dark? "I am a friend. I need to know where she is."
"I am sorry, monsieur," the clerk said, not sounding sorry at all. "Hospital policy. For the passengers of the flight, we are only releasing information to immediate family members. If you are not family, I cannot tell you anything."
"You don't understand," Ilya growled, the frustration spiking hot and fast in his chest. He leaned closer to the glass, his massive frame casting a shadow over the desk. "I need to know-"
"Rozanov?"
The voice came from his left. Ilya whipped his head around. Standing near a bank of vending machines, holding a flimsy cardboard tray carrying what appeared to be three steaming cups of coffee, was Jackie Pike.
She was wearing a pair of faded leggings and a massive, oversized Montreal Voyageurs hoodie that undoubtedly belonged to Hayden, her hair thrown up in a messy, chaotic bun. She looked utterly exhausted, the pale skin under her eyes bruised with heavy purple shadows, but her gaze was sharp, locking onto Ilya with a mixture of profound confusion and absolute disbelief.
She blinked, her eyes dropping from his bruised, exhausted face to his completely unlaced sneakers, taking in the sheer, impossible reality of the Boston Bears' captain standing in a Montreal trauma center at three in the morning. "What are you doing here?"
For a fraction of a second, the instinct to lie flared in Ilya's chest. It was a survival reflex honed over years of secrets, years of carefully constructed animosity, of hiding the softest part of himself behind a smirking, arrogant mask. He could say he heard the news and came to pay his respects to a colleague. He could preserve the lie. But then he remembered the sound of Shane’s voice on the phone.
I’m scared.
The memory of that broken, terrified whisper shattered the last remaining pillar of Ilya's pride. He let the survival reflex die right there in the fluorescent-lit hallway. Hayden’s inevitable questions and the risk of the entire world finding out meant absolutely nothing compared to the desperate, blinding need to put his hands on Shane and hold him until the world stopped being so terrifyingly vast and scary.
He closed the distance between them, his posture entirely stripped of its usual bravado. He didn't look like an arrogant superstar; he looked exactly like a man desperately begging for a lifeline.
"Jackie," Ilya said, his voice thick, the Russian accent bleeding heavily into his fractured English. "Please. Where is Shane?"
Jackie froze. She looked at him—really looked at him—and Ilya watched the incredibly fast, terrifyingly sharp gears of her mind turn. She processed the desperation in his eyes, the absolute, unshielded panic radiating from his massive frame, and the logistical impossibility of him being in this city unless he had driven like a madman the second the news broke. Ilya saw the exact moment the math clicked perfectly into place. Her eyes widened, just a fraction, a micro-expression of absolute, world-altering realization.
And then, because Jackie Pike was fundamentally one of the best, most relentlessly practical human beings on the planet—and currently skyrocketing into Ilya’s top three favorite people on earth—the shock completely vanished. She didn't gasp. She didn't drop the coffees. She didn't ask a single damn question about what kind of relationship he and Shane actually had that resulted in Ilya driving all the way to this hospital in the middle of the night, just so he could be here for him. The fierce, maternal caregiving instinct that made her such an incredible mother, and the profound love she carried so deep in her heart that practically made her Shane Hollander's unofficial older sister, simply overrode everything else.
Her expression softened into something impossibly warm and profoundly understanding. She smiled at him, a tiny, brilliant spark of wonder lighting up her exhausted eyes.
"Okay," Jackie said quietly, her voice a steady, grounding anchor. She tilted her head toward the elevators. "Come on. Follow me."
Ilya exhaled a breath that felt like it had been trapped painfully in his lungs since Boston, his broad shoulders slumping just a fraction as he fell into step beside her. As they navigated the blindingly white, labyrinthine corridors, Jackie effortlessly filled the heavy silence, her voice a low, soothing hum that demanded no effort from Ilya's fried brain.
"I just came down to grab these," she murmured, shifting the cardboard tray of coffees slightly as they finally reached the elevator bank. She pressed the glowing call button with her knuckle, offering him a small, grounded smile. "The coffee in the surgical waiting room tastes like literal battery acid." He was grateful for how she let the sentence hang there for a moment—he didn't know if it was intentional or not, but it gave his exhausted brain a few quiet seconds to process the mundane information. The low hum of the hospital ventilation filled the space between them.
"Shane’s dad is upstairs," she added softly, her voice dropping to an even gentler register now that she had his focus. "He got here about an hour ago."
Ilya let out a microscopic breath, his rigid shoulders dropping perhaps a millimeter more. David. Okay. Shane had his father. He was safe.
"He drove like a maniac all the way from Ottawa," Jackie continued. Ilya let out a short, rough puff of air, a dark, exhausted amusement flickering briefly in his chest. He could certainly understand the sentiment.
The elevator arrived with a soft, artificially cheerful chime. Jackie stepped inside and waited patiently until he followed her in. She let the heavy doors slide completely shut before she spoke again.
"And, of course," she said with a sigh, a deeply fond, almost sad smile pulling at her mouth, "the second David walked in, Shane immediately tried to kick Hayden and me out. He told us to go home. Said they were totally fine and we needed to sleep." She shook her head slowly. "He completely put his walls up."
She shot Ilya a wry, knowing look as she pressed the floor button. "Hayden basically told him to shut up and sit down. We weren't leaving him alone."
"Thank you," Ilya rasped, his thick accent bleeding heavily into the quiet space. The two words felt utterly inadequate, but they were pulled from the very bottom of his chest. "For staying."
He didn’t know if it was his place to thank them or not, considering they were Shane's chosen family and he was just a ghost hiding in a closet, but it felt like the absolute right thing to do. It made Ilya's chest ache with a profound, staggering realization: Shane was so deeply, fiercely loved. He had a family that dropped everything to drive through the night, and friends who refused to let him suffer in silence. He let the thought comfort him.
Jackie didn’t take offense at the gratitude; if anything, her smile only grew softer, looking at him with a warm, reassuring light in her tired eyes. "Of course we stayed," she said simply, leaning back against the metal rail. "He’s our family” She watched him attentively for a long couple of seconds, her sharp gaze calculating, as if trying to figure something out, maybe if he was actually worth Shane's heart or not. Whatever raw, unshielded truth she found in Ilya's open eyes seemed to satisfy her, because the heavy scrutiny melted away, and she continued with a spark of genuine mirth in her tone “But I have a feeling it’s not us he needs right now."
It took Ilya an embarrassing long moment to understand that she meant him. She was talking about him. Jackie Pike, who had just met him five minutes ago in a hospital lobby, was looking at him like he was the person Shane needed most in the world.
He didn't know what to do with that. Didn't know how to hold it. So he just nodded, a small, jerky movement, and hoped she couldn't see how much her words had gotten under his skin.
Ilya really fucking hoped she was right.
After watching the illuminated floor numbers tick upward for what felt like an eternity, she turned her gaze back to him, a sudden, playful lilt entering her voice. "I'm guessing you're the one Shane locked himself in the bathroom to call. Hayden is currently sitting up there entirely convinced that Shane was having a meltdown to his secret Boston girlfriend."
Ilya blinked, the sheer, staggering absurdity of the comment piercing straight through the heavy static in his brain. He let his heavy head fall back against the cool metal wall of the elevator, his voice dropping into a deadpan, exhausted gravel. He was already deep enough in this mess at this point—might as well be completely sincere about this one thing. He just desperately hoped Shane would eventually forgive him for burning their secret to the ground. "We are the same person."
Jackie let out a soft, breathy laugh, the corners of her eyes crinkling with a deeply fond, knowing twinkle. "Yeah, I kind of figured that out about sixty seconds ago," she smiled, the expression wide and genuine. "Honestly? It's a really good thing we are already standing inside a trauma center. Because when my husband sees you walk into that waiting room, he is absolutely going to have an aneurysm."
Completely against his own will, a laugh actually punched its way out of Ilya's chest.
It was a rough, gravelly sound, scraped raw by hours of suffocating panic and pure adrenaline, but it was undeniably real. His broad shoulders shaking slightly as the humor of the situation finally caught up with him. He was Ilya Rozanov, captain of the Boston Raiders, the ultimate villain of Montreal, currently standing in a Canadian hospital at almost four in the morning just to hold their golden boy's hand. He could already visualize the exact, horrifying shade of purple Hayden Pike's face was going to turn, the sheer psychic damage the winger was about to endure the second the elevator doors opened.
"I will gladly pay for his medical bills," Ilya rasped, his thick accent wrapping around the words as a familiar, arrogant smirk finally managed to break through the exhaustion on his face. He was still terrified for Yuna, and his hands were still shaking deep in his jacket pockets, but the crushing weight on his chest felt just a fraction lighter.
Jackie chuckled softly, shaking her head. Then her smile faded into something much gentler, much more serious as she seamlessly guided the conversation to the only thing that truly mattered. "But seriously—Shane is okay. And Yuna is going to be okay. I need you to know that before we walk out there. Nobody has said a single word about her being in mortal danger, alright?"
Ilya felt a massive, suffocating band of iron physically snap around his ribs, a full lungful of air rushing in for the first time in hours. "It's just... it's a very long, very complicated surgery," Jackie explained, keeping her voice slow and remarkably steady. "She's been in the OR for about four and a half hours now. They said the seatbelt absolutely saved her life, but it did a lot of mechanical damage to her body when the plane hit the ground."
Ilya listened as if his ears were packed tightly with cotton, but he forced his sluggish mind to latch onto her calm, patient tone.
"It’s a comminuted fracture in her right femur," she explained gently, her brow furrowing slightly. The complex English medical term slipped right off Ilya's exhausted brain, but Jackie didn't miss a beat, unknowingly offering the exact translation his mind desperately needed. "The bone broke into multiple pieces, so the surgeons are having to put it all back together with titanium plates and screws. That takes hours on its own. But the impact from the belt also ruptured her spleen."
Spleen. Another word he didn't quite know. An organ. Something inside. Ilya didn't need a medical dictionary to grasp the gravity of it.
"They had a general surgeon go in first to stop the internal bleeding and take the spleen out," she reassured him quickly, seeing the sudden, rigid tension locking Ilya's jaw. "They said you can live perfectly fine without one, so there shouldn't be any permanent damage once she heals. But a nurse came out about twenty minutes ago. She had a minor complication—her blood pressure dropped. They stabilized her immediately, but they had to slow down the orthopedic work. It's just going to be a while longer before they finish closing her up."
Ilya closed his eyes and pressed his head harder against the cold metal, hoping the sharp chill would cut through the ache that was starting to bloom behind his temple. He hadn't caught every single word, but the gist of it was completely clear. Four and a half hours. Hours of Shane sitting in a hard plastic chair, trapped entirely inside his own head, waiting for a surgeon to come out and give him his life back.
"She is strong," Ilya whispered to the metal doors, the words sounding terrifyingly fragile, less like a statement of fact and more like a desperate, exhausted prayer. "She will be okay. It is just bones. Bones heal."
"Exactly," Jackie agreed instantly, her voice a fierce, unwavering beacon of optimism in the suffocating space. "She's going to be completely fine, Ilya. And once she's out of recovery, she's going to need intensive physical therapy, but the doctors expect a full recovery."
Ilya was too fried to even begin to analyze what it did to his chest to hear one of Shane's best friends—people who were supposed to hate him on principle—suddenly addressing him by his given name. It felt entirely too intimate, too unguarded, a permanent shifting of the ground beneath their lives. But his drowsy brain simply lacked the capacity to panic right now.
Jackie shifted the coffees again as the elevator began to slow. "Shane just..." She paused, her tone softening. "He needs someone to help him carry the waiting part. Hayden and I are trying, we really are, but he's totally shut down. We can't reach him."
Before he could ask exactly what she meant by "shut down", the elevator dinged—a bright, artificially cheerful sound that grated against Ilya's raw nerves—and the heavy metal doors slid open to reveal the sterile, blindingly lit expanse of the fourth-floor surgical wing.
"He's at the end of the hall," Jackie said softly. She stepped out into the quiet corridor and looked back at Ilya. Her expression held such unwavering support that the ache in his throat sharpened. "Go to him."
The corridor seemed to stretch on forever, a sterile, blindingly white tunnel that ended in a small, agonizingly quiet surgical waiting area. Ilya stopped at the threshold for a second.
He saw him immediately. Shane was sitting rigidly in one of the plastic chairs, his posture stiff and completely unnatural. Beside him, David Hollander was leaning close, his hand gripping Shane’s pale fingers in a silent, desperate attempt at comfort. Crouched directly in front of Shane’s knees, taking up a massive amount of space, was Hayden Pike. The big right winger was speaking in a low, continuous murmur—too quiet for Ilya to catch the actual words, but the desperate, reassuring cadence was obvious—his heavy hand gripping Shane’s tense shoulder with unwavering firmness.
But Shane wasn't registering any of it. His gaze was completely blank, his unblinking eyes fixed with terrifying intensity on the sterile white wall opposite him, utterly lost to the room. It was a hollowed-out stare that made Ilya’s stomach drop. Because this was Shane stripped of every polished, disciplined, tightly held thing he usually offered the world. No captain. No composure. No practiced neutrality. No carefully managed distance.
There was nothing left of the version of himself he gave to the world now, nothing but the raw, unbearable center of him laid completely bare—his grief, his terror, and Shane himself in the purest, most breakable form Ilya had ever been allowed to witness.
And Ilya loved him so violently in that moment he almost could not breathe around it.
It was Pike who saw him first. The man's head snapped up as Ilya and Jackie approached, and as he slowly stood up, his features immediately twisted into a mask of profound bewilderment. His eyes darted frantically from the exhaustion on the face of his fiercest rival to his wife, silently demanding an explanation for the impossible absurdity of Ilya Rozanov standing in front of him right now.
He didn't care. The only thing that existed in his narrowed universe was the echo of Shane’s desperate voice on the phone. The only thing that mattered was the crushing, suffocating terror currently drowning the man he loved—a specific, agonizing fear that Ilya knew intimately, a darkness he had navigated blindly since he was a child. He looked at that empty, lost expression on Shane’s face, and his own exhaustion burned away.
"Shane," Ilya breathed.
The word tore out of his throat, completely unrecognizable. It was stripped of all its usual arrogant smoothness, jagged with raw urgency, the heavy cadence of his Russian accent bleeding thickly through the desperation. Slowly, agonizingly, Shane blinked. He dragged his gaze away from the blank wall, his head turning as if fighting a massive physical weight, until his eyes finally found the doorway.
The exact second their eyes connected, a massive shift occurred in Ilya's chest. It was as if his consciousness, which had been floating untethered since he backed out of his driveway in Boston, suddenly slammed back into his physical form. He was finally back in his own body. He finally had control of his limbs.
Shane just stared at him, and for what felt to Ilya like several excruciating millennia, the world stood perfectly still. Then, the fragile mask on Shane’s face finally cracked, his bottom lip began to tremble, a minute quiver, and the glassy emptiness in his eyes was instantly drowned by a sudden, hot rush of unshed tears. He looked utterly shocked for a split second, his brain failing to process the logistics of Ilya standing there, before the shock melted completely into something much more vulnerable.
"Ilya," Shane sighed.
If Ilya had been operating on anything more than pure survival instinct, if his brain hadn't been completely hijacked by the primal need to protect, he might have recognized the relief that saturated every single syllable of his name in Shane's mouth. He might have realized that his presence was exactly the anchor Shane had been praying for.
But every single electrical impulse in his brain was entirely focused on moving.
Shane didn't register his father's confusion or Pike's stunned silence. Didn't see any of it. His eyes were locked on Ilya as he pushed himself up from the chair, his legs unsteady beneath him, and moved—shoving past Hayden without even realizing it, without meaning to, just following the only gravitational pull that made sense anymore.
Ilya didn't wait. He crossed the remaining distance in two massive strides, meeting Shane halfway in the middle of the waiting room, and wrapped his arms around him with every ounce of strength he possessed. The impact of their collision knocked the breath out of both of them, but neither loosened their grip.
Shane didn't hesitate. Didn't brace himself. He just... surrendered. Let his knees give out, let his entire exhausted weight collapse against Ilya's chest, let his fingers fist desperately into the fabric of his jacket like he was afraid Ilya might disappear. The dam finally broke with a quiet, ragged gasp—a silent and devastating release of every hour of terror and panic he'd been forcefully holding inside. Shane let himself shatter entirely into the one person who knew exactly how to put him back together.
His face was buried so deeply in the crook of Ilya's neck that hot tears soaked through the collar of his jacket. The only thing Ilya could truly register was the frantic, stuttering rhythm of Shane's heart beating against his own ribs.
"I have you," Ilya rumbled, the words vibrating thick and heavy deep in his chest.
Shane’s fingers only twisted tighter into the fabric at his shoulders—a desperate, white-knuckled grip trying to anchor itself to something solid. Another ragged, silent gasp escaped, quiet crying muffled against the dark sanctuary of his coat.
"You came," Shane choked out, his voice scraped raw and muffled.
Ilya pressed his cheek fiercely against damp hair, his massive arms locking around him in an ironclad vow. "Of course," he whispered, the truth of it simple and absolute. "You called me."
His English felt entirely inadequate after that, too clumsy for the fragile thing trembling in his arms, so he abandoned it completely. The soft, rounded vowels of his native tongue spilled into the narrow space between them. "Ya zdes', solnyshko. Ya derzhu tebya. Ya nikuda ne uydy."
He pressed his lips hard against the sweaty curve of Shane's temple, ignoring the salt of the tears, his hand rubbing slow, heavy, deliberate circles between his shoulder blades—manually forcing the frantic panic out with the sheer, immovable force of his presence.
Behind them, the stunned silence in the waiting room had taken on a thick, suffocating quality.
"Shane?"
The voice was older, scraped rough with exhaustion, fear, and profound confusion. Shane’s father had slowly stood up from his plastic chair, his tired eyes darting frantically from his sobbing son to the massive, bruised Russian foward who was currently holding him together as if his life depended on it.
And Hayden. Hayden looked like he had just taken a blindside hit to the jaw at full speed. His mouth was slightly parted, his eyes wide, staring at the two of them as if gravity had just suddenly reversed itself. He looked helplessly toward Jackie, silently begging his wife for a translation of a reality that mathematically and historically did not compute. Jackie simply walked past her paralyzed husband, placing the cardboard tray of coffees quietly on a small table and putting a gentle, restraining hand flat against Hayden's chest, a silent command to let it be.
Shane flinched at the sudden sound of his father's voice—a violent, involuntary jerk of his spine—but he didn't pull away from the embrace. Instead, his fists tightened their desperate death grip on the fabric of the jacket, burying his face impossibly deeper into the warm, sandalwood-scented sanctuary of Ilya's shoulder, desperately trying to hide from the sudden influx of questions and eyes.
Ilya felt the flinch travel through Shane's bones and his protective instincts flared into a fierce, almost territorial heat—he shifted his weight, subtly angling his broad shoulders to physically block Shane from the rest of the room, creating a dark, enclosed pocket of safety built entirely out of his own body.
"It is okay," he said, not knowing if he was speaking to the boy in his arms, to David, or to the bewildered idiot staring at them, but he kept his eyes entirely focused on the side of Shane's head, his jaw tight. "We sit down now, da? Your legs are done working for today."
He didn't wait for permission or for Shane's sluggish brain to process the command. Keeping one arm locked like a solid iron band around his waist, Ilya practically carried the Captain of the Voyageurs back to the bank of plastic chairs. He sat down first, pulling Shane down firmly with him, maneuvering them with a practiced, effortless strength until he was tucked securely against his side. Shane went completely boneless, surrendering every ounce of his exhausted weight, his head falling heavily onto Ilya's shoulder. His breathing was still a ragged mess of hitched gasps, but the violent shaking had finally begun to subside under the heavy, unapologetic weight of Ilya's arm.
David took a hesitant step back, his brow furrowed so deeply it looked painful. "Rozanov? What... how are you..." He trailed off, the sheer impossibility of the intimacy completely short-circuiting a brain that was already battered by the terror of his wife's ongoing surgery.
Ilya finally looked up.
He met David Hollander’s exhausted, baffled eyes, offering no excuses, no carefully crafted PR deflections, no apologies for the way his hand was still possessively rubbing circles into his son's back. He was entirely too tired to lie, and Shane was entirely too broken to hide. If the universe wanted to rip the secret from their hands tonight, then Ilya would gladly hand it over, so long as he didn't have to let go of the boy leaning against him.
"I drove," Ilya stated simply, his voice a low, immovable absolute in the quiet room. "Shane called me. So I drove."
He offered nothing else—no explanations, no justifications. Not without Shane's permission, not while Shane was in no condition to decide what parts of their story they wanted to share.
Ilya braced himself for the inevitable fallout. He had just detonated a bomb in the middle of a sterile, brightly lit hospital waiting room, shattering the meticulously crafted illusion of their bitter rivalry right in front of the people who knew Shane best. He expected immediate, righteous anger. He expected David to pull his son away, to demand answers, to rail against the hated Boston captain for daring to touch his boy in his most vulnerable moment.
He expected the absolute worst, because Ilya’s only blueprint for a father was his own, a man who swept the broken pieces of his heart away into the dark rather than sitting on the floor to help hold them together. In Ilya's mind, a father was someone who demanded strength and decorum, someone who would view this desperate, public display of shattered composure and forbidden love as an unforgivable failure.
Not to mention the fact that they were both men.
Logically, somewhere beneath the deafening roar of his own panic, Ilya knew David Hollander was nothing like his father. He knew Shane's family didn't operate that way. The man trembling against his chest had grown up enveloped in a warmth and support Ilya could scarcely comprehend. But logic had completely abandoned him on an icy highway somewhere outside of Boston. Right now, operating purely on instinct, Ilya tightened his grip around Shane's shaking shoulders, jaw locked, ready to ruthlessly defend his right to stand exactly where he was.
But the explosion never came.
Over the top of Shane's trembling head, Ilya's defensive, burning gaze collided directly with David's.
Shane's father was a man fundamentally, almost confusingly different from his intensely driven, constantly calculating son or his high-strung wife; David had always been the quiet, grounding earth to their chaotic electrical storms. There was no shock in his eyes. No disgust. Certainly no anger.
He just looked.
David had spent almost forty years loving a woman whose brain ran at a hundred miles an hour, twenty-seven years raising a son who felt everything so deeply it sometimes broke him. He had learned long ago that the world didn't always make sense, that the people you loved didn't always fit into the neat little boxes other people built for them. He had learned that the only questions that ever really mattered were simple ones: Is my child happy? Is he safe? Is he loved?
Now he looked at the massive Russian hockey player wrapped around his son like a second skin. Those hands—the same ones that had scrapped with Shane on ice for a decade, that had thrown punches and delivered checks—were now rubbing slow, grounding circles into his son's back with a tenderness that couldn't be faked. He saw the way his jaw was set, not in arrogance, but in defense, like he was ready to fight the entire room if anyone tried to take Shane away from him. And beneath all of it, David saw the exhaustion carved into every line of the young man's face—the dark circles, the rumpled clothes from hours of frantic driving.
Then his gaze found Shane. His son. His beautiful, brilliant, sweet, overachieving son—who had been a hollowed-out shell when David walked into this waiting room an hour ago, unreachable, lost somewhere inside his own head with no way back.
But Shane was breathing now. Present now. Curled against this man's chest like it was the only safe harbor in a storm. And for the first time since David had gotten the call about the plane, he was certain his son would survive the night.
David's eyes softened. The tension that had been living in his shoulders since he'd called Yuna's phone over and over and gotten nothing, drained out of him in a long, slow exhale. He didn't ask how. Didn't ask why. Didn't ask for how long. Didn't ask about the decade of rivalry or the public animosity or the carefully constructed lies.
He just settled back into his plastic chair on Shane's other side and, without a word, reached out and took his hand—the one not currently fisted in Ilya's jacket. Forming a quiet triangle of support around the boy they both loved.
Ilya's brain short-circuited.
He stared at David, utterly frozen,waiting for the other shoe to drop—waiting for the anger, the accusations, the something that had to be coming. Because this—this quiet acceptance, this uncomplicated love—didn't exist in Ilya's understanding of the world. But nothing came. David just sat there, thumb tracing slow circles into his son's knuckles. No suspicion in his gaze. No judgment. No demands for explanations or promises. He simply was there—a steady, quiet presence asking for nothing except the chance to support his child.
Shane, still tucked against Ilya's shoulder, let out a shaky breath. His fingers tightened briefly around his father's hand—a small, unconscious acknowledgment of the connection—and his weight sagged further into Ilya's side. His breathing was finally, finally beginning to even out into something that resembled rest rather than survival. Ilya looked down at the top of Shane's head, then up at David—who was watching his son with an expression of such profound love it made Ilya's chest ache with something he couldn't name.
Of course, exactly like every other good, fragile thing in Ilya’s entire life, the profound, quiet tenderness of the moment was violently shattered, in this case by the obnoxiously loud voice of Hayden Pike.
"What the—ough!"
Ilya didn't even bother to lift his heavy head or tear his gaze away from the top of Shane’s messy hair to visually confirm that Jackie had just physically elbowed her idiotic husband in the ribs. He simply tightened his arms protectively, completely ignoring the baffled, sputtering man who was currently having his entire understanding of the universe forcefully rewritten.
"We are just going to go for a quick walk downstairs to stretch our legs," Jackie announced, her voice suddenly rang out with a saccharine, terrifyingly sweet cheerfulness that brooked absolutely no argument. "We’ll be right back!"
"But Jackie—"
"Hayden."
“Yes, baby, I’m sorry”
Without waiting for a single word of acknowledgment from the three men huddled in the center of the room, she clamped her hand onto her husban’s wrist with the vice-like grip of a seasoned hockey wife and ruthlessly dragged him backward toward the open elevator doors. Ilya listened to the sound of them stepping inside, to the muffled thump of Hayden's body hitting the elevator wall, to the doors sliding closed with a definitive shush.
And then, silence.
With the chaotic energy of the Pikes gone, the only sounds left were the low, sterile hum of the hospital ventilation, the distant, rhythmic beep of cardiac monitors down the hall, and the soft, steady cadence of Shane's breathing against his chest.
Across from them, David shifted slightly in his plastic chair. Not moving away, just... settling. Getting comfortable in the gravity of the situation. His thumb never once stopped its slow, rhythmic circles over Shane's pale knuckles and Ilya watched the way the rigid fingers relaxed incrementally with every single pass. Watched the way David's gaze never left his son's exhausted face. Such a small thing. A father quietly holding his son's hand in a freezing hospital waiting room, demanding absolutely nothing, just offering a steady presence.
Ilya had never experienced anything remotely like it in his entire life.
He looked down at the top of Shane's head, his throat tight. The messy, sweat-dampened hair curled slightly at the nape of his neck, and Ilya wanted to press his face there, to breathe him in like he'd done a hundred times before when Shane was asleep and couldn't see how desperate Ilya was for the scent of him. But he couldn't—not from this angle, not with Shane curled against his chest like this. So instead he pressed his nose into Shane's hair, right at the crown of his head, and breathed deep.
Shane shifted against him, a small, hesitant movement, and Ilya felt more than heard the shaky exhale that escaped his lips.
"I feel so stupid." Shane whispered, his voice thick, wavering, and deeply embarrassed. "I'm sorry about this. All of it. You shouldn't have to—"
"Stop." Ilya's voice was quiet but firm, his hand coming up to cup the back of Shane's head. "You do not apologize for being vulnerable, Shane. Never to me."
Shane tilted his head back just enough to find Ilya's eyes—red-rimmed, puffy, his face blotchy in a way that would probably embarrass him later, when he had the energy to care. Right now he just looked exhausted and open and impossibly young despite everything.
"You're really here." Wonder bled through this words, like he was still trying to make the math work in his head. "I called you, and you just... got in your car and drove. In February. At midnight."
Ilya shrugged, the movement jostling Shane gently against his side. "Was not midnight when I left. Was almost midnight. Close enough."
"That's not the point."
"What is?"
That familiar crease appeared between Shane's brows, cutting through the exhaustion. "The point is, it's the middle of the season. You're supposed to be in Boston. And you drove six hours—"
"Three and a half."
Shane blinked. Something shifted behind his eyes—the exhaustion still there, the red-rimmed weariness, but now a flicker of something else. His jaw tightened. His spine straightened a fraction, and suddenly he looked less like someone who'd been crying and more like someone you did not want to argue with. Ilya thought he looked cute.
"Three and a half?" Disbelief sharpened his voice. He actually pushed back, putting enough space between them to glare properly. "Rozanov, the roads are shit this time of year, there's black ice everywhere. You could have wrapped your stupid car around a tree, and then where would we be? Huh? Then I'd be sitting here waiting for news about my mother and also waiting for news about my—" He stopped abruptly, the word catching in his throat, but his glare didn't waver. "News that I would have to learn over the internet because no one would have thought it was important to tell me, because nobody fucking knows about us. No, no you don't get to do that. You don't get to drive like a maniac just because I had a bad night."
Ilya blinked at him. The shift was so sudden, so completely Shane—the way his brain could flip from devastated to angry in seconds—that for a moment Ilya just stared. Then something warm bloomed in his chest.
It was ridiculous. He was being yelled at in a hospital waiting room at four in the morning by a man who looked like he'd been put through a washing machine. And all Ilya could think was: So this is what it feels like—to have someone who would be angry if you died.
"You are scolding me," Ilya said slowly, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth despite his best efforts to suppress it.
"Yes, I'm scolding you! Somebody has to! You clearly don't have a single functioning brain cell when it comes to your own safety!"
"I have many brain cells. They were all focused on getting here."
"Then they're the wrong brain cells!" Shane's voice cracked, but he pushed through, his fingers still twisted in Ilya's jacket like it was the only thing keeping him upright. "You don't—you can't just—do you have any idea what could have—"
"I didn't." Ilya's voice was soft now, amused and tender in equal measure. "I am here. In one piece. Your mother is the one in surgery, not me. Focus on the correct crisis, Hollander."
Shane's jaw worked. Ilya watched the war play out across his face—the need to keep yelling warring with the bone-deep relief that he'd come at all. The gratitude won. It always won with Shane, Ilya was learning. No matter how much he wanted to be practical, to be careful, to be the responsible one—Ilya made him want to throw caution into oncoming traffic. Which was ironic, given the current conversation.
"You're such an idiot." The words came out soft now, all fight drained. Shane slumped heavier against Ilya's chest, his grip loosening into something more comfortable. "A complete, reckless, stupid idiot."
"A very safe idiot." Ilya pressed his smile into Shane's hair where he couldn't see it. "Who made excellent time."
"Don't brag about speeding."
"Is not bragging. Is just facts. There is difference."
A sound escaped Shane—something almost a laugh, small and tired and cracked at the edges. It vibrated through Ilya's chest, and he felt something finally, finally start to unclench. The knot that had been wound tight since the moment he'd answered the phone in Boston and heard nothing but ragged breathing on the other end.
"You're impossible," Shane whispered against his collar.
"You called me, so really, you did this to yourself."
Shane huffed—no real irritation in it, just exhaustion and relief and that warm, wondering thing that had been growing between them for years. The thing they'd both been too scared to name. Until tonight.
Across from them, David was watching. And there was something in his eyes—a glint of recognition, maybe. The look of a man who'd also broken a few speed limits tonight, for a reason that wasn't so different from Ilya's. The look of a man who also loved someone whose brain ran at a different speed than everyone else and whose body was currently broken on a surgical table.
David Hollander had spent forty years loving Yuna—her intensity, her brightness, her glorious, overwhelming way of filling every room she entered. Forty years of watching her burn bright and trying to keep up. Forty years of knowing, with absolute certainty, that there was no version of his life that made sense without her in it.
And Ilya? Ilya had spent ten years circling Shane. Ten years pretending he didn't feel it, didn't need it, didn't wake up in hotel rooms reaching for someone who was already gone. And tonight, when he'd finally stopped pretending—when he'd admitted to himself, in the dark of his car at two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, that he loved Shane Hollander more than he loved his own life—he looked up from the pretty boy in his arms and saw the same love reflected back at him in David's tired eyes.
The same fear. The same fierce, bone-deep devotion. The same absolute refusal to let the people they loved face the dark alone.
David watched him—watched the way his hands cradled Shane's shoulders like he was something precious, watched the way he pressed his face into Shane's hair like he was breathing him in, watched the way his thumb never stopped its grounding path against Shane's arm—and he understood.
This wasn't just attraction. This wasn't just convenience or secrecy or whatever story these kids had been telling themselves. This was the real thing. The kind of love that made you drive through the night without thinking. The kind of love that made you sit in hard plastic chairs and refuse to sleep because the person in your arms needed you to be awake. The kind of love that David had spent his entire adult life feeling for Yuna. He saw it, clear as day.
Ilya Rozanov loved his son the way David loved his wife. Completely. Desperately. Without question or hesitation.
And from the way Shane was curled into Rozanov's side, from the way his fingers were twisted into his jacket like he'd never let go, from the way his breathing had finally evened out and he'd laughed despite his panic—
Shane loved him back just the same.
David's eyes burned. He blinked rapidly, looking away for a moment, giving himself a second to process the weight of it. When he looked back, Rozanov was watching him.
There was something in his expression—a flicker of uncertainty, maybe, or the barest hint of defensiveness, like he was bracing for David to say something, to pull Shane away, to tell him he didn't belong here. But David didn't do any of those things. He just looked at Rozanov, really looked at him, and let everything he was feeling show on his face. The recognition. The acceptance. The quiet, overwhelming gratitude that someone loved his son this much.
Ilya's ears went hot. He felt the flush creeping up his neck, but he didn't look away. Didn't hide. Just tightened his arm around Shane's shoulders and let himself be seen.
The silence that followed was heavy, but not uncomfortable—the kind of quiet that comes after something important has been said without words. David cleared his throat softly, swiping at his eyes with his free hand. Then, slowly, he pushed himself up from his chair. The plastic creaked under him, the sound loud in the stillness.
"I'm going to find some water," he murmured, already moving. He squeezed Shane's hand once before letting go, a small, deliberate pressure. "Give you two a minute."
Shane's head lifted slightly, a flicker of concern crossing his exhausted face. "Dad, you don't have to—"
"I know." David's voice was gentle, firm. He straightened slowly, his body protesting the hours of sitting. "But I'm going to anyway. Been sitting too long. I need to move."
He looked at Ilya then—a long, steady look that made Ilya's spine straighten instinctively. But there was no judgment in it. No warning. Just that same quiet acknowledgment from before, the look that said; I see you. I see what this is. And you don't have to be scared of me.
David nodded once, just a small movement, and then he was gone, his footsteps fading down the corridor.
The quiet that followed was different—softer, more private, like the room itself was giving them permission to breathe. Shane exhaled slowly, his shoulders dropping as some of the tension finally released its grip. He shifted against Ilya, tilting his head back just enough to meet his eyes. They were still swollen from crying, shadowed with exhaustion, but underneath all of that there was something lighter. Something that looked almost like peace.
Then his forehead creased again. "What were you doing?" He asked, his voice still thick but steadier now. "When I called. What were you doing?"
Ilya blinked down at him. "What?"
"When you answered. You picked up so fast. What were you doing?"
Ilya hesitated. It felt stupid to admit now, in the harsh fluorescent light of a hospital waiting room, that he'd been spiraling over a news report. That he'd watched a plane crash on television and immediately thought about Shane—where he was, when his last game was, whether he could have been on that flight, if he was safe. That he'd typed out a text and deleted it three times because he couldn't figure out how to say that he couldn't properly breathe with just the thought of something bad happening to him, without sounding insane.
But Shane was looking up at him with those eyes—still exhausted, but focused now, present in a way they hadn't been all night—and Ilya found he didn't want to lie. Not about this.
"I was watching the news," he said quietly. "They showed the plane. The emergency landing. And I thought—" He stopped, his jaw tightening.
Shane's fingers curled tighter into his jacket. "You thought what?"
"I thought about you." The words came out rougher than he intended, stripped of all his usual careful control. "I did the schedule in my head. Montreal played at home Saturday, so you should be safe, but I could not—" He exhaled sharply. "I could not make my brain stop. So I sat there trying not to think about you. And then you called."
Shane was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. "You were scared."
"I was... concerned."
"Same thing."
"Is different. Concerned is rational. Scared is—" Ilya cut himself off, frustrated with his own inability to find the right words. "I do not get scared, Hollander. I am Russian. We do not have that word."
"Liar."
"Rude."
Shane's mouth twitched. It was small, barely a movement at all, but Ilya saw it. Felt it, more like, in the way the tension in Shane's shoulders eased just a fraction.
"You're a terrible liar," Shane murmured. "You were scared for me. And then I called, and I was having a full meltdown on your phone, and that definitely helped."
"Immensely," Ilya deadpanned. "Was exactly what I needed. Ten out of ten experience."
Shane let out a real laugh this time—short, surprised, punched out of him before he could stop it. It was watery and exhausted and absolutely the most beautiful sound Ilya had heard in hours.
"I'm sorry," Shane said, but he was smiling now, just a little. "That's terrible."
"It is not terrible." Ilya's voice softened. "You called me. That is the opposite of terrible. I am always happy when you call me." The words came out before he could stop them, more honest than he'd intended. But Shane was looking at him with those impossibly bright eyes that seemed to see right through him, and he did not want to take it back.
The hour was late, the adrenaline had long since burned away, and something in Ilya Rozanov's chest was cracking open whether he liked it or not.
"I fell apart on your phone."
"You trusted me with falling apart." Ilya's voice was quiet, rough at the edges. "That means everything, Shane. That you wanted me. That you chose me."
Shane's breath caught. His eyes went bright again, but the tears didn't fall this time. They just sat there on his lower lashes, catching the harsh light.
"I would never have called anyone else," he admitted quietly. "I just—I needed to hear your voice. I needed you to tell me it was going to be okay, even if you didn't know. Even if you couldn't promise. I just needed you to say it. I never thought—I didn't even have to ask you to come."
Ilya's throat tightened. He thought about the phone in his hand, the way his thumb had hovered over the send button on a text he never sent. The way his heart had lurched when Shane's name appeared on the screen. The way he'd answered without thinking, without strategy, without any of the careful walls he'd spent a decade building.
"You called," Ilya said simply. "I came. That is how it works. You do not have to ask."
Shane shook his head slowly, a tiny movement against Ilya's chest. "That's not how it works for most people."
"I am not most people."
"No." Shane's voice was impossibly soft. "You're really not."
For a moment, they just looked at each other. Ilya was acutely aware of everything—the weight of Shane against his side, the warmth of him, the way his fingers were still twisted into his jacket like he was something worth holding onto.
And Ilya wanted to tell him. Wanted to tell him every single secret he had ever kept, every single thought that had filled his head during all those miles he'd driven. How scared he'd been. How worried. Wanted Shane to know him. All of him. The good parts and the broken ones and all the messy, complicated space in between. Ilya wanted to tell him everything.
"When you told me what happened," Ilya said quietly, his hand stilling where it rested against Shane's shoulder, "I thought about my mama."
Shane went still.
"I remembered how it felt," Ilya continued, the words coming slowly, painfully. "When I found her. How lonely I was, like the floor was gone. And I was not going to let you sit here alone and feel that. I could not."
Shane's eyes went bright again, but he blinked rapidly, forcing the tears back. "I didn't know that," he whispered. "About your mom. I mean, I knew she—but I didn't know you were there. That you found her."
Ilya nodded, not trusting his voice.
"That's—" Shane swallowed hard. "Thank you. For telling me. And for coming. For not letting me be alone."
"You are never alone." The words came out fierce, absolute. "Not anymore. Not while I am breathing. You understand me, Hollander?"
Shane stared at him for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded. "Yeah. Yeah, I think I do." And then he reached up, his fingers brushing against the dark circles under Ilya's eyes with a gentleness that made Ilya's chest ache. "You look terrible," he murmured. "When did you last sleep?"
Ilya caught his wrist, turning his head to press a kiss to Shane's palm without thinking. The gesture was so natural, so automatic, that he did not realize what he'd done until he felt Shane's fingers curl against his cheek.
"I do not remember," Ilya admitted against his skin. "Sleep is for people who are not worried about their—" He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "Sleep is for people who are not worried about the people they love."
The words hung in the air between them. Shane's eyes went wide, his breath catching audibly.
Ilya felt the admission settle between them like a stone dropped into still water—and immediately wanted to take it back. What kind of idiot said something like that now? Shane was already carrying too much. Ilya had already messed things up enough just by coming here without a thought for who would find out, without a care for the consequences. And now he was dumping his damaged heart into the pile too?
The worst part was that he was a fucking coward who couldn't even confess properly. Hiding behind words aimed at no one, deflecting them against skin instead of saying them face-to-face. Always hiding. Always protecting himself. Always leaving just enough room to pretend he hadn't really said anything at all.
Just in case Shane didn't want him.
"The people you— Ilya " Shane's voice cracked and his face crumpled in a completely different way. Not the panic from before—this was softer, more vulnerable, his bottom lip trembling as fresh tears welled up. He tried again.
That's it, Ilya thought, something cold and inevitable settling in his gut. This is it. He's going to let me down easy. He's going to break this thing before it even begins. All because Ilya couldn't keep his stupid mouth shut and his stupid ass on his stupid couch in Boston where it belonged.
Shane must have seen something in his expression—horror, maybe, or shock, or just the blank look of a system that had completely crashed—because he stopped mid-sentence. His eyes went impossibly wider. His face went pale beneath the tear tracks.
And then he tried to pull away.
It was a small movement, barely a shift, but Ilya felt it like a physical blow. Felt Shane's muscles tense, felt him start to retreat, felt the fragile thing they had built tonight start to crack.
Ilya's arm locked around him. Tight. Immovable.
"Stop," Ilya said, his voice rough. "Do not—Shane. Stop moving."
Shane froze, his eyes searching Ilya's face with something that looked terrifyingly like resignation. Like he was bracing for impact. Like he already knew what was coming.
Ilya stared at him. This beautiful, broken, impossible man who had just handed him his entire heart like it was nothing. Like it was something Ilya deserved.
"You love me," Ilya said slowly, testing the words. They felt huge in his mouth. Terrifying. Right.
Shane flinched. "I shouldn't have—I know it's too soon, I know we haven't talked about it, I just—with everything that happened tonight, I couldn't—"
"Shane."
"—keep pretending that I don't feel this, and I understand if you don't feel the same, I don't expect—"
"Shane."
Shane's mouth snapped shut. His eyes were bright and wet and absolutely terrified.
Ilya cupped his face with both hands, ignoring the way his own fingers were trembling. Ignoring everything except the man in front of him who had just shattered every wall Ilya had ever built.
"I love you too," Ilya said. The words came out rough, scraped raw, absolutely certain. "I have loved you for years. I did not know how to say it. I did not think I was allowed to want it. But I love you, Shane. I love you."
Shane stared at him. His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. Nothing came out.
Then, slowly, incredibly, his face broke into something Ilya had never seen before. It was wrecked and glowing all at once, tear tracks still fresh on his cheeks but his eyes bright with something Ilya couldn't quite name. It was the kind of smile that started somewhere deep and spread outward, warming everything it touched. It was the smile of someone who had just been given permission to stop running.
"Yeah?" Shane whispered.
Ilya let out a sound that was half laugh, half something else entirely. "Yeah."
Shane surged forward, pressing his face into Ilya's neck, his whole body shaking with something that might have been laughter or crying or both. Ilya held him through it, one hand cradling the back of his head, the other pressed flat against his spine, grounding them both.
"You're such an idiot," Shane mumbled against his skin, his voice muffled and wet. "I cannot believe you made me say it first."
"You did not even let me finish my sentence."
"Your sentence was going nowhere."
"It was going somewhere. I was building up to it."
"You were not."
"I absolutely was. I am very romantic person."
Shane pulled back just enough to look at him, one eyebrow raised. His face was a mess and he was absolutely beautiful. "You're literally the least romantic person I have ever met."
"Rude. I drove three and a half hours for you."
"While speeding."
"Romantically speeding."
Shane laughed. It was wet and wobbly and perfect. "That isn't a thing."
"Is a thing in Russia."
"You are not in Russia."
"Thank God for that." Ilya pressed his forehead against Shane's, breathing him in. "I love you," he said again, softer this time, like he was still learning the shape of the words. "I love you, and I am not going anywhere. Okay?"
Shane nodded, a tiny movement that brushed their noses together. "Okay." His hand came up to curl around the back of Ilya's neck, holding him there. "I love you too. Just so we're clear."
"Crystal clear."
"Good."
They stayed like that for a moment, foreheads pressed together, breathing each other's air, and Ilya could feel Shane's pulse through the point where their skin touched, could feel the way his breath kept catching like he was waiting for something—like he, too, couldn't quite believe in this, couldn't quite believe that Ilya would stay, like he was waiting for him to disappear the way he always had.
Ten years. Ten years of hotel room doors closing behind him, of leaving before the sun came up, of pretending that what they had was just convenience, just release, just something to burn through until the next game. Ten years of walking away because it was easier than staying.
But Ilya was so tired of walking away. So desperate for a place to stay.
So he tilted his head, just slightly, and kissed him.
It was soft at first—barely a press of lips, a question more than a statement—but Shane made a sound against his mouth, small and desperate and relieved, and something in Ilya's chest exploded. So he pulled Shane closer and kissed him like he meant it, like he meant every single word they'd just said and a thousand more he didn't know how to say in English.
This was their first kiss that wasn't in the safety of some hotel room, wasn't in one of their apartments with the curtains drawn tight and the lights off. This was in a hospital waiting room, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, where anyone could walk through that door at any moment—a doctor, a nurse, some stranger whose loved one had been on that plane. The thought flickered through Ilya's mind, instinctive and cold: Shane's image. Shane's career. Shane's perfect reputation. He remembered another kiss, years ago on a balcony after the rookie awards, the way the boy in his arms had practically launched himself away at the sound of footsteps, the terror in his eyes at the thought of being seen. The memory had lived in Ilya's chest like a splinter ever since—a reminder of what Shane needed, what he couldn't give, what Ilya would never ask for.
So he started to pull back. Always protecting him. Always putting his comfort above Ilya's own desperate need to be loved in the light.
But that was then. This was now. And Shane wasn't letting him retreat. His fingers curled tighter, refusing to let Ilya disappear the way he always had.
Ilya let out a shaky breath against his mouth and kissed him deeper, letting himself believe what that grip was telling him: that it didn't matter anymore. The cameras, the headlines, the judgment of the world—none of it mattered. He wanted this. Wanted him. Right here, in front of anyone who might walk through that door.
Shane kissed him back like he was drowning and Ilya was air, like he'd been holding his breath for years and had finally been given permission to breathe, his fingers curling into the hair at the nape of Ilya's neck, holding him there, keeping him close, like he still couldn't quite believe Ilya would stay.
But Ilya wasn't going anywhere. Not now. Not ever. He knew that with a certainty that settled deep in his bones, heavier and more real than anything he'd ever felt.
He could not believe he had gone ten years without this. Without the right to hold him like this, to kiss him like this, to let himself feel the full weight of what the other meant to him. Every hotel room, every stolen night, every goodbye that left him hollow—it all led here. To this moment. To Shane warm and alive and his in a way he had never allowed himself to want.
And Shane had said I love you. Had said it first, had said it like a confession and a gift all at once, had said it while looking at Ilya like he was enough, like he was everything.
Ilya let that thought settle into him, let it seep through all the cracks he'd spent a lifetime building. And Shane didn't lie—Shane couldn't lie, not about something like this, not with his whole heart cracked open and bleeding into the space between them. So if he said he loved Ilya, if he said he'd loved him for years, if he said I'm sorry if you aren't ready like Ilya was the one who needed protecting—then it meant it was true. It meant he wanted Ilya here. Shane wasn't angry that Ilya had come, wasn't wishing he'd stayed in Boston, wasn't already calculating the damage to his precious public image.
For the first time in his life, following his heart hadn't led Ilya to disaster. For the first time in his life, wanting something—wanting someone—hadn't ended in ashes.
He let himself believe it. Let the truth of it seep into all the cold, empty places he'd been carrying for so long. Shane wanted him here. Shane loved him. The thought unraveled something in Ilya's chest—something tight and terrified that had been holding on for years. He let it go. Let himself relax into Shane's grip, into the kiss, into the impossible, terrifying, beautiful truth of it.
The kiss deepened, turned desperate, turned into something Ilya couldn't control and didn't want to. He poured every mile he'd driven into it, every second of terror, every prayer he'd whispered to a God he didn't believe in—kissing him like he was trying to memorize the shape of him, the taste of him, the way he fit so perfectly against Ilya's mouth. It wasn't just a kiss. It was a homecoming. It was every goodbye reversed, every closed door forced back open.
And then he tasted salt.
Not just Shane's tears—though those were there, mixing between their lips, warm and wet and overwhelming—but there was more, too much salt for it to be only Shane, and Ilya pulled back just enough to breathe, just enough to see, and realized with a jolt that his own face was wet. When had that happened? When had the tears started? He couldn't remember, couldn't remember the last time he had cried, couldn't remember the last time he had let himself feel anything this much.
Shane was looking at him with those impossibly bright eyes, his own face a mess of tear tracks and wonder, and he raised one hand slowly, gently, brushing his thumb across Ilya's cheekbone, catching a tear before it could fall.
"Hey," Shane whispered, his voice wrecked and beautiful. "You're crying."
Ilya shook his head, a tiny, automatic denial. "I do not cry."
"Uh-huh." Shane's thumb traced the same path again, following the trail of another tear. "Tell that to your face."
"Is the hospital. Bad air. Makes eyes water."
Shane laughed—soft and wet and the most stunning man Ilya had ever seen. "You're ridiculous."
"Okay," he admitted, his voice rough. "Maybe a little crying. But only because you are very emotional tonight. Is contagious."
Shane's laugh was brighter this time, louder, filling the small space between them. He pressed his forehead back against Ilya's, breathing him in.
"I love you," Shane said again, like he could not say it enough. Like he needed Ilya to hear it, to believe it, to carry it with him. "I love you so much. I'm so fucking grateful you are here."
Ilya kissed him again—shorter this time, softer, just a brush of lips to remind himself that this was real. Then Shane's hand slid down from his neck, pressing flat against the center of Ilya's chest. Right over his heart, which was currently trying with all its might to violently beat its way out of his ribcage.
"Your heart is going crazy," Shane murmured against his lips.
"You are very annoying."
Shane smiled, close enough that Ilya could feel the curve of it. "You love it."
"Da," Ilya said quietly, the word slipping out before he could stop it, warm and certain and absolutely true. "I do."
For a moment they just breathed each other's air, foreheads pressed together, Shane's hand still flat against the frantic rhythm of Ilya's heart. Ilya could feel each beat like a countdown to something he couldn't name.
Then the elevator dinged.
The sound was soft, polite, entirely out of place in the quiet of the surgical wing. But Ilya felt Shane tense against him, felt the way his breathing began to quicken again. Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Three sets of them. Low voices, hushed but not urgent. Ilya kept his arm locked around Shane's shoulders, kept his thumb moving in that slow, grounding path against his bicep—the one that seemed to calm him earlier. He wasn't going to let go just because company was coming. Not now. Not after everything.
Shane shifted, pulling back just enough to break the press of their foreheads, to be able to see. But he didn't let go—his hand stayed curled in Ilya's jacket, his body still pressed warm against Ilya's side. Just enough space to face whatever was coming, but not enough to lose the connection.
David appeared first, a paper cup of water in his hand. His eyes found them immediately—found the way they were still tangled together, found the tear tracks still fresh on both their faces—and something in his expression softened, like he'd already known what he'd find and was glad to be right.
Behind him, Jackie emerged from the stairwell, moving with the quiet efficiency of someone who'd spent too many hours in hospitals. And behind her, looking significantly less shell-shocked than when he'd left, was Pike.
The man's eyes landed on them and, for a split second, his step faltered. Ilya watched him take it in—the way Shane was curled into Ilya's side, the way Ilya's arm was wrapped around him like a protective shield, the way neither of them had moved apart despite the audience. Hayden's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
Then Jackie's elbow found his ribs, and he made a sound that was half grunt, half surrender.
"Hayden," Jackie said sweetly, "sit down and be quiet."
Hayden sat, dropping into the chair closest to the vending machines. Jackie sat beside him, close enough that their shoulders touched. She didn't say anything. Just watched them with that warm, knowing look that made Ilya feel like she could see straight through to his bones.
David settled back into his plastic chair, the one he'd occupied for hours, and reached for Shane's hand like he'd done a thousand times before—like it was the most natural thing in the world. Shane didn't even look. He just moved his hand, the one that had been pressed flat against Ilya's heart, sliding it off Ilya's chest and onto his own thigh, close enough for his father to reach. David's fingers found his instantly, wrapping around them with that same quiet, unthinking ease. Like muscle memory. Like love so ingrained it didn't need words.
The gesture was so natural that Ilya felt his heart breaking a little.
For a long moment, no one spoke. The silence wasn't uncomfortable per se, but it was heavy with everything none of them knew how to say. Then Shane shifted against Ilya's side, his fingers tightening briefly on his dad’s hold before he spoke.
"I should—" Shane started, his voice still rough but steadier now. He cleared his throat, tried again. "I should explain. About us. About... everything."
Surprisingly to Ilya, it was Hayden's idiotic head that snapped up at Shane’s comment. "Shane, man, you don't have to—"
"I know." Shane cut him off, but there was no sharpness in it. Just exhaustion and something like surrender flickering through his eyes. "I know I don't have to. But I want to. I'm so tired of lying. To the people I love. I can't—not anymore. Not after tonight."
Ilya felt the words land in his chest like stones. He looked down at Shane, at the way his jaw was set with that stubborn determination that Ilya had spent ten years pretending to hate, and something warm and aching bloomed behind his ribs.
"Shane," Ilya murmured, low enough that only he could hear. "You do not have to do this tonight. You are tired. You have been through enough."
Shane tilted his head back to look at him, and his eyes were puffy but absolutely certain. "I know I'm tired. I'm so tired I can barely think straight." A small, tired smile tugged at his lips. "Which means I'm too exhausted to panic about this. And I don't want to keep pretending. Not with them. Not after tonight. Not when the last thing I said to my mom was a lie."
David leaned forward slowly, his brow furrowing with gentle concern. "What do you mean, kid?"
Shane's cheeks flushed—just a little, a faint pink that crept up from his collar. He glanced at Ilya, then back at his father, then at Hayden and Jackie, who were watching with matching expressions of careful attention.
"I asked her for vodka," Shane said quietly.
Ilya blinked. "What?"
Shane's flush deepened. "The vodka you like. The Russian one—the fancy one I can never remember the name of." He wouldn't look at Ilya, his gaze fixed somewhere on the opposite wall. "You mentioned it once. Months ago. I don't even remember when. But I remembered. And I asked my mom to bring some from New York. They don't sell it here, and I wanted—" He stopped, swallowed. "I wanted to have it for you. For when I went to Boston on Friday."
Ilya's brain stopped working. Completely. Entirely. He stared at Shane, utterly frozen, trying to process what he'd just heard.
Shane kept going, his voice getting smaller but somehow more determined. "The game on Friday. I thought maybe I could come over after. Stay the night. We could—I don't know." He finally glanced at Ilya, just for a second, blushing even more, before looking away again. "But when my mom asked why I needed it, I lied. I told her it was for someone on the team. One of the guys who liked it. Which was stupid, because none of them drink that stuff, and also I'm a terrible liar, and she definitely knew I was hiding something, but I just—I couldn't tell her the truth. Not then." His voice cracked, wobbled, broke. "And now she's in surgery, and the last thing I said to her was a lie."
Ilya couldn't move. Couldn't breathe. Couldn't do anything except stare at the man pressed against his side—this impossible, ridiculous, devastating man who had remembered a throwaway comment from months ago, who had asked his mother to smuggle alcohol across the border, who had been planning for Friday, planning for them, while Ilya had been sitting in his empty house trying not to think about how much he missed him.
David was the first to move. He leaned forward, his free hand coming up to rest on Shane's knee. "Shane. Look at me."
Shane did, his eyes holding that familiar shine he hadn't been able to shake all night.
"First," David said quietly, "mom is going to be fine. She's going to wake up, and you're going to have plenty of time to tell her everything you want to tell her. About the vodka. About Ilya. About whatever else you've been keeping from us. You'll get that chance."
Shane's breath hitched.
"Second," David continued, his voice gentle but firm, "you don't owe us any explanations. Not tonight. Not ever, if you don't want to give them. You're allowed to have a private life. You're allowed to love who you love without having to justify it to anyone. That's not lying, son. That's just... living. On your own terms."
Ilya's throat closed.
He stared at David—at the way he looked at Shane, at the way his voice wrapped around every word like it was something precious. There was no judgment there. No disappointment. No edge waiting to cut. Just patience and so much love. Just the quiet, absolute certainty of a man who had spent years looking at his son and seeing someone worth looking at.
Ilya had known, logically, that Shane grew up way differently than him. He'd seen the way Shane's face softened when he talked about his parents, filed away the small details that painted a picture of a childhood nothing like his own. But knowing something and seeing it were two different things.
Seeing it was this: David looking at his twenty-seven-year-old son—captain of an NHL team, grown man, professional athlete—with the same expression Ilya imagined he'd worn when Shane was a little boy and scraped his knee. Like nothing had changed. Like Shane would always be his little boy, and that was a privilege, not a problem.
Seeing it was this: the way David's voice never wavered, never hardened, never lost that undercurrent of warmth even when he was saying something serious. The way his eyes never left Shane's face, tracking every flicker of emotion, like he was cataloguing his son's heartbeat in real time.
Seeing it was this: Shane nodding, quick and eager, not because he was scared of his father's disapproval, but because he wasn't. Like he needed David to know he understood, he agreed, he was listening but he just needed to make his point heard. Like earing this wasn’t something strange or remarkable. Because he knew, with absolute certainty, that David was on his side. Because he'd always known. Because that was just how it worked in the Hollander house.
Ilya's eyes burned.
He blinked rapidly, looking away for a moment, pressing his face into Shane's hair to hide. It didn't help. The tears were there anyway, hot and unwanted, spilling over before he could stop them.
This was what it looked like to be loved by a father who stayed. Who held your hand in hospital waiting rooms. Who looked at you at twenty-seven the same way he looked at you at seven—like you were the most important thing in the world
Ilya had never had that. Would never have that. His father's love came with conditions, with performance, with the constant grinding pressure to be enough—and even then, it wasn't love. Not really. Not like this. But Shane had it. Shane had always had it. And as Ilya held him in that freezing hospital room, feeling the steady rhythm of his breathing, the warmth of his body pressed close, he waited for the envy to come.
He knew envy. Knew it the way he knew the back of his own hand, the way he knew the sharp bite of a Moscow winter, the way he knew the hollow echo of an apartment where no one waited for him. Envy was an old friend. An unwelcome one, but familiar. He'd felt it watching other kids with their parents at the rink when he was young. Felt it watching teammates pull out their phones to call their mothers after games. Felt it a thousand times, a million times, in a thousand different ways.
So he waited for it now. Waited for the familiar twist in his gut, the bitter taste on his tongue, the small, ugly voice that whispered why not me, why not mine, why not ever.
But it didn't come.
He searched for it—really searched, dug deep into the dark corners of his chest where all the old wounds lived—and found nothing but space. Nothing but warmth. Nothing but the steady, impossible realization that what filled him wasn't envy at all.
It was gratitude.
Huge, overwhelming, bone-deep gratitude. So big it made his ribs ache, made his breath catch, made fresh tears spill silently into Shane's hair.
Because Shane knew. Shane knew what love was supposed to look like. He'd grown up with it, breathed it in like air, had it woven into the very fabric of who he was. He knew what it felt like to be held without conditions, to be loved without performance. And with all that knowledge, with all that history, with every example of what love should be burned into his bones—
Shane had chosen Ilya.
Shane had looked at Ilya Rozanov—broken, sharp-edged, terrified of his own heart—and seen something worth keeping. Something worth calling at midnight. Something worth coming back to, over and over again. Something worth being brave for. Something worth holding onto in a freezing hospital waiting room while his mother was in surgery. Shane had seen something in Ilya that Ilya himself couldn't find. Had found something worth loving in all the broken, messy, complicated space between Ilya's ribs.
He pressed his face deeper into Shane's hair, hiding the tears, hiding the wrecked expression he could feel pulling at his features. His arm tightened around Shane's shoulders, pulling him closer, and he let the gratitude wash over him like a wave.
Thank you, he thought, though he didn't know if he was thanking Shane or David or whatever cold, indifferent universe had somehow, impossibly, led him here. Thank you for loving him the way he deserves. Thank you for making him someone who could love me back.
Yeah. No envy. Just this. Just gratitude. Just the overwhelming, terrifying, beautiful certainty that somehow, against all odds, he'd been chosen by someone who knew exactly what love was supposed to look like.
Shane moved a little, not pulling away—never pulling away, not anymore—just adjusting, settling deeper into Ilya's side like he belonged there. Like this was normal. Like they'd been doing this for years instead of hours. His free arm—the one not currently being held by his father—slid around Ilya's back, palm pressing flat against the space between his shoulder blades. Warm. Solid. Grounding. And then he just... kept talking.
"—But I want to tell you. I don't want to hide anymore. Not from you. Not from them." He glanced at Hayden and Jackie, then back at his father. "I've been hiding for ten years. I'm so tired of it. And after tonight—after thinking I could lose her without her ever knowing who I really am—I just..." His voice broke again. "I can't. I can't keep—"
Ilya stopped listening.
Not because he didn't care—he cared, god, he cared so fucking much—but because Shane's hand was moving in slow, absent circles against his back. The same motion Ilya had been using on Shane's shoulder all night, mirrored back at him without thought, without intention, like Shane's body had simply decided that this was how they held each other now. Like it was instinct. Like it was habit. Like it was something they'd done a thousand times before.
And maybe, in a way, they had. In the dark. In those stolen hours when the world didn't exist and Shane's skin was the only map Ilya needed. But those moments had always been borrowed, always temporary, always tinged with the knowledge that morning would come and they'd go back to being strangers. This wasn't borrowed. This wasn't temporary. This was Shane, in front of his father, in front of his best friends, holding Ilya like it was the most natural thing in the world. Like he'd been doing it his whole life. Like he never planned to stop.
lya stayed there for a moment longer, still hidden in the soft, dark warmth of Shane's hair, breathing him in. Letting the familiar, comforting smell of him—cedar and salt, like standing on a weathered deck near the coast, where land and sea don’t quite blend and everything feels quietly held in place—calm the last of the static in his chest, grounding him in a way nothing else could do. When he finally lifted his head, David's eyes had softened, and he was squeezing his son's hand gently.
"Then tell us whatever you want to tell us," David said quietly. "We're here. We're listening. And we're not going anywhere."
Shane nodded, a small, grateful movement. He took a breath, clearly gearing up for another round of explanations, when Hayden's voice cut through the quiet.
"You just said ten years." Hayden's voice was quiet now, all the earlier chaos drained out of it. He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, looking at Shane like he was trying to reconcile every version of him he'd ever known with this new information. "You're telling me that for a decade—while we were rooming together on road trips, while I was sitting next to you in locker rooms, while I was complaining to you about Ilya Rozanov—you were just..." He trailed off, shook his head. "I don't even know what I'm asking."
Shane's jaw tightened. Just a fraction. His hand, still pressed warm against Ilya's back, didn't stop its slow circles.
"It wasn't like that," Shane said quietly. "It was never like that."
"Then what was it like?"
Shane was quiet for a long moment. Ilya watched him—watched the way his gaze drifted to the blank wall opposite, the way his thumb kept moving against Ilya's spine like it was the only thing keeping him tethered to the moment.
"Complicated," Shane finally said. "Messy. Confusing." A small exhale. "We were eighteen when this started. Both of us. Terrified. In way over our heads. And at the beginning we were just fooling around."
Ilya's fingers pressed a little harder against his shoulder—a silent reminder that he was here, that he was not facing this alone. Not anymore.
"We didn't know what we were doing," Shane continued, his voice softer now. "Didn't know what it meant, what it would become. We just knew that when we were together, it felt—" He stopped, searching.
"Like coming up for air," Ilya offered quietly.
Shane glanced at him. Held his gaze for a moment. Then nodded. "Yeah. Like that. Like I was—like we were, finally just ourselves. Not Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov, just Shane and Ilya."
Across from them, David was very still. His hand hadn't moved from Shane's. His eyes hadn't left his son's face. Hayden was quiet too, processing. When he spoke again, his voice was different—softer, stripped of its usual bravado.
"God," he said. "You two were just kids."
Shane nodded, his eyes bright.
"Eighteen," Hayden continued, like he was working through it out loud. "You were eighteen. Fresh out of juniors." He shook his head slowly. "I've known you for nine years, Shane, and I thought I knew you pretty good, but—but I have literally never met a version of you that wasn't somehow tangled up with him and I didn’t even suspect it.”
Shane's mouth opened, then closed. There wasn't really anything to say to that. It was true. Every version of himself he could remember, from that terrified rookie to the captain sitting here now, had Ilya somewhere in the margins. Even when they weren't together, even when they were pretending, Ilya was there. A constant. A thread running through everything.
"Ten years."
"Yes Hays, I heard you the first time."
"I don't think you understand how long ten years is, Buddie. That's—that's a decade. That's—" Hayden did some rapid mental math. "That's like, a third of our lives, you need to be a little patience with me here. That's—"
Hayden's mouth opened and closed several times. Jackie patted his knee sympathetically.
"I think what he's trying to say," Jackie offered, "is that the mental image of you two together is going to take some time to process."
"Together," Hayden repeated weakly. "Together together. For ten years. While he was breaking my nose in playoffs."
"That was one time," Ilya said.
"One time? You cross-checked me into the boards so hard I saw stars!"
"You were in front of my net."
"I'm always in front of your net. That's my job!"
"And I always cross-check you. Also my job."
Ilya felt the familiar itch of mischief crawling up his spine. It was strange, after hours of terror and tears, to feel something so normal—but Shane was warm against his side, and Yuna was going to be okay, and Hayden Pike was so easy to rile up. He couldn't help himself.
"That's not—" Hayden sputtered, and for a moment he was fully distracted, caught up in the familiar rhythm of arguing with Ilya Rozanov. It was almost comfortable, this back-and-forth—a dance they'd done a hundred times on ice, just with less blood and more fluorescent lights. Then Hayden caught himself. He blinked, looked back at Shane, and something in his expression shifted. Softened. Like he'd remembered what they were actually here for.
He shook his head, a small, rueful smile tugging at his mouth.
"You," he said to Ilya, "are very annoying."
"I know."
"But you're also—" Hayden paused, glanced at Shane, then back at Ilya. "You're also apparently... this. So I'm going to figure out how to be okay with it."
Ilya raised an eyebrow. "Is that your way of saying you accept me?"
"It's my way of saying I'm gonna try."
"Trying is first step. Is very good. I am proud of you."
Hayden made a sound that might have been a laugh, buried somewhere under all the exhaustion. "You're impossible."
"Da, because you are so easy."
Across from them, David's quiet voice cut through. "He's got you there, Hayden."
Hayden's head snapped toward Shane's father, betrayal written all over his face. "Not you too."
David shrugged, unrepentant. "I'm just making an observation."
"Observe less."
"I don't think that's how observing works."
Shane laughed—soft and surprised, the sound vibrating against Ilya's side. It was small, barely there, but it was real. And Ilya felt something warm spread through his chest at the sound of it. For a moment, the silence was comfortable. Full of breath and warmth and the slow, settling weight of everything that had been said.
Then Hayden's brow furrowed.
"Wait," he said slowly. "So what was all that with Rose, then? You two seemed serious. For a while there, I thought—"
Ilya felt Shane stiffen beside him and forced his face into careful neutrality, but something cold flickered in his chest anyway—Rose Landry, the actress, the beautiful, famous woman who had been all over the tabloids with Shane. The one from the club, with her perfect smile and her hands all over Shane's back. The one he could go out in public with. Didn't need to hide.
Ilya had tried very hard to stop thinking about Rose after Shane told him they weren’t compatible.
Shane made a sound low in his throat. "Hayden—"
"I'm not trying to—" Hayden stopped, ran a hand through his hair. "I'm not trying to be difficult. I just... you seemed serious. You brought her to team events. Jackie and I had dinner with you guys. You held her hand. You introduced her to your mom."
He paused, and when he spoke again, his voice came out slower. Wrecked.
“I thought you were happy.”
The words stayed there between them, heavier than they should have been for something said so quietly.
Ilya watched something shift in Hayden’s expression then—something small, but unmistakable. A fracture in the usual bravado. A glimpse of something raw and unguarded beneath all the easy sarcasm and noise he so often used to keep the world from getting too close.
He had been so relieved when Shane started seeing Rose. After years of watching his best friend throw himself into hockey and almost nothing else, years of watching him sidestep every question about his personal life with that careful, polished blankness of his, years of wondering—quietly, privately—whether Shane was lonelier than he ever let anyone see, Rose had felt, at first, like an answer.
Like proof that Shane might finally have something good. Something steady. Something real. Something that might soften the sharpest edges of his solitude and give him the kind of quiet, ordinary happiness Hayden himself had stumbled into almost obscenely young with Jackie and, by some miracle, never lost.
He had wanted that for Shane more than he had ever said out loud.
Not because Shane needed saving, and not because Hayden thought a relationship was some magical cure for whatever private, carefully hidden things lived inside a person, but because everyone deserved to have someone. Everyone deserved at least one person in the world who made the unbearable parts of life feel lighter to carry. And Shane had always seemed like someone carrying far more than he ever let anyone touch.
And now?
Now Hayden did not know what to do with any of it. Had Shane been lonely anyway? Had he been hurting right in front of him all this time, while Hayden had been stupidly, sincerely relieved, patting himself on the back for believing his best friend had finally found someone who made him happy? What kind of friend felt grateful for a lie simply because it had looked enough like happiness from a distance?
Had he missed it all because Shane was that good at hiding, or because Hayden himself had wanted so badly to believe in the surface of things that he had never once forced himself to look underneath?
His gaze flicked, just briefly, to Ilya.
And for one strange, disorienting second, something else seemed to move through him too—something quieter than shock, and far more unsettling. A thought, half-formed and almost absurd in its lateness.
What if Shane had found someone after all? What if he had not been alone in the way Hayden had always feared? What if the answer had been here, somehow, all along, hidden in plain sight beneath years of bickering and sharp edges and whatever strange, impossible thing had always existed between them?
Ilya felt Shane's breathing change at the words—just slightly, just enough for him to notice.
“I was,” Shane said quietly. “Not the way you think, and not the way I wanted to. But I was.”
Hayden did not interrupt. Did not rush to fill the silence the way he so often seemed biologically incapable of not doing. He only stood there with his mouth slightly parted, his usual easy expression gone strangely blank, as though he had not yet caught up to the shape of what was being handed to him.
Shane took a breath. Let it out. Took another.
“I didn’t always know,” he began slowly. “What I wanted. Who I was. I mean, I knew I felt things for Ilya, but I also thought—” He stopped, swallowed. “I thought maybe I could be normal. Maybe I could want what everyone else wanted. And with her I tried, I really, really tried. But I just couldn’t.”
David’s hand tightened around Shane’s almost imperceptibly, not enough to interrupt him, only enough to anchor him there—to say, without words, I’m still here. Keep going. I’m still here.
But it was Hayden’s face Ilya found himself watching.
Something complicated moved across it then, too quick and too deep to be called simple surprise. It darkened his expression for only a second, but it was enough. Enough for Ilya to see the way the word normal had landed wrong. Not with confusion, but with pain. With the sudden, ugly understanding of just how long Shane must have been carrying around the belief that he had somehow failed at becoming the version of himself the world would have found easiest to love.
Ilya thought, suddenly and with a strange sharpness, about all the times Hayden had protected Shane on the ice.
The dropped gloves. The immediate, unquestioning way he always seemed to step between Shane and whatever came at him too hard, too cruel, too fast. The fights he picked without hesitation, the bruises he collected on Shane’s behalf as if his body had long ago decided that was one of the things it was for.
Ilya had always dismissed it as hockey. As instinct. As teammates being teammates.
But maybe it had never been only that.
Maybe Hayden had spent years sensing, in some wordless, animal way, that there was something in Shane softer than he ever let the world see, something he guarded so viciously that even Hayden himself had never been trusted close enough to name it. Maybe, without even knowing what he was protecting him from, Hayden had been standing guard for years.
And maybe that was why guilt was now opening so visibly across his face. Because he couldn’t protect Shane from this—from himself, from the years of hiding, from the loneliness of it all—because maybe, despite his best efforts, Shane had still spent years trying to survive himself in silence while the people who loved him most stood just outside the walls, believing he was fine because he had made “fine” look so convincing.
Ilya wondered, not without a flicker of reluctant sympathy, how badly Pike felt in this exact moment. Whether he was replaying every awkward deflection, every too-careful answer, every time Shane had smiled just a little too quickly and changed the subject before anyone could look too closely. Probably as bad as Ilya himself. Probably worse, in some ways, because Hayden had been right there the whole time and never known.
And wasn’t that a thought to have. To feel genuine, aching empathy for Hayden Pike of all people.
“Rose was the first person I ever told. About me. Or more like, she realized and confronted me about it.” Shane continued, his voice softer now, his eyes flickering to his father.
David was watching him with the kind of stillness that did not read as detachment but devotion—as if every part of him had gone completely quiet just to make more room for whatever Shane needed to say next. There was something almost unbearable in the steadiness of it, in the absolute absence of recoil. He looked at Shane the way some people held fragile things in both hands: carefully, yes, but never fearfully. Like there was no version of his son that could make love require reconsideration.
“She was really good about it, really kind. She helped me see that it wasn’t—that I wasn’t broken. That I could want both, or neither, or whatever, and it didn’t make me less of a person.” He swallowed hard. “She helped me understand that I’m—that I like men. That it was okay to be gay. That it is okay that I’m gay.”
The words settled into the room with a strange, almost sacred weight to them, as if even the fluorescent hospital air had paused long enough to make space. Heavy, because Ilya could hear what they had cost Shane to drag into the light. Light, because once spoken, they no longer seemed to belong entirely to shame.
David nodded. Just once. But there was nothing absentminded in the movement. It was small, yes, and quiet, but it carried the solemnity of something chosen deliberately—like he was not simply reacting, but placing his acceptance down with care where Shane would be able to find it and trust that it would stay.
“Okay,” he said. Not a question. Not a challenge. Not a request for clarification. Just okay. And the simplicity of it was so staggering it nearly felt unreal.
No hesitation. No visible recalculation. No subtle shift in his face that would suggest he was rearranging his son into something newly unfamiliar. Just okay, offered with the same calm certainty he might have used if Shane had told him the weather had changed or that he was hungry or that he needed a ride home.
Something in Shane’s expression gave then—not dramatically, not all at once, but in one small, involuntary fracture through the middle of the composure he had been clinging to with such visible effort. His eyes widened just slightly, and for one fleeting second he looked almost young again. Not childish. Just startled in the oldest, deepest way there was: by the possibility that the thing he had feared might not happen after all.
He did not speak. He didn’t need to.
Not with his father looking at him like that.
David squeezed his hand. “I mean it, son. Okay.”
That was all.
No dramatic embrace. No grand declaration. No one crying openly, though David’s eyes had gone wet, and Shane’s were bright, and something hot and tight had lodged itself in the back of Ilya’s throat with such force he refused to examine it too closely for fear it might become unbearable if named. Just a father holding his son’s hand as though it had never occurred to him to let go. Accepting him not loudly, not performatively, not as some heroic act of tolerance, but with the kind of quiet certainty that made it feel, somehow, even bigger. Quietly. Without condition.
Ilya had to look away for a moment. Just a second. Just long enough to lower his face into Shane’s hair and breathe, because there was suddenly too much inside his chest and nowhere for any of it to go.
When he looked back, Jackie was watching him.
Not in the prying, curious way most people did when they thought they had stumbled onto something intimate, but with a softness that made it feel, somehow, worse. Like she had seen far more than he would ever have willingly shown. Like she understood, in some quiet and unnervingly complete way, exactly what that moment had cost him to witness. She didn’t say anything about it. Didn’t embarrass him by naming whatever had passed across his face. She only gave him a small, warm smile, one that held no mockery and no pity, and turned back to Shane as if granting him the dignity of pretending she hadn’t just looked straight through him.
“Rose sounds like a good friend,” she said quietly.
Shane nodded, and his face did that awful, delicate thing it always did when he was trying not to cry—his mouth tightening at the corners, his eyes going too bright too fast, as though emotion always reached him first in the places he tried hardest to control.
“The best,” he said. A pause. “She still is.” His fingers shifted slightly against Ilya’s where their hands rested together, not enough to draw attention to it, just enough for Ilya to feel the warmth of it. Grounding. “She’s the one who told me to stop being a coward and actually talk to Ilya.”
Ilya blinked. “She told you to talk to me?”
“She told me a lot of things.” Shane’s mouth curved, just slightly, and there was something so fond and quietly exasperated in it that Ilya could almost picture the entire conversation without having been there. “Mostly that I was being an idiot and that if I didn’t do something about it, I’d regret it for the rest of my life.”
Ilya did not know what to do with that.
For too long, Rose Landry had existed in his mind more like a wound than a person. A polished, smiling doll in paparazzi photos and thirty-second clips from some games that Ilya would die before telling another soul that he had watched and analyzed every frame till his eyes started to burn. She was always at Shane’s side in public in some way that felt effortless and unbearably easy, safe in a way Ilya could never be. A woman Shane could stand beside in daylight without anyone looking twice. A woman he could walk holding hands if he wanted, and the world would smile at them for it instead of making them into something ugly and wrong.
Ilya had not known how to look at that and not feel replaced by the life it represented. He had thought, stupidly, selfishly, and with the full force of his own private misery, that Rose was proof Shane had chosen a version of happiness that had no space for him in it. And maybe that was why it had hurt so much. Not the fact that the only person Ilya had ever loved was actively choosing to be with someone else—though that was another scar he would have to show under his skin permanently—but the fact that with her, Shane had seemed to have access to a life Ilya had long ago stopped believing belonged to people like them. a life without hiding, without all that careful distance. A life without shame clinging to every soft touch.
A couple of weeks ago, when Shane had first come out to him, Ilya had not understood what he had actually been trying to say. He'd heard I’m gay and translated it only through the narrow, bruised logic of his own fear. Now Ilya thought that maybe Shane was trying to tell him that, for him, Rose had never been proof of any kind of freedom—quite the opposite, actually. She had been proof that he had tried and failed; she was the last straw that made Shane finally run out of ways to lie to himself.
What Ilya had been too brute to understand, and Shane too unsure to actually explain, was this: There is no other path left for me, not like there is for you.
But what Shane had not known, back then, what Ilya himself had not been brave enough to say either, is that being capable of wanting women had never actually saved him from anything. That his bisexuality, so useful in theory, had been functionally worthless the moment the only person he had ever wanted to build a life around had turned out to be a man with shining eyes and a soft heart.
That there had never really been another life for Ilya either.
Rose Landry. A woman Ilya had never met, whose name had once made something ugly and possessive twist low in his chest. But now—now he understood. She wasn't the reason Shane had stayed away from him. She was the reason Shane had come back.
She had seen Shane when Shane could not yet bear to see himself clearly. Had sat beside him through all the confusion and fear and futile, painful attempts to become someone easier to be. She had not recoiled when he told her the truth. Had not made him feel fractured for wanting things that refused to fit neatly into the shape of a life the world approved of. And when it mattered most, she had not let him keep hiding behind indecision and fear and timing and all the other flimsy excuses people used when they were terrified of the one thing they wanted most. She had pushed him—gently, but firmly—toward the person who had always been waiting for him.
And tonight—tonight, when everything could have fallen apart, when Shane could have retreated back into silence and safety—he hadn't. He'd sat in front of his father, his best friends, and laid himself bare. He'd let Ilya hold him in a hospital waiting room where anyone could see. He'd kissed him back like the world outside those doors didn't exist.
That was Rose too, wasn't it? Not directly—but the courage, the willingness to stop running, In the slow, painful work of becoming someone who no longer wanted fear to be the organizing principle of his life. That was what she'd helped him find. That was the gift she'd given him. Given them.
Maybe, when everything was alright—when Yuna was home and healing, when he and Shane had slept for about twelve hours straight, when they'd had time to talk about what this meant for them, about what came next—maybe Ilya could ask. Ask if Shane would want to organize a dinner. Something small. Somewhere quiet. Nothing overwhelming. Just enough for Ilya to finally meet the woman who had, in some indirect but undeniable way, saved them both long before either of them knew they needed saving.
And maybe—if Shane wanted, if he was ready—Ilya could give him something too. Something he'd never given anyone. Not just his heart, not just his future, but his past. The only piece of home he had managed to carry intact across an ocean and through fifteen years of loneliness.
Svetlana.
The only real friend he'd ever had before Shane walked into his life. The woman who had never asked him to be anyone other than who he was. Who had never demanded more than he was willing to give.
Ilya hadn't really told her—that he also liked men—because he'd never needed to. She had simply known, the way she always knew things about him that he never said aloud, and he was not naïve enough to imagine she had failed to form certain conclusions about Shane over the years. So she probably knew. Or at least suspected—The way she always said Jane with that infuriating, knowing little edge of amusement whenever she caught him on the phone at odd hours, or the way one eyebrow would tilt whenever he came back from a game against Montreal quieter than usual, had never exactly suggested a woman that found him especially convincing.
But she never pressed. Never asked. Never made him say anything he wasn't ready to say. She had only ever looked at him with that same patient steadiness, as though she did not need every detail in order to remain loyal. As though she trusted that one day, if and when he could bear to speak plainly, he would. She had always respected his limits, and for that, Ilya would always love her.
She had protected him as best she could. From his family, from himself, from the situations he stumbled into and didn't know how to escape. Svetlana had been the only person in his life who looked at him and saw someone worth staying, without asking him to be different first.
For years, he hadn't let himself talk about Shane with her. Not because he was afraid she would think less of him—Svetlana had never made him feel less, not once—but because saying it out loud would have made it real in a way he had not known how to survive. It would have given it weight. It would have meant admitting that what he felt for Shane was not some private indulgence that only existed in the dark or in hotel rooms or in the space between games, but something with consequence. Something with tenderness. Something that mattered enough to ruin him if he lost it.
Now, though—Now he wanted to tell her everything. Wanted to show up at her door and tell her that Jane had a name and a face and a laugh and a smile that made something painful and joyful crack open in his chest all at once. Wanted, selfishly and absurdly, to put the two people who had loved him most cleanly in the same room and watch what happened.
He just hoped neither of them killed him when he did.
Svetlana, meanwhile, would almost certainly kill him for an entirely different reason. Because for all her quiet, knowing smiles and her pointed "Jane"s, Ilya had never told her the truth. Had never given her the satisfaction of being right. Had let her wonder, let her guess, let her wait for the day he'd finally be ready to say the words out loud. And now he was going to show up one day and tell her that Jane was not only a man, but the man. Ilya Rozanov, captain of the Boston Raiders, hopelessly in love with Shane Hollander, captain of the Montreal Voyageurs. Their rivalry. Their history. Their years of secrets and sharp edges and all the things they had been to each other before they had ever allowed themselves to become this.
She was going to kill him. And then, almost certainly, ask why he had not had the basic decency to get her a signed jersey years ago.
If Rose was the person who taught Shane it was okay to love who he loved, then Svetlana was the person who had taught Ilya that he was allowed to be loved at all.
Maybe he could give Shane that part of himself too.
He did not know how to thank all the people who had, knowingly or not, carried them to this exact moment. So he only tightened his hold on Shane by a fraction, let the warmth of him seep quietly into every cold, starved place, and hoped that, for now, that could be enough.
Jackie leaned forward slightly then, one hand curling more securely around Hayden’s forearm as if she were easing herself into the shape of a question she already suspected she would regret asking.
“So when did it—” She gestured vaguely. “When did it become... this?”
“All Stars’ Game,” Ilya said. “That was where something changed.”
Jackie’s brow furrowed, but not with judgment. More with the strained concentration of someone trying to reverse-engineer a decade’s worth of emotional nonsense in real time and finding the math actively offensive.
“But that was just a few weeks ago.”
Shane nodded.
“So you’re telling me,” she said slowly, looking between them now as if the answer might somehow improve if she could physically inspect both of their faces at once, “that you two have been dancing around each other for almost ten years. And you only actually talked about it a few weeks ago?”
Ilya shrugged. “We are not very smart.”
Shane huffed a laugh, the sound quiet and frayed at the edges from exhaustion but real enough to make something inside Ilya unclench. “Speak for yourself.”
“I am speaking for both of us. We are equally stupid. Is part of our charm.”
Jackie shook her head, though there was affection all over her face now, disbelief softened by something far warmer. “That’s insane.”
“Is love,” Ilya corrected. “Insane love. There is difference.”
Jackie’s smile widened, and her head came to rest lightly against Hayden’s shoulder in a gesture so easy and long-practiced it almost made the room feel warmer. Then she looked at Ilya—really looked at him, without irony, without teasing, without the amused detachment she had worn through most of this conversation—and something in her expression gentled.
“I like him,” she said simply, nodding toward Shane. “He’s good for you, Shane. You made an excellent choice, just so you know.”
The words landed in Ilya’s chest with the delicate, destabilizing force of something he had no instinct yet for catching. Approval, perhaps. Acceptance
He wasn't sure himself. Wasn't sure Shane had made a good choice at all. There were a thousand reasons why this could fall apart, a thousand ways Ilya could mess it up, there were still too many voices inside him, too many old reflexes sharpened into certainty over years of being exactly the kind of person people warned others about. too rough, too broken, too much.
But Shane had chosen him anyway. This beautiful boy had looked at him in the middle of all this chaos and said I love you like it was the simplest thing in the world. And if Shane let him—if Shane kept choosing him, day after day, year after year—Ilya would spend the rest of his life trying to prove Jackie right. Trying to be the keeper Shane deserved. Trying to build something steady enough, gentle enough, worthy enough, that Shane would never have cause to look back on this night and wonder what on earth he had been thinking.
Shane’s flush deepened, but he did not look away from Jackie. If anything, he seemed to settle more fully into himself beneath the weight of her certainty, like some small part of him had finally unclenched at being told out loud that the thing he wanted most did not look ridiculous or doomed from the outside.
"I know," he said quietly.
Not I think so. Not I hope so. Just I know. Like there wasn't a single doubt in his mind. Like Ilya being made for him was as obvious as gravity, as undeniable as the beating of his own heart. Like Ilya was perfect for him the same way Shane was perfect for Ilya.
He didn't turn to look at Ilya. Didn't need to. He just said it—simple and sure—like he'd known it for years. Like it was just a fact, no different from the ice being cold or the sky being blue. And maybe he had known. Maybe through all the years of hotel rooms and late-night calls and unfinished conversations and pretending and wanting and not wanting to want, Shane had known something Ilya was only now beginning to let himself believe.
I know.
Shane knew. Shane had always known. And Ilya was going to spend the rest of his life making sure that certainty was never misplaced.
"Please stop making bedroom eyes at my best friend in front of me and his father," Hayden complained.
David held up both hands immediately. "No, please don't get me into this."
But there was no real resistance in it. His voice had gone lighter than it had been in hours, and the laugh that escaped him seemed to surprise even himself, as though his body had momentarily forgotten it was still supposed to be bracing for bad news.
Ilya felt a grin tugging at his mouth.
This—this was what he had never let himself want. Not just Shane, but this too. The teasing. The warmth. The careless intimacy of people who already belonged to one another enough to be ridiculous in front of each other without shame. The kind of family banter he had spent most of his life watching from the edges of rooms, close enough to recognize its shape and far enough away to know it had never been meant for him.
“Bedroom eyes?” he repeated, genuinely delighted now. “You think I make bedroom eyes at Shane? This is not bedroom eyes; this is I love you eyes.”
“I don’t know what you make! I’m not an expert on whatever this is!”
“I make many eyes at Shane. Some are bedroom. Some are ‘I want to kill you on ice.’ Some are both. He is very good at reading them.”
Shane groaned against Ilya’s shoulder, but the sound lacked all real suffering. It came out soft and embarrassed and suspiciously close to fond, like his body had already given up any serious attempt at resisting being folded into whatever this had become.
“Please stop.”
“He knows all my looks,” Ilya continued, warming to the topic.
He was being himself. Completely, unapologetically himself. And they were laughing with him, not at him. What unsettled Ilya most was not Pike’s outrage, or Jackie’s knowing little smiles, or even David looking at him with the exhausted, kind eyes of a man too worried about his wife to spare much energy for whatever complicated thing his son and Ilya clearly were.
It was the fact that no one had asked him to leave yet. No one looked at him and saw an intrusion. No one treated him like something shameful Shane had dragged in by accident and would need to explain away later. They made room.
Quietly. Almost absentmindedly. As if the space beside Shane had always been his in some unfinished, unspoken way and they were only just now catching up to something Shane himself had known for years.
It should not have mattered as much as it did. It mattered enough to make his throat ache.
Here he was. And they were still laughing.
“Is very impressive,” Ilya continued. “Ten years of practice. From across the ice, I can tell him—” He made a series of exaggerated faces. “This one means ‘meet me after.’ This one means ‘you are in my spot.’ This one means ‘your hair looks stupid today but I still want to kiss you.’”
“That last one is not a real look,” Shane muttered against his shoulder.
“Is absolutely real. You just miss it because you are too busy staring at my ass.”
Shane’s head snapped up so quickly it was almost violent, all soft post-confession daze instantly replaced by sheer offended panic. The flush that had never fully left his face deepened with impressive efficiency, climbing all the way up into his ears.
“I do not stare at your ass.”
“You do. Is okay. I stare at yours too. Is fair.”
“Ilya Rozanov!”
“What? We are being honest now. This is honesty time.”
Jackie had long since abandoned any attempt at restraint. She was laughing openly now, one hand pressed to her mouth too late to do anything useful, her entire body tipped slightly toward Hayden like she physically needed someone to absorb the force of how delighted she was by all of this. Even David had covered part of his face with one hand, though the effort was useless. The smile was there anyway, visible in the softened lines around his eyes and the helpless, intermittent shake of his shoulders.
They’re not just tolerating me, Ilya realized, something warm and strange and almost frightening unfurling low in his chest. They’re actually enjoying this. They’re enjoying me.
And from somewhere behind his hands—currently clamped over most of his face like a man trying to preserve the last surviving fragments of his dignity—Hayden made a muffled groaning sound. At some point during the conversation, he had folded in on himself almost completely, elbows braced on his knees, shoulders rounded forward, as if the only available strategy now was to physically make himself smaller until the situation either improved or killed him.
“Okay. So. Ten years. Rookie showcase. Rose was—” He waved one hand vaguely through the air without uncovering his face. “—a whole thing. And Tampa was—” Another helpless motion. “—recent.”
He paused, then peeked at them through his fingers with the shell-shocked expression of a man who had been forced to realize that an enormous, absurd drama had apparently been unfolding directly in front of him for a decade without his knowledge.
“I have approximately seven hundred more questions, but I’m going to try really hard to be chill about this.”
“Try harder,” Jackie murmured.
“I am trying!” Hayden pointed at Ilya. “My mortal enemy is apparently in love with my best friend, and has been for the better part of a decade. Give me a break.”
“I am not your mortal enemy,” Ilya corrected. “I am your captain’s lover.”
“Same thing,” Hayden complained, at the exact same moment Shane muttered under his breath, “Oh my God, why wasn’t I on the plane with Mom.”
Ilya ignored him completely, too busy soaking in the warmth spreading through his chest—the impossible, terrifying warmth of watching Hayden Pike, of all people, complain and gripe and protest his way steadily toward acceptance without even realizing that was what he was doing.
And for the first time in his life, Ilya thought maybe, just maybe, he could stop waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“Is not the same thing,” he continued. “Mortal enemy implies we are still fighting. We are not. I am part of the family now. You have to accept me.”
“Have to?”
“Is in the rules.”
“There are no rules!”
“Family rules. Very important. Jackie already likes me. David likes me. Shane loves me. You are outnumbered.”
Hayden lifted his head just enough to glare at Ilya through the gaps between his fingers, the expression itself far more performative than sincere by now.
“I hate you.”
“No you don’t.”
Ilya pressed a little closer to Shane, letting the warmth of him settle against all the places in himself that had spent too many years braced for rejection.
“I really, really do.”
“You bought me a birthday shot last year. At that bar in Boston. After the game.”
Hayden froze.
The stillness that followed was so immediate and complete it bordered on theatrical. Jackie turned to look at him slowly, with the sharp, delighted interest of someone who had just been handed a brand-new weapon and already intended to use it.
Ilya’s smile widened.
He could feel Shane starting to shake beside him with the effort of not laughing again, his forehead now half-hidden against Ilya’s shoulder as though that might somehow preserve a shred of neutrality he had very clearly already lost.
This—this ridiculous, stupid little argument—was exactly what Ilya had never known enough to want until it was happening to him. To be teased and tease back like he was just another person in the room instead of Ilya Rozanov the villain, the Russian, the outsider, the man people formed opinions about before they had ever heard him laugh.
“I know you remember,” he continued, clearly enjoying himself. “We were both there. You bought a round for your linemates. And then you saw me, and you—”
“I was being polite!”
“You bought me a shot. And we clinked glasses. And you said—”
“Don’t.”
“—‘good game, Rozanov.’ And I said—”
“Ilya.”
“—‘good game, Pike. See you next time.’ And then we drank.” Ilya smiled, slow and infuriating. “That was bonding. You cannot take it back now.”
Hayden dropped his face back into his hands with a defeated thump, the gesture so dramatic it finally tipped over from resistance into full surrender.
“I hate everything.”
Jackie patted his back with the absent, soothing rhythm one might use on a deeply distressed but ultimately harmless house pet.
“There, there, honey. You’ll survive.”
“Will I?”
“Probably.”
A sound escaped Hayden then that might have been a laugh if it had not been so thoroughly buried under mock suffering. His shoulders gave him away anyway, loosening and shaking with it despite his best efforts.
“I need a minute,” he mumbled.
Shane’s voice, when it came, was quieter than the room deserved.
Steadier too.
“Take a minute. We’re not going anywhere.”
Hayden looked at him then. And just like that, something in his face shifted. The joke drained out of him first. Then the defensiveness. Then that frantic need to turn everything into something manageable and stupid and unserious before it could get too close to whatever it was actually making him feel.
What remained after that was something much simpler.
Just Shane’s best friend. The same one who had, despite it all, always tried to protect him. Always tried, in whatever imperfect ways he knew how, to be there. Just Hayden, sitting in a hospital waiting room, trying to find the right words
“I’m glad you’re okay,” he said finally. “I mean it. After tonight, after everything—” He stopped, swallowed. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
Shane nodded, and Ilya felt rather than saw the slight shift in him—that tiny internal collapse people sometimes had when relief landed somewhere too tender to be held upright for long.
“And I’m sorry,” Hayden continued, his voice rougher now. “That I wasn’t—that you couldn’t tell me. That you had to go through all of that alone. I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you the way you needed.”
Shane’s breath caught, just a little. But Ilya felt it immediately, the small hitch of it where they were still pressed together.
“But I’m glad,” Hayden said, “that you came out the other side of it. That you’re still here, a better man. That you’re—” He gestured vaguely at Shane, at Ilya, at the two of them folded into each other in a way that no longer looked accidental. “That you have this. Even if I don’t understand it. Even if it’s weird.” A small, awkward shrug. “I’m glad.”
Shane nodded again, smaller this time. Softer.
“Thanks, Hayd.”
Hayden waved it off immediately, but the gesture lacked its usual dismissiveness. It looked less like rejection and more like someone trying, unsuccessfully, to cover up the fact that he had just said something honest enough to make his own skin itch.
“Yeah, well. Don’t get used to it. I’m still going to need therapy.”
Jackie patted his knee. “We’ll get you a good one.”
That finally got a real laugh out of him—brief, reluctant, but unmistakable.
Shane leaned his head back against Ilya’s shoulder then, watching his best friend slowly unravel and restitch himself in real time with a soft, exhausted smile still lingering at the corners of his mouth. He was still pink. Still visibly flustered. But there was something else in him now too. Something looser. Something that looked a little too much like relief for Ilya not to notice it instantly.
“You’re enjoying this way too much.” Shane whispered to him.
“Am enjoying this exactly the right amount. Is perfect amount.”
“You’re evil.”
“I’m a man in love,” Ilya said proudly. And then, lower, pitched just for Shane, “You good?”
Shane glanced up at him. Held his gaze for a long moment. Then, slowly, he nodded.
“Yeah,” he whispered back. “I think I am.”
Ilya believed him.
The waiting room settled into something almost peaceful—the quiet hum of the lights, the distant beep of monitors, the soft sound of Shane breathing against his chest, solid and real and his. Hayden was still muttering into his palms. Jackie was still wiping her eyes. David was still smiling that small, quiet smile. All of it—the grief and the relief and the ridiculous, wonderful chaos of this new thing they were building together—hung in the air like a held breath.
And then a door opened.
Not the elevator. Not the stairwell. One of the heavy double doors down the hall, the ones that led to the restricted areas where families weren't allowed. A figure in surgical scrubs emerged, clipboard in hand, eyes scanning the waiting area.
Ilya's heart stopped.
He felt Shane tense beside him, felt the way his hand froze mid-circle against Ilya's back. Felt the collective intake of breath from everyone in the room as the surgeon walked toward them.
The doors swung open before anyone was ready for them.
Every head in the waiting room snapped up at once, the fragile, half-formed quiet collapsing instantly under the weight of collective panic. A woman in blue scrubs stepped through the double doors, surgical cap still on, mask pulled down around her neck, clipboard in hand and exhaustion written plainly across every line of her face.
Her eyes moved across the room.
“Hollander family?”
David was on his feet before the words had fully left her mouth, as if his body had made the decision before his mind had even caught up. Shane tried to stand too, but his legs gave under him almost immediately, trembling with the kind of weakness that came only after too many hours spent held together by fear alone.
Ilya caught him before he could stumble.
He tightened one arm around Shane’s shoulders and steadied him against his side, feeling the full, shaking weight of him lean in without resistance this time, as if whatever force had been keeping him upright all night had finally burned itself out.
“Here,” David said, his voice raw enough to sound scraped from somewhere deep. “We’re here.”
The surgeon smiled then—small and tired and unmistakably genuine—and something in Ilya’s chest cracked open so suddenly it almost hurt.
“Mrs. Hollander is out of surgery,” she said. “The procedure went well. She’s stable, and we’re very optimistic about her recovery.”
For one suspended, disbelieving second, no one moved.
Then Shane made this tiny, wrecked sound beside him, barely more than a breath breaking apart on its way out, and Ilya felt the sting rise sharp and immediate behind his own eyes.
“The orthopedic team was able to repair the fracture in her femur with plates and screws,” the surgeon continued gently, glancing down at the clipboard in her hand before looking back up at them. “The splenectomy was successful, and she tolerated the procedure very well. There were no complications beyond what had already been discussed with the family earlier.”
David exhaled like someone had just cut a rope from around his throat.
“Can we see her?” he asked, and there was so much inside those four words that it nearly undid Ilya all over again—the waiting, the helplessness, the terror, the desperate, almost childlike need to see with his own eyes that the woman he loved was still here.
“Very soon.” The surgeon’s smile widened, warmer now. “She’s in recovery at the moment. We need to give the anesthesia a little more time to wear off, and then we’ll be moving her to a private room on the fifth floor. Give us about twenty minutes, and you’ll be able to go up. Two at a time for now—she’ll be tired, and we want to keep things calm.”
Shane nodded immediately, too quickly, tears already spilling freely down his face as though his body had finally received permission to stop pretending it could endure one more second of uncertainty.
“Okay,” he said, breathless. “Okay. Twenty minutes. We can—we can do twenty minutes.”
The surgeon nodded once, made another note on her clipboard, and disappeared back through the doors she had just delivered their entire world through.
And then it was over.
The words moved through Ilya slowly at first, like they were struggling to reach the parts of him that had spent hours braced for devastation. Yuna was alive. She was alive. She had made it through. The room itself seemed to change around them, the air no longer sharp with dread but suddenly thinner somehow, lighter, as if all at once it had remembered it was meant to be breathed.
Beside him, Shane turned without a word and folded himself straight into Ilya’s chest.
It was not graceful. It was not measured. It was not the restrained, carefully managed version of affection Shane usually allowed himself in public. It was instinctive and immediate and total, like his body had finally chosen the one place it trusted to collapse. His breathing came in short, uneven bursts, each inhale catching somewhere painful on the way down, each exhale stuttering out like it had to fight its way free. His fingers twisted tightly into the fabric of Ilya’s jacket, clutching with quiet desperation, shoulders trembling hard enough that Ilya could feel it all the way through to his own bones.
And still, he didn’t make a sound.
No sob. No gasp. No dramatic unraveling. Just that awful, silent shaking. That devastating effort to hold himself together even now, even after all this, as though some old, deeply rooted part of him still believed he had to suffer neatly in order to be allowed to do it at all.
Something inside Ilya ached so sharply it felt almost holy.
He held him tighter.
One hand slid up to cradle the back of Shane’s head, fingers threading gently into the hair at his nape, while the other spread flat between his shoulder blades and stayed there, steady and warm and immovable. He did not tell him to calm down. He did not ask if he was okay, because the answer was obvious and because this, too, was a kind of okay. Not peace. Not composure. But release. Relief. The unbearable aftermath of fear finally loosening its grip.
So he said nothing.
He just stood there and let Shane fall apart against him in complete, devastating silence.
“I told you,” Ilya whispered at last into his hair, his own voice rough around the edges. “I told you she was strong. I told you.”
Shane nodded against him, small and jerky and almost frantic in the way grief and relief often looked identical when they first came out. His breath hitched again. Then again. But he still didn’t cry. Not fully. Not in the way most people would have expected. He only stayed there, breathing in those fractured little pulls of air, letting Ilya’s arms keep him upright until, little by little, they began to even out.
Next to them, David had finally started crying too, though quietly, as if even now he did not quite know what to do with the scale of what he was feeling. One hand was still wrapped around Shane’s arm, unwilling to let go even with Ilya holding the rest of him. Jackie had her face buried in Hayden’s shoulder, her whole body shaking with what looked suspiciously like silent tears, and Hayden—the fool—was patting her back with one hand while very obviously, and very badly, trying to wipe his own eyes with the other without anyone noticing.
For a long moment, no one moved. No one spoke.
They just stayed there in the wreckage of relief, breathing the same newly merciful air, letting it wash through them in waves too large to name.
Eventually, Shane pulled back just enough to look up at him. His face was damp and flushed and exhausted, his eyes still glassy with the remains of panic, but there was something almost luminous in them now—something soft and open and joyfully wrecked that made Ilya’s heart feel suddenly too large for his chest.
“Thank you,” Shane whispered. “For being here. For—for everything.”
Ilya’s expression tightened immediately, something almost pained moving through it, and he shook his head once.
“You do not thank me for this,” he said quietly, firmly, like the idea itself offended something fundamental in him. “This is not—” He stopped, swallowed hard, and when he spoke again, his voice came out lower. More honest than anything else he had said his enitre life. “There is nowhere else I would be, Shane,” he said. “There is nowhere else I want to be.”
Something in Shane’s face gave way completely at that.
His smile, when it came, was trembling and radiant and so nakedly full of feeling that it nearly made Ilya look away just to survive it. Instead, Shane leaned up and pressed a kiss to his mouth—soft and brief and warm with all the things neither of them had the words for yet.
Behind them, Hayden made an aggressively disgusted noise.
“Get a room,” he muttered. “There is an entire hospital full of them and somehow you still picked the hallway.”
Without taking his eyes off Shane, Ilya lifted one hand and flipped him off.
Jackie laughed. A small thing, wet at the edges. Even David shook his head, though he was smiling now in that dazed, exhausted way people sometimes did when joy arrived too soon after terror for the body to fully trust it.
Then Shane reached for him again.
His hand slid into Ilya’s almost absentmindedly, like it belonged there, like the gesture required no thought at all. Their fingers laced together with practiced ease, and Ilya looked down at the sight of it—his own scarred, battered hand wrapped around Shane’s careful, familiar one—and felt something deep in his throat pull painfully tight.
“Twenty minutes,” Shane murmured, still smiling in that stunned, disbelieving way, like happiness itself was something he was trying not to startle. “Then you’re meeting my mom.”
Ilya’s heart stumbled hard enough that, for one disorienting second, he thought it might simply stop. Not out of fear—not the old kind, not the kind he had spent most of his life swallowing whole until it calcified inside him—but because the weight of what Shane was offering him was almost too large to hold all at once. Shane wanted him there. Not hidden in the margins, not tucked carefully behind closed doors and half-truths and plausible deniability, not as something private enough to protect and fragile enough to deny, but there, in the bright and terrible intimacy of family, in the center of the room, in front of his mother and his father and the people who had made Shane into the man Ilya loved with a kind of devotion that still frightened him in its scale. He wanted him there as his.
“She will be—she will be on drugs,” he said, and even to his own ears his voice sounded thinner than he wanted it to, unsteady in a way that made him feel absurdly young. “Very strong drugs. She might not—”
“She’ll love you anyway,” Shane said, with the kind of certainty Ilya still did not know how to survive. His fingers tightened around his hand, warm and grounding. “Trust me.”
Ilya swallowed, and the movement felt difficult somehow, as though his body was struggling to process too many impossible things at once. “I am very nervous.”
Shane grinned, because of course he did. “Good. You should be. She’s terrifying.” Ilya let out something that was almost a laugh, and Shane’s grin softened immediately, the teasing falling away into something gentler, something unbearably sincere. “I’m kidding,” he said, quieter now. “Well. Mostly.” His thumb moved once over Ilya’s knuckles. “She’s going to love you. Honestly, she already does. She just doesn’t know it yet.”
Ilya couldn't find the words. Couldn't find anything except frozen in the impossibility of this moment—this boy, this family, this life that somehow, impossibly, was becoming his.
And that—more than anything—was what undid him.
Because Ilya did not have language for this. Not really. Not for the particular, impossible tenderness of being anticipated by a life he had not let himself believe he could have. Not for the quiet violence of being included. Not for the way Shane said things like that so easily, as if love were not a scarce and conditional resource, as if it were not something that could be withdrawn without warning, as if it were not always one mistake away from vanishing.
And yet here he was, sitting in a freezing hospital waiting room with fluorescent lights that made everyone look tired and half-haunted, surrounded by people who had seen enough of him by now to leave if they wanted to and had, inexplicably, chosen not to.
He looked around the room as if he could not quite trust what he was seeing unless he catalogued it piece by piece.
David was wiping at his eyes with the back of his hand, already halfway lost inside the practical mechanics of care, mentally rearranging furniture and logistics and medication schedules, trying to solve what could be solved because love, in some people, naturally translated itself into labor. Jackie was leaning into Hayden’s space to whisper something that made him snort despite himself, and Hayden—who looked deeply offended by the fact that he had apparently become emotionally attached to any of this—was failing spectacularly to hide the small, stubborn smile pulling at his mouth. There was life here. Messy, ridiculous, exhausted life. Not performative. Not conditional. Just people staying in the room because someone they loved was hurting, and because leaving had never once occurred to them as an option.
And beside him, Shane sat with his hand wrapped around Ilya’s like it belonged there, like it had always belonged there, like this was not some extraordinary act of faith but the simplest truth in the world.
He had come to America at seventeen, full of a grief so large it constantly overflowed of his small body—he had spent his whole life since building cages. Beautiful cages, comfortable cages, cages so well-constructed that no one ever guessed the bars were there. For years afterward he had gone on living the only way he knew how: defensively, beautifully, half-starved and half-feral, surrounding himself with noise and bodies and spectacle so that no one—not even himself—would have to look too closely at the ruins underneath. He had made a life out of surviving it. Out of enduring. Out of moving fast enough, talking loud enough, wanting little enough that the ache at the center of him could almost be mistaken for momentum.
But this—this over-air-conditioned waiting room with its bad coffee and stale air and people speaking too softly because fear had made everyone reverent, this hand in his, this family gathering around pain instead of retreating from it, this impossible, ordinary intimacy of being wanted in the room—this was something else entirely. Something he had never learned how to build because it had never been built for him. Something he had wanted for so long, and so wordlessly, that by the time he was old enough to name it he had already taught himself to live without it.
A home, he thought, and the word moved through him with such force it was almost unbearable.
Not a place. Not walls. Not a country. Not an apartment full of expensive things and no softness anywhere in it. Not the echoing, airless mausoleum in Moscow where he had first learned that silence could become a living thing if you fed it enough years. Not any of the sterile spaces he had filled since, all those beautifully curated cages where he had slept alone and called it freedom because the alternative was admitting it was grief.
No.
This.
This hand. This room. This boy. These people who were, somehow, beginning to fold him into the fabric of their lives as though there had always been space for him there. As though his presence did not have to be justified by performance. As though he did not have to earn every scrap of tenderness by bleeding for it first.
He lifted Shane’s hand to his mouth and pressed a kiss to his knuckles, slow and reverent and helplessly full of feeling, and when he looked back up Shane was watching him with that same open, impossible expression—soft and wondering and so full of love that it made something deep inside Ilya go painfully still.
And for the first time in his life, Ilya understood with complete and devastating clarity that what Shane had given him was not simply love, though it was that too, and more of it than Ilya had ever thought one human being could safely hold. It was not only desire, or comfort, or even forgiveness.
It was a reason.
Shane had taken all the hollow, uninhabitable spaces inside Ilya and, with nothing but patience and stubbornness and the terrifying gentleness of being seen clearly and loved anyway, made them feel less like a grave and more like something a person might actually survive living inside.
For most of his life, Ilya had believed that being alone was safer, that loneliness was simply the cost of being who he was, that some people were made to be loved from a distance and left before dawn and never, ever chosen in daylight.
But five hundred miles away from the cage he'd once called a house, five thousand miles away from the country where he had first learned how to disappear inside himself, and fifteen years away from the boy who had once stood in a silent kitchen waiting for a dead woman to start singing again, Ilya found himself sitting in the cold fluorescent middle of a life he had not dared to ask for and realizing, with the force of revelation, that maybe he wasn't just passing through in a world that didn't have a place for him. That he wasn't a ghost haunting his own existence. That maybe he had not been put on this earth only to endure it.
Maybe he had been meant to stay.