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The last good afternoon Rozanov ever had in 2016 began with kisses, ginger ale and a tuna melt.
It was a stupid detail. The kind of thing that shouldn't matter, that should have dissolved in the wash of everything that came after - the fight, the door, the months of silence, the violence on ice. But Rozanov's memory was cruel in its specificity, and so the tuna melt survived. It persisted. It lodged itself in his brain like a splinter and would not come out.
Hollander, barefoot in Rozanov's kitchen in his Boston home, wearing Rozanov's old black practice shirt and silly Rick Owens pants, standing at the counter drinking ginger ale as Rozanov put butter on bread for a tuna melt, smiling gently.
Not a smile for the cameras. Not the composed, media-trained expression that Hollander wore like armor. A real one. Small and unguarded and directed at Rozanov like he was the only person in the world, and the worst part - the part that would haunt Rozanov for months afterward - was that Hollander didn't even seem to know he was doing it.
This was the thing about Shane that undid him every time - the quiet, gentle smile that Shane would never acknowledge and Ilya was never supposed to notice. The way Shane would kiss him sweetly and scent him, an extension of what they'd just done in the bedroom, as if the intimacy of the afternoon spilled naturally into this domestic, ordinary act.
It was the middle of the afternoon. September light was coming through the kitchen windows, golden and slow, and Ilya was standing at the counter making a sandwich while Shane sat on the stool drinking ginger ale, and Ilya was thinking that this was the happiest he had ever been. Not the frantic, electric happiness of the sex they'd just had - though that had been its own kind of extraordinary, Shane undone and open in Ilya's bed the way he never was anywhere else - but the quieter happiness of after. The still, warm center of a life that Ilya wanted so badly it was eating him alive.
The butter sizzled. Ilya flipped the sandwich. Shane smiled.
"You're staring," Shane said, not looking up.
"Is good view."
"It's a tuna melt."
"Am not looking at tuna melt."
Shane's lips twitched. The almost-smile - the one he gave Ilya and no one else, the one that cracked the careful composure of his face and showed something soft underneath. Ilya lived for that almost-smile. He had been collecting them for eight years the way other people collected photographs. Eight years, and he could still count them.
"Your scent. Your smile. Am glad you stay," Ilya said. Soft. Almost to himself.
It wasn't the first time he'd said it. It was the tenth time since last night. Stay the night. Stay the week. Stay forever. Move into this home that has too many bedrooms and let me cook you terrible nutritious food you hate and fall asleep on the couch watching hockey highlights and wake up with your face in my neck and just - stay.
"I have to go," Shane said an hour later, shivering from an intense orgasm and Ilya's alpha spit still on his palm.
Ilya's heart didn't sink. It dropped - the way a stone drops in water. No resistance. Just gone.
Shane's back was to him, and the line of his shoulders was tight - that particular tension that meant the wall was going up, the careful blankness returning, the shutters closing over whatever Shane Hollander actually felt. Ilya knew that tension the way you know the shape of a wound - intimately, precisely, from having pressed on it too many times.
What they had existed only in stolen hours. Hotel rooms. Ilya's home, Shane's secret condo when the schedules aligned. Always behind locked doors, always with scent patches firmly in place, always with the understanding that this was temporary, that this was just their bodies finding each other the way rival bodies did - all that friction had to go somewhere.
Except it had stopped being that years ago, and they both knew it, and neither of them could say it, because saying it would make it real and real things had consequences.
Ilya said nothing. Because Ilya was a coward, and because the Rozanov men expressed love by swallowing it until it turned to poison, and because he had three languages and not one of them contained a word big enough for what he felt.
Shane came out dressed and looking like a stranger, still in Ilya's blacks and his own jacket. He didn't look back.
"See you on the ice, Rozanov," he said. And the door closed.
The click of the latch was the loudest sound Ilya had ever heard.
Ilya sat on the sofa for a long time after that. The afternoon light moved across the counter, golden to amber to grey. The tuna melt congealed. The room settled into the heavy, thick silence of a place that someone had just left.
He just waited. Some stupid, animal part of him believed that waiting there would bring Shane back. His omega back.
It never did.
* * * *
A couple of months later, the Raiders came for a home game against Montreal.
Montreal won. Shane had two assists and played one of his best games of the season - sharp, relentless, every pass a statement. He was brilliant. Shane was always brilliant. That was the problem. That was always the fucking problem - that Ilya could not stop watching him, could not stop being amazed by him, could not stop wanting him, even now, even after.
After the game, Ilya went to a club because the thing inside his chest was howling too loud to sit alone in a hotel room with. Shane and bloody fucking Rose Landry.
He wasn't planning on seeing Shane there. Montreal was a big city. There were dozens of clubs. The probability of ending up in the same one was -
Shane was there.
Of course Shane was there. Shane was always there - in the same city, in the same room, in the same breathing air, a gravitational pull that Ilya couldn't escape no matter how many kilometers he put between them. Shane Hollander was the only person in the world who could be absent and still take up all the space in a room.
Shane was celebrating. The postgame glow was on him - that particular energy that players carried after a win, the looseness in the shoulders, the brightness in the face. He was dancing with Rose Landry. Rose - golden, laughing, her arm around Shane's waist, her alpha scent probably radiating a possessive signal that said mine, mine, mine to every person in the club. Rose's friends were with them, a circle of beautiful people having a beautiful time, and Shane was in the center of it, smiling, looking more at ease than Ilya had seen him in months.
Looking happy.
The sight hit Ilya like a fist to the sternum. Not a metaphorical fist. A real one. He felt the air leave his body.
Shane was happy. Shane was happy without him. Shane had walked out of his home and into Rose Landry's arms and found something that looked, from across a dark club, like the life Ilya had been begging him to build together.
Only not with Ilya. Never with Ilya. That was the answer to the question Ilya had been too afraid to ask: Was I not enough? The answer was dancing in a Montreal club with her arms around someone else's omega.
What Ilya did next was not a decision. It was a reflex - the animal response of a wounded alpha who couldn't howl, so he performed instead. He found a woman. Tall, busty, blonde, cunt-soaked and willing. He danced with her the way he used to dance in Moscow clubs when he was nineteen and thought that being desired by strangers was the same as being loved. He danced with her close and slow and deliberate, and he made sure - he made absolutely sure - that Shane could see.
Because if Ilya couldn't have Shane, then Shane was going to watch him pretend not to care. Shane was going to see Ilya with his hands on someone else and feel a fraction of what Ilya felt every time he saw Rose Landry's arm around Shane's waist.
It was petty. It was cruel. It was exactly the kind of thing that the Rozanov men did when they were hurting too much to be human.
Shane saw.
The eye contact lasted three seconds. Maybe less. Across the dance floor, through the shifting bodies and the colored lights, Shane's eyes found Ilya's, and in them Ilya saw - not jealousy. Something worse. Something quieter.
Disappointment.
As if Shane had expected better. As if Shane had believed, despite everything, that Ilya was capable of better. That was the cruelty of it - not that Shane was angry, but that Shane was unsurprised. As if this was exactly what he'd always feared Ilya would become.
Shane turned away. Said something to Rose. Rose nodded, took his hand, and they left the club together.
Ilya danced with the woman for another hour. He didn't remember any of it. He went back to the hotel and put his fist through the bathroom mirror and spent twenty minutes picking glass out of his knuckles with a pair of tweezers from his travel kit, and the physical pain was such a relief that he almost laughed.
Almost.
* * * *
After the club, Ilya Rozanov became the most dangerous player in the league.
It wasn't a decision. It was more like something breaking - a containment wall, a levee, some internal structure that had been holding back eight years of want and grief and love-that-had-nowhere-to-go. Without the wall, everything flooded out through his body. Through his fists, his shoulders, the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound weapon he'd spent his whole life building.
He hit people. He hit them hard, and often, and with a viciousness that went beyond competitive physicality into something that looked like cruelty. The sports journalists wrote about it - the escalating aggression, the penalties piling up, the dangerous hits that were earning him warnings and fines and whispered concerns from teammates.
"He's just playing hard," his coach told reporters. "He's competitive."
But his coach had also pulled Ilya aside after practice and said, quietly, "Whatever this is, get it under control. You're going to hurt someone."
Ilya had looked at him and said, "I know."
He didn't say: I already have.
The first game against Montreal after the club, Ilya had put Hayden Pike through the boards. Pike - Shane's best friend, Shane's linemate, the person Shane trusted most in the world. The hit was vicious, the kind that cracked visors and got you thrown out of the game. Ilya took the penalty and sat in the box and felt nothing except the absence of feeling, which was its own particular agony.
The second game, he went after Shane directly. Legal hits, technically - shoulder to shoulder along the boards, the kind of body contact that was part of the game. But Ilya threw them harder than necessary. Harder than safe. He drove Shane into the wall with his full weight and felt Shane's body absorb the impact and told himself this was hockey, this was rivalry, this was what they had always been.
Shane's ribs bruised. Shane missed the next morning's practice. The team doctors ran scans and found hairline damage.
And Shane pushed back. That was the thing about Shane Hollander - he didn't take anything lying down. He dug his elbow into Ilya's ribs during the next few games. He played with a cold fury that matched Ilya's hot one, and when they were pulled apart by the officials after a scuffle in front of the net, Shane looked through his visor at Ilya with an expression that was not anger. It was worse.
It was the face of someone being destroyed by a person they loved, and knowing it, and being unable to stop it.
Ilya saw that face. He recognized it. He filed it away in the same place where he kept the almost-smiles, because apparently he collected Shane's pain the same way he collected Shane's joy - obsessively, helplessly, as if witnessing it was the same as deserving it.
And he kept doing it anyway.
Because some part of Ilya - the ugly part, the part he kept locked in the basement of his mind - believed that if he couldn't touch Shane in the bedroom anymore, he would take any kind of touch he could get. Even if it was violent. Even if it left marks.
Even if it was destroying them both.
* * * *
Shane Hollander was not having a good season.
The numbers said otherwise. The numbers said he was having an excellent season - the Voyageurs were winning, Shane was scoring, and by every measurable standard, he was performing at the highest level of his career.
But Shane was tired.
Not the normal fatigue of a long season - the ache in the legs, the heaviness behind the eyes, the slow grind of eighty-plus games spread across six months. This was different. Deeper. A weariness that lived in his bones and wouldn't respond to sleep or recovery days or the expensive supplements his nutritionist kept adjusting.
He was nauseous. More often than not, these days. A rolling, low-grade sickness that arrived in the morning and lingered until afternoon, sometimes longer. He threw up before practice three times in one week - locked the bathroom stall, emptied his stomach, rinsed his mouth, walked out and laced up his skates like nothing had happened. Shane Hollander didn't get sick. Shane Hollander performed.
His body felt strange to him. A softness in his core that no amount of training could tighten. A sensitivity to smell that made the locker room almost unbearable. His scent patch itched against his neck in a way it never had before.
He assumed it was stress. The season. Ilya Rozanov. The specific psychic weight of dating one person while being in love with another, of performing happiness for cameras and teammates and the beautiful woman who shared his bed and deserved so much better than what he was giving her.
Rose noticed, because Rose noticed everything.
"You look pale," she said one morning, her hand on his cheek. Her alpha pheromones were gentle and steady - a calm, sunlit meadow of a scent, warm and safe and nothing like the dark pine and black coffee and raw winter that Shane's body craved with a desperation he couldn't afford to examine.
"I'm fine," Shane said. "Long week."
Rose studied him with those actress eyes, the ones that saw through every script. "You'd tell me if something was wrong."
"Of course."
That was a lie. Shane's whole life was a cathedral of lies, and Rose Landry was the altar he knelt at every night and prayed for forgiveness. He was so tired of lying. He was so tired of the taste of it - metallic and bitter, like the bile he kept swallowing before practice, like the words he kept pushing down every time Ilya's name appeared on the schedule.
Some mornings he woke up reaching for a body that wasn't there. A body that was six-foot-three, that ran warm, that curled around Shane in sleep with an unconscious possessiveness that Shane pretended to hate and privately lived for. On those mornings, Shane lay in the dark next to Rose - next to this good, kind, beautiful person who loved him - and pressed his face into the pillow and missed Ilya so much it felt like a physical wound. A hole in his chest where something vital used to be. Rose deserved a man who reached for her in the dark. Shane reached for a ghost.
He had a hoodie. Ilya's hoodie, from one of their hotel room fucks when Ilya had ripped his flimsy vest. It was in the back of his closet, behind the suits and the game-day blazers, folded into a plastic bag to preserve the scent. Some nights, when Rose was asleep and the wanting was unbearable, Shane took it out and pressed it to his face and breathed in until his hands stopped shaking.
He hated himself for this. Hated the weakness of it. Hated that he'd walked out of Rozanov - no, Ilya's house and into Rose's life and still couldn't cut the cord. Hated that his body seemed to be rejecting the choice his mind had made - the nausea, the exhaustion, the constant low-grade wrongness of everything.
Shane assumed his body was punishing him. He assumed the sickness was psychosomatic - his omega biology protesting the distance from the alpha it had imprinted on, despite Shane's best efforts to override it.
He was wrong about that. He was catastrophically wrong.
But he wouldn't find that out for another few weeks. Not until a night game in Montreal, at home, under the lights of the Bell Centre, when Ilya Rozanov hit him into the boards and the whole world cracked open.
* * * *
The Bell Centre was sold out. Eighteen thousand seats, every one full, the building humming with the particular energy of a rivalry game in Montreal. The crowd was loud and partisan and dressed in Voyageurs colors, and the pregame atmosphere had the feel of something that was going to be remembered.
Shane came out for warm-ups and did what he always did - skated his laps, took his shots, stretched against the boards. His body moved through the routine on autopilot while his mind did the thing it always did before a Boston game, which was try not to think about Ilya and fail completely.
Ilya was on the other side of the ice. Dark jersey, Boston away colors. Even from across the rink, Shane could feel him - not his scent, which was suppressed under the patch, but his presence. The physical reality of Ilya Rozanov occupying space in the same building. It was like standing near a large body of water - you felt the pull before you saw the surface.
Rose was in the stands. Three rows behind the glass, Hollander 24 jersey. She blew him a kiss during warm-ups. Shane raised his stick. The cameras caught it. They always caught it - the golden couple, Canada's sweetheart omega and his alpha actress girlfriend. The narrative was perfect. The narrative was a prison. Shane smiled for the cameras and the bars didn't even show.
Shane's stomach rolled. He swallowed it down.
The game started hard.
Ilya was in one of his moods - the dangerous ones, where every shift felt like a controlled detonation. He threw hits on everything that moved in Voyageurs colors. He put a shoulder into Pike along the wall, a legal but brutal hit that sent Pike's mouthguard flying. He took a penalty for shoving someone after a whistle. He played like a man trying to outskate something that was inside him.
Shane recognized it. Shane had been watching Ilya play with this particular fury for weeks now, and he knew what it was. It was grief wearing a hockey jersey. It was love turned rancid. It was eight years of hotel rooms and one afternoon in a minimalist house with a tuna melt on the counter and everything that came after.
Shane played his own game. Cold where Ilya was hot. Precise where Ilya was reckless. He made passes that shouldn't have been possible. He won every battle along the boards with positioning instead of force. He was, objectively, the better player tonight, and they both knew it, and that only made Ilya angrier.
They collided in the second period. Inevitable, the way it always was - like two bodies in orbit, eventually you came around to the point of closest approach. Ilya came in hard behind the Montreal net, where Shane was handling the puck. Two hundred and twenty pounds, moving fast, closing the distance.
Shane saw him coming. Shane always saw him coming. That was the tragedy of them - they could always see each other. They just couldn't stop.
Ilya pinned him against the boards. Full weight, full contact, shoulder to chest. For a half-second, through pads and equipment and patches, they were pressed together, and Shane felt the heat of him - the furnace of Ilya's body, the sheer physical mass of him - and his omega hindbrain lit up like a switchboard, screaming: alpha, alpha, yours, YOURS -
Shane shoved him off. Hard. Got his hands up and pushed with everything he had, and for a moment they were face to face, visors nearly touching, breathing the same air.
"Back the fuck off, Rozanov," Shane said. Low. Only for Ilya.
"Make me, Hollander." Ilya spit in his face.
Shane's jaw clenched. He slapped Rozanov as an omega does. Ilya spit it off. He wanted to say something devastating. He wanted to say something that would hurt Ilya the way Ilya's absence hurt him. Instead he said nothing, because the nausea was surging and his vision was swimming slightly and this was not the time to show weakness. Shane Hollander did not show weakness. Shane Hollander died on his feet.
The officials separated them. The game went on.
Montreal led 2-1 going into the final period. Shane had set up the second goal. His body was screaming at him - fatigue, nausea, a strange ache in his lower abdomen that he'd been ignoring for days. He swallowed it all. He performed.
He always performed. That was the only thing Shane Hollander knew how to do. Perform, and break, and perform through the breaking.
* * * *
Thirteen minutes into the final period, with Boston trailing 2-1 and desperation sharpening every play, Shane picked up the puck at center ice.
A two-on-one rush with Pike. The kind of breakaway that Shane Hollander was built for - fast, surgical, the puck on his stick like it had agreed to be there. He crossed into Boston's end and the crowd was rising, eighteen thousand people sensing the goal before it happened, the building tilting toward something inevitable.
Ilya was the last man back.
He saw Shane coming. Saw the lane he was going to take - left side, cutting toward the net, looking for the shot. If Shane scored, the game was over. Ilya was not going to let that happen.
He was not going to let Shane win one more thing.
The thought was irrational. Ilya knew it was irrational. This was not about winning or losing a hockey game. This was about the ginger ale and the tuna melt and the door that closed and the club and Rose Landry's arm and the eight years of wanting that had curdled into something toxic and unstoppable. This was about kitchen in September and the word stay and the silence that answered it.
Ilya accelerated. Three strides, four, closing the distance, his body aimed at Shane like a guided weapon.
The hit was supposed to be clean. Shoulder to shoulder. Hard but legal. The kind of hit that separated the player from the puck and nothing more.
But Shane turned.
At the last second, Shane turned his body to protect the puck, to get the shot off, and instead of catching him square, Ilya's hit landed high and off-angle, two hundred and twenty pounds of force driving Shane sideways into the boards.
The sound was wrong.
Not the usual heavy thud of a body check. This was sharper. Harder. A crack that carried through the glass and into the stands and made eighteen thousand people gasp as one.
Shane's helmet hit the boards first. Then his left shoulder, taking the full impact. Then his body - not bracing, not rolling, not doing any of the things a body was supposed to do. It crumpled. Like someone had cut the strings. He went down and he did not get up.
Three sharp whistles. The referee's arm was up.
Ilya stood four feet away from where Shane had fallen, and the world narrowed to the space between his body and Shane's, and in that space there was blood. Bright red on white ice. Coming from somewhere under Shane's cracked helmet, running along the edge of his visor, pooling beneath his head in a shape that looked like a small, dark flower.
The arena was on its feet. Eighteen thousand people screaming, and all Ilya could hear was the silence where Shane's breathing should have been.
Get up.
The Voyageurs players swarmed - Pike first, always Pike first, then the whole bench. The trainers were running across the ice in their sneakers, medical kits in hand.
Get up. Shane. Get up.
Shane didn't get up.
* * * *
The officials came for Ilya. A major penalty for boarding - the kind of hit that gets you thrown out of the game. The player who made the hit goes to the dressing room and doesn't come back. Those were the rules.
The official took Ilya's arm. "Rozanov. Tunnel. Now."
Ilya's legs moved. His mind stayed behind, standing over the blood on the ice. He was in a daze. He couldn't be coherent. Shane was hurt, his omega was hurt, he had hurt HIS SHANE -
He was ten feet from the tunnel entrance when the scent hit.
When the trainers removed Shane's helmet, they had to cut the scent patch. The patch sat over the omega scent gland on the left side of the neck, and the helmet removal took it with it. Normally, a backup patch went on within seconds. Nobody smelled anything. The game went on.
But Shane's helmet was mangled. The left side had cracked on impact, the chin strap was twisted into the broken shell, and the trainer had to work at it for nearly a full minute - cutting, prying, easing fragments of composite away from Shane's neck while Shane lay on the ice with blood in his eye and his body limp and wrong.
A full minute without a scent patch. On a male omega. In a building with eighteen thousand people.
Shane's scent unfolded.
It hit the trainers first. Both men kneeling over Shane froze - a fraction of a second, barely perceptible, but it was there. Their hands stuttered.
It hit the Montreal players in the protective circle. Ilya saw their heads come up, one after another, like animals catching wind.
It hit Pike.
Pike, who was holding Shane's hand. Pike, who was a beta but had spent enough years beside Shane to know his scent like a second language. Pike, whose entire body went rigid.
It hit the officials. The Boston players on the far side of the ice. The people in the first few rows behind the glass, who wouldn't fully understand what they were smelling but would feel it - that deep, evolutionary recognition of something significant.
And then, last, carried on the cold arena air across feet of ice, it hit Ilya.
Shane's scent had always been warm. Clean linen dried in the sun, something underneath that was darker and earthier. A scent that Ilya had been breathing in stolen hours for eight years. A scent he had fallen asleep to and woken up reaching for and would recognize in any crowd, in any country, in any version of his life.
It was different tonight.
Not wrong. Not bad. Richer. Deeper. There was a sweetness underneath the pain - because Shane was radiating pain pheromones, distress signals sharp and screaming - but beneath the pain, something Ilya had never smelled before. Something layered and warm and alive in a way that Shane's scent had never been alive.
And threaded through it - woven into the fabric of Shane's scent the way a signature is woven into a painting - two faint notes.
Two.
Not one.
Small. New. Barely there. The kind of scent that only an alpha could detect at this distance, the kind that was meant to be picked up by one specific nose, tuned to one specific frequency.
Winter pine. Black coffee.
Ilya's scent.
The ground disappeared.
The official caught him before he hit the ice. "Rozanov? Hey - Rozanov, what's -"
Ilya couldn't speak. His knees had buckled and his vision had whited out and there was a roaring in his ears that was not the crowd and not the blood and not the arena. It was the sound of eight years rearranging themselves around a single, devastating fact.
Shane was carrying.
Shane was carrying, and the babies - babies, plural, two scent signatures, two - were Ilya's.
On the ice, inside the circle of bodies around Shane, Hayden Pike was standing up.
Pike's face had gone through confusion, through recognition, through horror, and arrived at a fury so pure and total that it had its own gravity. He was staring across the ice at Ilya. His chest was heaving. His fists were clenched.
"Are you FUCKING kidding me?" Pike's voice cut through the arena noise like a knife through skin. "Rozanov - what the FUCK is this? What the FUCK did you DO?"
Because Pike could smell it too. Every person in that circle could smell it. The trainers, the officials, the players, the spectators in the front rows who were leaning forward with their mouths open. Shane's omega scent was broadcasting at full strength - unpatched, unfiltered, completely exposed - and the story it was telling was unmistakable.
Shane Hollander was pregnant. The scent of the father was threaded through every molecule. And the father was the man who had just driven him headfirst into the boards.
The head trainer was kneeling over Shane, two fingers on his pulse point. His face had changed - from focused to urgent, the kind of shift that happened when the medical picture suddenly got more complicated.
"He's pregnant," the trainer said. Quiet, only for the immediate circle. "Smells like 10 plus weeks, maybe more. It's multiples."
"Jesus Christ," Pike said.
"We need an ambulance. The concussion is serious. His left collarbone is fractured - I can feel the displacement. But the pregnancy changes everything. We need fetal monitoring. We need an OB. Now."
The stretcher was being brought out. The arena had shifted - not quiet, because a crowd that size was never quiet, but the sound had changed quality. Something was happening that went beyond a hockey injury. The commentators in the press box could see the trainers' body language, the escalation of urgency. They could see Pike screaming at Rozanov. They could see Rozanov on his knees in the tunnel entrance.
And the people close enough to smell it were already pulling out their phones.
* * * *
Then Ilya Rozanov did something that nobody expected.
He got up off his knees. He shook off the linesman. And he ran.
Not toward the tunnel. Not toward the dressing room where the rules said he was supposed to go.
Toward Shane.
Two security staff tried to stop him. A linesman planted himself in Ilya's path. It didn't matter. Ilya was two hundred and twenty pounds of terrified alpha operating on something that predated language, predated rules, predated the entire structure of professional hockey. Every cell in his body was locked on a single imperative: get to him, get to him now, he's hurt, he's carrying your children, GET TO HIM.
"SHANE! OMEGA! MY OMEGA!"
He went through the security guard like the man wasn't there. He dropped to his knees on the ice next to Shane, his pads cracking against the surface, and the sound that came out of his throat was not a word in any of his three languages.
It was the alpha distress call. Low, guttural, involuntary - the sound that alphas made when their mate was down. Except Shane wasn't his mate. They had no bond, no mark, no claim. They had eight years of secrets and one closed door and a distance that Ilya had been trying to destroy with his fists for weeks.
But his body didn't know any of that. His body had decided a long time ago - probably the very first time, in that hotel room when they were nineteen and horny and couldn't stop touching each other - that Shane Hollander was his.
"Shane." His hands were shaking. His gloves were gone - he had ripped them off him at some point, he couldn't remember when. His bare fingers hovered over Shane's face, afraid to touch. "Shane. Am here. Am yours. Shane."
Shane's eyes were half-open. Unfocused, pupils uneven - left blown wide, right a pinpoint. Blood in his left eye, on his cheek, in his hair. His lips were moving.
"...Rose..."
"We will get Rose. Shane, be still. ROZANOV MOVE THE FUCK AWAY-"
"NO", Ilya screams, his head bursting with pain and his heart threatening to stop. The tears come unbidden.
"I NEED TO BE WITH SHANE! I'll die without him, I'LL DIE -"
"...Rosen...ov..."
The trainers and Pike exchanged a look.
Shane's hand moved. Barely - fingers scraping across the ice, reaching for something, someone. His drugged, concussed mind was reaching for the one scent it recognized even through the haze of pain. Not Rose. Not the alpha he was supposed to want. The one his body had chosen without permission, without logic, without mercy.
Ilya caught his hand. Shane's fingers were cold - not ice-cold, but shock-cold. The deep, internal cold of a body redirecting resources to protect what mattered most.
"Found you," Shane mumbled, and his cracked lips tried to curve upward.
Ilya felt something inside himself shatter. Not crack, not fracture - shatter. Like a window hit with a stone, the whole structure collapsing inward in a single, silent implosion.
He pressed his lips to Shane's. Then Pressed his lips to Shane's knuckles. The cameras were everywhere and he didn't care.
"My heart, my everything. My joy."
The entire arena could see them and he didn't care. The broadcast was live and millions of people were watching and he did not care, because caring about cameras was something that belonged to a version of Ilya that had existed before he put the person he loved on a stretcher.
That version of Ilya was gone.
"Sorry," he said against Shane's skin. "Am sorry. Am so sorry. My heart. My omega."
And then the memory arrived. Uninvited, as it always was. His father's fist. His mother's face. The kitchen in Moscow. The sound of a body hitting the floor. Ilya was eight years old and watching from the doorway and learning the first lesson the Rozanov men ever taught their sons: this is what love looks like when it has nowhere to go.
Ilya had spent his whole life swearing he would be different.
He had spent six weeks slamming a pregnant omega into the boards.
He hadn't known. But that didn't matter. That didn't change the bruised ribs from the second game. That didn't change the fact that Ilya's children had been growing underneath Shane's ribs while Ilya was trying to break them.
You are your father's son.
The thought was so loud it eclipsed everything. The arena, the crowd, the trainers, Pike's murderous stare. Everything collapsed into that single, unbearable sentence.
"Going to be sick," Ilya said, and turned away from Shane and vomited on the ice.
* * * *
They let him ride in the ambulance.
Not because anyone wanted him there. The head trainer would have preferred him gone. Pike would have preferred him dead. But when the paramedics lifted Shane onto the stretcher, Shane's hand - the one that had found Ilya's on the ice - tightened and would not let go.
"His vitals stabilize when the alpha is close," the paramedic said, reading the portable monitor. "Heart rate drops fifteen beats. The fetal heart rates normalize too. He stays."
Shane's body knew what Shane's mind wouldn't admit. Even unconscious, even broken, his body reached for Ilya. Eight years of scent memory encoded in his cells, and not a single condom or scent patch or locked door or lie had been enough to override it.
Ilya sat on the narrow bench. Shane's hand in his. The ambulance swaying through Montreal streets with its siren cutting the cold December air.
The paramedic ran the portable ultrasound. Gel on Shane's abdomen, the wand pressed flat, and on the small, grainy screen - shaking with the motion of the ambulance, the image jumping and settling and jumping again - two shapes.
Two small, curled shapes with flickering heartbeats.
Ilya stared at the screen and the math hit him like a wall.
Sixteen weeks. Four months.
They had used a condom. They always used condoms - it was one of the rules, like the patches and the locked doors and the careful fiction that this was temporary. The condoms were Ilya's responsibility. He bought them, kept them in the nightstand drawer, was meticulous about it because the alternative - the possibility of creating something permanent, something that couldn't be hidden or denied or walked away from - was unthinkable.
Except condoms broke. Condoms slipped. Condoms were ninety-eight percent effective, which meant two times out of a hundred, they were nothing.
They'd never felt it happen. That was the thing Ilya couldn't stop circling. There'd been no moment of panic, no pause, no oh shit. Just the usual aftermath - the cleanup, the disposal, the return to the careful choreography of their secret. And then Ilya had made a tuna melt. And then Shane had left. And then Shane had walked out into the September afternoon carrying everything Ilya had ever wanted inside his body, and neither of them knew.
"Pups' scent," Shane mumbled through the oxygen mask. His eyes were open now, cloudy but present, the concussion making his thoughts loose and wandering. "Ilya. Could smell it. On ice. Even half-conscious, could smell -"
"Don't talk."
"Thought I was sick." Shane's voice was thick, slurred. "Throwing up. For weeks. Thought it was stress. Thought my body was rejecting - you know. Everything. The lying. Being away from -"
He stopped. His eyes were wet.
"I thought my body was rejecting you," Shane said. "And it was the opposite. My body was keeping you."
Ilya made a sound that was not a word in any language. A small, broken thing that came from somewhere below his ribs. The sound of a man learning that the universe had been trying to give him the only thing he ever wanted, and he'd been too stupid and too scared and too busy destroying things to notice.
"The babies," Shane said. "Are the babies -"
"Both heartbeats strong," the paramedic said. "About sixteen weeks. Twins."
Shane's face crumpled. The full thing. Not the controlled Hollander composure, not the performance - the real, ugly, devastating collapse of a man who had just learned that the two things he wanted most in the world and the thing he was most afraid of were exactly the same.
"I've been playing hockey," he said, and his voice broke into pieces. "I've been playing contact sports for four months with - oh god. Oh god, Ilya, I didn't know, I -"
"They are okay. You hear? They are okay."
"And you - you've been hitting me -"
There it was. The blade between the ribs. Ilya closed his eyes.
"I know," he whispered. "Know what I have been doing."
"Not on purpose," Shane said quickly, the words tumbling out urgent and defensive. "You didn't know, you couldn't have known -"
And that - that - was the thing that finally cracked Ilya open completely. That Shane, lying on a stretcher with a fractured collarbone and a serious concussion and two lives inside him that Ilya had endangered, was trying to protect Ilya from himself. Was still, even now, even after everything, reaching for Ilya instead of pulling away. Shane Hollander was bleeding and broken and carrying Ilya's children and his first instinct was to make sure Ilya didn't blame himself.
"Don't." Ilya's voice was shattered glass. "Don't defend me. In those games - Shane, was trying to hurt you. Wanted you to hurt like I was hurting. Did not know about them, but knew about you, and still -"
"We're both monsters," Shane said softly. "Just different species."
The ambulance turned a corner. The ultrasound screen flickered. Two heartbeats, fast and steady, completely unaware of the wreckage surrounding them.
"We're going to have to be better than this," Shane said. "For them."
"I know."
"So much better than this."
"I know."
* * * *
Centre hospitalier de l'Université de Montréal. Shane's home city. At least Shane was home when this happened. At least he would wake up in familiar territory.
At the hospital, Ilya refused to leave Shane's side. When a nurse told him he couldn't be in the trauma bay, he looked at her with eyes that had stopped pretending to be civilized and said, "Am alpha. He is carrying my children. Am not leaving this room."
The attending physician looked at Ilya - six-three, still in his hockey under-armor, hospital gown draped over him like an afterthought, his eyes raw and red and absolutely immovable - and made the call.
"Let him stay. Corner."
Ilya stood in the corner.
He stood there while they confirmed the concussion - serious, requiring monitoring. He stood there while they confirmed the fractured left collarbone - clean break, six to eight weeks in a sling. He stood there while the OB-GYN performed the full fetal assessment and confirmed what the ambulance ultrasound had shown: two healthy fetuses, no signs of distress.
"He's lucky," the OB said. "The uterine wall in male omegas is remarkably resilient. But he should not have been playing contact sports. Someone should have caught this."
Should have been me, Ilya thought. Should have smelled through patch. Should have felt in that half-second when I had him against boards and something was different. Body tried to tell me. Did not listen. Never listen.
They moved Shane to a private room. Ilya sat in the plastic chair next to the bed and held his hand and did not let go and did not speak and did not forgive himself.
In the silence of the room - the beep of monitors, the hum of the heater, the distant sounds of a hospital at night - Ilya hated himself with a clarity that was almost peaceful. Not the performative self-destruction of the past weeks. Not the bar fights and the on-ice violence and the fines and the mirror he'd broken in the Montreal hotel. This was the real thing. The quiet thing. This was sitting three feet from the evidence of what he'd done - Shane's swollen face, the sling, the IV, the ultrasound printout taped to the wall showing two small bodies that Ilya had come inches from harming - and understanding, fully, completely, without defense or excuse, what kind of man he was.
He put his head in his hands, and he sat there, and he carried the weight of it, because carrying weight was the only useful thing he had left to offer.
* * * *
Shane surfaced slowly. Like coming up from deep water - the light brightening, the sounds sharpening, the pain arriving in waves instead of all at once.
The ceiling. White. Wrong. Hospital.
Then the smell. Ilya. Unpatched, unfiltered, close. Winter pine and black coffee and the sharp, acidic undertone of an alpha in distress. Shane had smelled Ilya a thousand times, but never like this - stripped raw, every defense gone, the scent equivalent of a man with his chest cracked open.
Shane turned his head. The movement sent fire through his skull, but he turned anyway. He would always turn toward Ilya. That was the pathology of them.
Ilya was in the chair. Bent forward, hands in his hair, shoulders carved from stone. He looked like a man being crushed by something that no one else could see.
"Hey," Shane said. His voice was gravel.
Ilya's head came up. His eyes were dry and destroyed - not red from crying but hollowed out, the look of a man who had gone past tears and arrived somewhere emptier. Somewhere that didn't have a name in any of his three languages.
"Hey."
"How bad?"
"Concussion. Collarbone, broken." A pause. The next word cost him something visible. "Babies are fine."
"Babies," Shane repeated. The word was enormous. It filled the room and kept expanding. "Twins."
"Twins."
Shane stared at the ceiling. Tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. He didn't wipe them. He didn't have the energy. He didn't have the pride.
"Rose is going to know," he said. "She's an alpha. A female alpha can't - she'll figure it out. If she hasn't already. The broadcast, Ilya - the commentators were close enough, they could see everything, and anyone near the ice could smell -"
Ilya reached for his phone on the side table. Turned the screen toward Shane. Three hundred and forty-seven notifications. Missed calls from agents, coaches, Ilya's cousin in St. Petersburg, numbers neither of them recognized.
Ilya read the top headline. Slowly. The English careful and halting, as if the words were heavier than usual: "Hockey's... Fiercest Rivals. Rozanov and Hollander Expecting Twins After Arena Revelation."
Shane closed his eyes. The headline was a door slamming on every version of his life that included the word private.
"World has seen us," Ilya said. "Am sorry. Don't know how to -"
"I love you."
The room went absolutely still.
Shane's eyes stayed closed. The tears continued, slipping beneath his lashes, running into his hair. His voice was thick with medication and pain and the eight-year exhaustion of a man who had been holding a wall up with his bare hands and had finally, completely, run out of strength.
"I love you," he said. "I've loved you since I was eighteen years old. I've loved you through every hotel room and every locked door and every game where I had to pretend you were just my rival. I love you and I'm carrying your children and I am so tired, Ilya. I am so fucking tired of pretending that I don't."
Ilya's jaw trembled. His whole body trembled. He looked like a building about to come down.
"You are high on drugs," he said, because he had to say something or he was going to fall apart in a way that couldn't be fixed.
"I'm high on drugs and I love you and I'm having your twins. All three are true."
The sound that came out of Ilya was not a laugh. It was the shape of a laugh, the memory of one, haunting a face that had forgotten how.
"I forgive you," Shane said. "For the hit."
"Don't." Ilya's voice cracked like ice under sudden weight. "Don't forgive. Was trying to hurt you. Every game. Every hit. Was trying to make you feel what I -"
"I know. I forgive you anyway."
"Cannot forgive myself."
"I can't forgive myself either. For the lying. For Rose. For not knowing about them. For playing hockey for four months while they were -" Shane's voice broke. "So we'll be unforgiven together. That's the deal."
His hand found Ilya's on the bedrail. Their fingers laced. Shane's were cold. Ilya's were shaking.
"Your parents are coming?" Ilya asked.
"Probably already here."
"Pike?"
"Definitely already here. Definitely planning your murder."
"Good. Deserve it."
"Ilya."
"Da?"
"Promise me something."
"Anything. Everything."
"Promise me you'll be here. Really here. Not drowning in whatever's eating you alive right now." Shane opened his eyes. Dark, clear despite the drugs, looking at Ilya without a single wall. "I can smell it on you - the shame. You smell like you're trying to disappear. I need you to promise me you won't."
Ilya's breath came out broken. A ragged, ugly sound.
"I promise," he whispered. "On them. On our children. Will be here. Will not disappear. Will cherish them. Will cherish you."
"Then start by forgiving yourself. Because they're going to need a father. A whole one. Not one who's drowning."
Ilya leaned forward. Rested his forehead against Shane's - gently, gently, the way he should have been touching him all along, the way he should have touched him every day for eight years instead of only in secret, only in stolen hours, only behind locked doors.
He breathed Shane in. The real scent. The one underneath everything - linen and sun and earth and now, woven through it like two new threads in an old fabric, the scent of something that was half Shane and half Ilya and entirely, stubbornly, miraculously alive.
"I will give up everything," Ilya said. Not a declaration. A fact. Simple and absolute, the way he spoke when the English fell away and what was left was just the truth. "Russia. Contract. Don't care. Get traded to Montreal, or leave hockey, or whatever it takes. Protect you. Protect them. Rest of my life. Everything else is noise. "
Shane's right hand came up - slowly, painfully, the left arm immobile in its sling - and curved around the back of Ilya's neck. His fingers pressed into the damp hair at Ilya's nape.
"My alpha," Shane whispered.
He pulled Ilya down. Or Ilya leaned in. Neither of them would ever be sure who closed the distance first - only that the distance closed, and then Ilya's mouth was on Shane's, and the kiss was soft and careful and tasted like salt and hospital and eight years of wanting, and it was the first kiss they had ever had that didn't need to be hidden.
Shane made a small sound against Ilya's lips. Not pain. Something deeper - the sound of a lock turning, of a door opening, of a man finally being allowed to stop holding his breath. The sound of the word stay being answered, eight years late, in the only language that mattered.
Ilya kissed him like an apology. Like a vow. Like the only prayer he knew.
When they pulled apart, Shane's eyes were wet and open and looking at Ilya without a single wall, and Ilya thought: This. This is what it was supposed to feel like. All along. This.
Outside the room, the hallway was filling. Shane's parents. Agents. League officials. The machinery of a scandal that would reshape two careers and an entire sport's conversation about omega athletes, hidden pregnancies, and the private lives of public men.
Pike was out there somewhere. Arms crossed. Fury radiating off him in waves. The world's angriest best friend, pacing a hospital corridor, rehearsing a murder.
Rose was somewhere too. Perhaps watching the broadcast. Perhaps already knowing - she was too smart and too perceptive not to have seen the cracks, not to have felt the shape of what Shane had been hiding beneath the Hollander 24 jersey she'd worn to the game tonight. Perhaps already grieving the relationship she'd believed was real, and she would be right to grieve, because it had been real to her, and that was the worst thing Shane had done to anyone.
All of that was coming. The phone calls, the press conferences, the conversations that would be agonizing and necessary and long. The apology to Rose that Shane owed. The reckoning with the league that Ilya deserved. The slow, painful work of building something real in the place where the secrets used to be.
All of it was coming. But not yet.
Right now there was only this: a hospital room in Montreal. Two people. Two small heartbeats on a monitor. A silence that held more truth than eight years of words.
Ilya kissed Shane again - just once, just barely, his lips brushing the corner of Shane's mouth. Shane's fingers tightened at his nape.
Shane closed his eyes.
And for the first time in eight years, neither of them let go.
fin