Chapter Text
Shane told himself, four separate times, he was leaving. He had his jacket over his arm to prove it. Twice he made it as far as the main entrance and let himself get towed back in, once by the Japanese ambassador's wife, once by his own feet refusing to carry him past the area where he might see Ilya.
The Olympics were over, and soon the whole miserable experience would be too. That morning, the last of the Canadian hockey team had flown out. Shane stayed only as a favor to his mother, one he was deeply regretting. The Japanese ambassador to Russia was an old friend of hers and Shane promised to stay an extra day to escort them to the last few diplomatic events. Canada's Golden Boy carried political significance, even if Shane's awkward presence added very little.
He'd done the math on the flight from Montreal to Sochi. Shane talked himself into this when things were calm, when he still hoped for what he couldn't have. Two diplomatic events, a few hours each, one extra day, and back to the hotel by midnight. Perhaps, if he was lucky, he would have company on his last night. He wanted that more than he would admit. So he had broken the whole trip into manageable pieces and convinced himself he could do it.
His math had been wrong since the ambassador showed up late to collect him. It was wrong every time he checked his watch. He'd stopped trying to guess how much longer they would be. It didn't stop him from checking the time. The hands clicked past midnight. When he looked up, it felt like the same ten minutes on a loop, and the exit was no closer than the first time he'd grabbed his jacket.
Go away, Hollander. The irony of that statement had him smiling even as it ached. It had been days, and he could still hear Ilya's voice go flat on his name. By now the words should have stopped hurting. They hadn't. He kept replaying them anyway. Shane was good at a lot of things. Getting over Ilya Rozanov was not one of them.
Shane picked Ilya's voice out of the chaos again. Ilya laughed quietly, then said something in Russian too fast for Shane to catch. A second later it was gone.
Without a focus, the room overwhelmed Shane's senses. Chandeliers threw hard light off the marble underfoot. Forty people talking in Russian, English, and who knows what else drowned out the string quartet. The sound bounced off the high ceiling until it became a single roar. Somewhere underneath it the quartet lost the beat or maybe that was just him. Every time Shane tried to ground himself in the rhythm, he lost it again in the noise.
Shane closed his eyes to pull himself back together. Even in the dark, he could smell alcohol, Russian incense, and someone's too-sweet perfume. His eyes snapped open when his balance wobbled. He could hold an edge at full speed, but he couldn't stand still in a ballroom.
Moving away from the edges of the room felt impossible. Shane needed the wall at his back. Two men forcing themselves behind him had his lungs tightening in panic. They were speaking in Russian, too quick for his rudimentary understanding. He might have heard Rozanov's name. The word "father" was clearer. Another might have been "sad," or "too bad," or nothing at all. Then they were past him, disappearing into the crowd.
The ambassador muttered something rude in Japanese about one of the men walking away. Shane laughed and it was enough to pull him out of his head. His wife scolded him in the same language, telling him not to say such things where Shane's sweet innocent ears could hear.
Shane rolled his eyes.
He caught sight of Ilya, and pain shot across his chest. His rival stood tall near the center of the room, in a suit instead of pads. Shane loved to curl up against that broad chest. Those large hands had held his in their most private moments. He could stare at that face for hours.
A suit instead of pads always changed how Shane saw him. Ilya was a weapon on skates. In a suit, he was just a man. It made Shane think, unhelpfully, of the time he'd watched Ilya play a period with a separated shoulder without telling anyone, waving off the trainer between whistles. "Rozanov's don't get hurt," he said after, his dry tone making Shane laugh. He hadn't realized until much later it wasn't a joke.
Rozanov looked wrong. Shane may not understand the nuance of conversation but as one of the greatest hockey players in the world he was a master at body language. His Russian counterpart stood too straight and kept his movements too small. He looked like he'd rather be anywhere else on earth, daring the room to notice. The crazy thing was, Shane seemed to be the only one who noticed. Around Ilya, the men and women were laughing and smiling and relaxed. Shane wanted to storm over and demand to know what was wrong with them.
Instead, he stayed where he was. Shane had spent his entire career unable to look away from Ilya and unable to close the distance. That was true whether Ilya was across the ice or wrapped up in his arms. It was humiliating how much he liked watching from thirty feet away. He had no right to cross that marble floor, but he studied every detail anyway. Ilya held his left shoulder stiffly now, and his haircut was newer.
Shane lost track of how long he'd been staring. Long enough that the rest of the room faded to background noise. For once, he didn't check his watch. Shane was locked in a world of interpreters and folded napkins and other people's small talk while Rozanov stood in the center of whatever room he walked into. Whatever they were to each other in the dark, out here Shane was just another guest.
Ilya slipped his phone out of his pocket. For half a second, something in his face let go. The corners of his mouth softened. Then it was gone as fast as it came, and his usual control was back. Shane had watched him hide like that before. He realized he didn't know what was underneath.
It needled him now. He'd missed it the first time, that night in his apartment. Ilya's phone had lit up his face at two in the morning. The same softness showed for a moment. Then he turned the screen over and put it down without a word. Shane had been too pleased with the man in his bed to wonder who had put that look on Ilya Rozanov's face.
Shane forced his gaze away. Only then did he notice that he'd been standing still so long his feet ached inside his Reebok dress shoes (his mother's voice in his head, "and the watch, Shane, the shoes and the watch"). Out of habit, Shane touched the phone in his pocket, then the watch. The compass bezel on the waterproof Rolex pointed northwest. Only forty minutes had passed since he'd arrived. How did people do this for a living?
Someone asked him a question in Japanese. Shane's media training got him halfway through the answer before he stumbled, reaching for a word he couldn't find. The kind diplomat patted his back. "Long night," he said. Shane nodded, grateful, and took a breath. The knot in his chest stayed tight. He spoke Japanese as easily as French or English. His attention was still across the room, on Ilya. Grigori Rozanov was walking toward him.
The crowd thinned without seeming to move. A path opened for Grigori before he had to ask. Shane watched him cross the floor with a group of men in dark suits a half-step behind. Ilya's spine straightened until Shane winced, half a second before his father reached him.
At the same moment, a beautiful woman with smooth caramel skin and curly hair arrived at Ilya's other side. Her dress matched the flowers on the tables. She looped her bangled arm through Ilya's without hesitating. Shane knew her name before he saw her face. You didn't get to be what Shane was to Ilya without learning the name of the girl who got to be visible. Svetlana. He caught himself totaling up what she had that he didn't, and gave up somewhere around everything a camera would ever see.
Grigori's hand landed hard on his son's shoulder.
Shane saw it in pieces. The fingers closed. Ilya's stance gave a little, not quite a flinch. Then he went still. Ilya armored up one plate at a time, starting at the jaw. The muscles locked at the hinge. That unfair cupid's bow, the mouth Shane could never stop looking at, pressed into a thin line. Shane had seen him take hits hard enough to rattle the glass. This was the first time he'd seen him lock down like this.
The group moved. Grigori led, his hand still resting on his son's shoulder like he owned it. Svetlana stayed on Ilya's other side. The suits closed in behind them like an honor guard walking a man to his execution.
Away from Shane.
Shane told himself he wasn't going to follow but he didn't believe it. He was moving, jacket still crushed in one fist like he might actually be leaving this time. A quick comment to his companions... "there's a friend," "I'll be right back," "no, no, you don't have to come, I'll be right back." The murmured excuses were forgotten the second he was clear.
Shane kept to the edges of the room. He had woven through entire teams on the ice. A ballroom was easier. He waved off a waiter serving drinks, ducked around a cluster of officials, and slipped behind a tall metal tower of unserved hors d'oeuvres to avoid a security officer talking into a radio. It was a little too fast for polite society, but it kept him close enough to catch pieces of conversation. Grigori kept his Russian low. Shane caught Latvia and that didn't need translating. Ilya's answer was short.
The group filed out a side door. Shane hesitated for a moment, but indecisiveness was a flaw no professional athlete could afford and when it came to Ilya Rozanov, he had no self-respect. Here he was again, trailing him to places he had no business being. "This is such a bad idea," Shane muttered as he followed.
The door led to a dingy service hall stacked with carts and discarded junk. Shane wrinkled his nose at the heavy smell of hot wax and cigar smoke. Ahead, the group disappeared into a room tucked behind a trolley piled with floral arrangements. By the time Shane reached it, the door had swung shut.
Shane stopped with one hand flat against the wall and the other still locked around his jacket. He needed to feel something solid, to be sure any of this was real. Part of him wanted to ease the door open. The rest wanted to go back to the party, or run back to the hotel and pretend none of this had happened.
Shane stood there longer than he'd meant to, waiting for an invitation into Ilya's life that wasn't going to come. Every second stretched longer than the one before it. All this time together, and there was still a chasm between them. Shane stood alone on his side of it.
Slowly, the voices inside the room cut through his spiraling thoughts. The door was thin. He could hear everything.
"You embarrass me," Grigori said, in English. Had the men with him been Americans or possibly British? "You embarrass Russia. In front of everyone, you embarrass Russia, to lose to Latvia."
"We lost. Is game." Ilya's voice sounded almost bored, and Shane could only guess what it cost him to sound like that over such a devastating loss. "Sometimes team lose."
"Is not game. Is everything." His father spoke English in the same way Ilya did. Hearing it from someone else's mouth made Shane's skin crawl. "You think this is only hockey? You carry name, my name. Your laziness reflects on family. You..." Grigori stopped and turned toward the other men. "...forgive. Is emotional day for a father."
The conversation went on, but Shane lost the thread. Footsteps were coming up the service hall behind him. Shane froze. For one endless second, he was certain someone was coming to join them. He was about to be found pressed against the door of a private family argument, with no reasonable explanation. Shane half-turned, already rehearsing an apology.
A staff member pushing a cart of empty glasses toward the kitchen. Shane stood, stiff. The man gave him an unimpressed once-over on his way past. He walked on without breaking stride or saying a word.
Shane let out a long breath and leaned back against the door.
"I am tired, Papa."
"Tired." Grigori repeated the word like it tasted bad. "No. Not tired. Lazy. You know what I think of, watching you lose today? I think of your son. I think, what does boy learn, watching his father give up like this."
The quartet kept playing. Somebody laughed far away. Nothing stopped except Shane. His breath solidified, and so did his thoughts. Then his knees went weak. The last time he'd felt that was the final minute of an overtime game. Air turned heavy in his lungs. Behind him, the roar of the party narrowed to nothing.
Your son.
"He will learn to win," Ilya said, evenly, in the voice he used for reporters. "Like I did."
Shane stopped breathing. Ilya had a son.
Grigori made a small sound that might have been a laugh. "No, I think no. I not want your son to be lazy, to be weak. The child will be strong, like me, like Alexei. Until you are strong you will not... what is word... influence. Yes, no influence until you do better."
Grigori said something else, quiet, in Russian. Shane caught only the ugly shape of it. Ilya answered in Russian too. A few clipped words, then a long pause. Something passed between father and son that Shane couldn't hear.
Then Grigori switched back to English and moved on, as if none of it had happened.
Shane closed his eyes.
Ilya had never said. Shane tried to make the new fact fit in his world. It didn't. The man he thought he knew had a son.
Was Shane so unimportant to Ilya's life? Why had he never mentioned it? Were they built entirely on sex with nothing real underneath?
Inside the room, footsteps and the rustle of clothing grew louder. Shane opened his eyes. He squeezed into the recess behind the flowers just as the door swung open and hid him. Through the gap, he saw Ilya and Svetlana pass shoulder to shoulder, not looking back.
As they walked away together, Shane let himself wonder if the boy was only Ilya's. It would explain why she was here. Was she the mother of Ilya's son? The thought hurt too much, and he had to let it go.
Later, he told himself, he would think about it later. He had to hold it together for now. Someone might catch him, and Ilya was walking away from him again.
A few more of the others walked past. He leaned out carefully, ready to follow, and Grigori's voice stopped him. The old man was right at the threshold, still speaking Russian, and every word was hard.
Shane's Russian was still basic. He'd been learning it in secret. Even so, he understood enough to parse what the older Rozanov had just said.
"Return the child. There will be no visit this year."
This year.
Something in Shane went very still, and then, for the first time all night, very clear.
His logical brain kicked in. The emotions that had overwhelmed him since Ilya's rejection at the rink faded away.
He didn't decide to let them go, any more than he decided to track players on the ice. It happened on its own. He had trained for years to think past his feelings when there was a clear goal.
This year?
The ache in his chest dropped away. So did the jealousy, the why didn't you tell me, and the pull to watch from the shadows and nurse his wounds. It all broke like a fever.
A child was being shuttled around like a political pawn, and Grigori Rozanov controlled him. That cut through everything else. Shane's focus went as clear as fresh ice.
This wasn't about him.
This year?!
Somewhere, a boy was about to lose time with his father over a hockey game, a fucking hockey score.
Did Ilya have a choice? He was a legal adult. But that couldn't be right. He had walked away. Now Svetlana's hands clutching his arm meant something different. Were they holding on to each other in grief? That made much more sense.
Ilya cared about his son, Shane was sure of that.
Shane could believe a lot of things about Ilya and his father, especially now. He could not believe that the man who had always been so tender with him would give up his son voluntarily and leave the boy with Grigori.
Shane didn't move from behind the flowers. For the first time since he'd spotted his rival, he wasn't watching Ilya Rozanov. Grigori passed his hiding place with one of the men. Another set of footsteps went the other way.
Away from the party.
"Where are you going?" Shane whispered, looking out of his hiding place.
His knuckles were white around the jacket he'd forgotten he was holding. He shrugged it on.
For the last few days, Shane had let himself be towed along by other people's plans, his mother's favor, Ilya's rejection, Grigori Rozanov's meeting.
Now the ground had shifted under Shane's feet. The minutes belonged to him. He checked the phone in his pocket and the time on his watch. The clock was finally ticking.
Shane stepped out and strode confidently down the hall.