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Chapter Text

Part One: Ilya

Chapter One: December 2008 - Regina, Saskatchewan

The cold is a different kind of beast here. In Russia, winter gnaws at every exposed piece of flesh it can find, biting at red cheeks and noses and the thin skin stretched over bare knuckles. It’s a starving wolf of a season that would strip you down to bloody bones if it could, nipping at your heels and chasing you all the way up to your doorstep. Russian winters stalk you. They snarl; they hunger. 

Canadian winters are different. It was the first thing Ilya noticed stepping off the plane in Regina. The cold here is less starving, more patient. It slithers across his shoulders, finds the gaps between his skin and his clothes and worms its way inside to tighten around his chest like a great python. Restrictive, paralyzing. Canadian—or maybe just Saskatchewanian—winters bide their time. They linger; they wait.

His fingers fumble against the spark wheel of the lighter, clumsy from the winter air. It’s inescapable, the Canadian cold. Even inside his hotel room in the middle of downtown Regina, he’s felt it against his skin, inside his throat and spreading through his lungs until he feels numb from the inside out.

Out here, with only the concrete wall of the rink to give him shelter from the chilly wind, it is worse. But it is a necessary evil if he wants to steal a smoke before practice, and the soothing wash of nicotine through his body may just be the only thing that gets him through this first session.

The spark wheel slips against his thumb again; the flame flickers and fails to catch. 

Captain of the Russian team, even though there were older players who’d been salivating for the opportunity. Ilya isn’t stupid. He knows he’s good on the ice—the best in Russia at his age, maybe already one of the best players in the world. But there are no laurels he can rest on, not yet. Just more to prove: to the audience of fans who have yet to learn how to fit the consonants and soft vowels of his name into their mouths, to the NHL scouts still circling his games but confirming nothing more than their passing interest. To the players on his own team, who glance sideways at his jersey and swallow down their resentment. To his father, who—

He feels it in his bones that this team is good. That they can take the Prospects Cup home to Russia, that they want it more than they care that an undrafted, unproven protostar of a future supernova is wearing the C. 

That does not mean team cohesion will come easily to them, even if the goals will. And that can fall on Ilya’s shoulders, afterwards. Yes, yes, we were a great team. But it was in spite of our Captain, not because of him. Rozanov could not lead us out of Moscow if he had a clear sky and a detailed map of the city. He is just lucky we hunger for Russian glory, always. 

The lighter’s fire spits for a moment and then dies again. Ilya’s thumb presses into the ruts of the metal wheel until it hurts and pushes at the stone. 

It will not matter to Russia. As long as they win. 

But it will matter to the scouts, maybe. It will matter to his father. 

He clicks at the lighter again, harder this time. Frustration sparking and flickering in his chest as the stupid piece of shit Zippo clicks uselessly in his hand. He bought it yesterday along with the pack of cigarettes, snuck out of the hotel to a corner shop a few blocks away that looked like they wouldn’t care so much about his age. Just shy of eighteen, too young to smoke legally in Canada. Dangerous to even try, but it was something he needed, brushing up against danger. Even if it was mundane and petty and purposeless.

What if the shopkeeper recognized him. What if the shopkeeper got in touch with the Canadian media. What if the shopkeeper wanted to see him arrested for underage smoking. 

An absurd possibility, but there. Flickering like coals after a fire. 

Danger is always like that, for Ilya. Embers to be stoked, flames to be coaxed back to life and then studied. Maybe in another universe, one where he has not chosen to live with the ice of a hockey rink under his fingernails, he is something of a pyromaniac instead. Sveta calls him self-destructive, but she is hardly the expert. She has read half a book on twenty-first century trends in American psychology because this year she wants to go to university there, and she has decided to make it everyone’s problem. 

The spark wheel slips out from his numb fingers, light dying before it has a chance to catch and burn the end of his cigarette.

Canadian cold is worse than Russian cold, Ilya decides, flexing the muscles in his hand and clicking at the lighter again. Then again.

The real danger is losing, of course. That is always a possibility in ice hockey, but maybe for other people it is a sin that can be confessed away, a bruise that heals overnight. Get back out there, try again. Maybe this is something other people’s coaches say. Other players’ fathers.

The real danger is not losing. It is what can happen afterwards. It is Ilya’s father, curt voice snapping like gunfire down the phone line, supposition and threat and cold, calculated promise stacked one after the other. Efficient. International phone calls must be kept short. Costs per minute are astronomical, but then that’s the way Ilya’s father has spoken since he was a child: command, demand, threat. Pause for breath, pause for agreement. Continue.

When Russia’s coach tapped Ilya on the shoulder this morning during breakfast and told him his father was calling, he wasn’t stupid enough to think it was to tell him good luck.

But he was still too naive. Or maybe his father will always find ways to surprise him. 

The lighter clicks; nothing happens. 

“We have been thinking,” his father says. “This cup, your captaincy. It is a good point to stop and reassess, yes?”

The eggs and toast Ilya managed to eat turn in his stomach. The hallway is empty of spectators, the coach whose phone Ilya is holding to his ear still downstairs at the breakfast table. The man gave him a weird look when he took his phone and practically ran from the room, as if phone calls between fathers and sons were allowed to take place around witnesses. Sometimes, you meet someone and you know instinctively that they have never been a wounded animal.  “Yes, sir.” 

“North America might take you still if you do not win, but you would not be ready for the draft. Your coach here agrees. Another year in Russia would strengthen your short-comings. A season with the KHL, perhaps an entry level contract. It would be real hockey; they would not allow you to be lazy, to shrug off work.”

“Yes sir.”

“I will not let any son of mine make a mockery of his life,” his father says. It sounds like a threat. “Of this family.”

“I will not,” Ilya says, automatic.

“Do not interrupt,” his father snaps. “Listen, attempt to understand.”

“Yes sir.”

“Losing will bring home dishonor to this family, to your name, Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov. It cannot happen.”

In this, at least, they are in complete agreement. Ilya leans his forehead against the hotel’s corridor. It is deserted, everyone in these rooms down in the lobby for breakfast, so he allows himself this show of weakness. He allows himself the smallest flinch at the way his name rolls off his father’s tongue.

“If you fail to honor your country with the little amount of skill we have managed to manufacture into you over the past ten years, then there are alternate routes of service. The police force will never take you, you are too lazy. Too weak. But the military has extensive experience making men out of boys like you.”

Ilya’s mouth is dry; his lips are cold and numb, like the Canadian winter has snuck its way into the hotel. His chest is tight, the ghost of frigid winds curled around his lungs. “Yes sir.”

“It would be an honor.”

“It would be an honor,” Ilya says. 

“The shadow minister of the Interior has a daughter who is…in the family way,” his father tells him. “The problem will be resolved, of course, but her father has decided that changes will need to be made. Her name is Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov. Say it.”

“Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov,” Ilya says. There is no spark beneath his skin, no rush of endorphins or burn of electricity down his spine, but then he didn’t think there would be. Soulmarks only appear if a person’s soulmate says their name in front of them, within their hearing. But the romantics like to think that soulmates can feel it, even with just the name, even from great distances apart. Like a shiver in the breeze. A rightness in the bones. Perhaps somewhere in Moscow, Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov has just sneezed. Perhaps she has already said his name, had this same conversation with her father. Soulmarks—with the right kind of money, the right sort of incentive—they are easy to fake. This is not a conversation. This is a declaration of intent.

“Practice it,” his father commands. “It would be advantageous for both of our families if your skin bloomed for her.”

“It would be an honor,” Ilya says. He closes his eyes when he realizes it’s been so long since he’s blinked that the wallpaper in front of his nose has started to blur.

“Good,” his father says. Then, as if he has just remembered: “Win. Show me you are capable of it.”

“Yes sir,” Ilya says just as the call disconnects.

The lighter clicks with nothing to show for it, and Ilya hits it against his palm before trying again. 

He shouldn’t be smoking, but he needs it. Needs the release, the heat. The Canadian winter has snuck down into his bones and he cannot shake it. He cannot play like this, and there is so much on the line. There is his whole life on the line, his future extended before him and planned out in someone else’s handwriting.

The unrelenting swarm of thoughts bite at his mind. His father has been planning this for longer than Ilya has been training for the World Juniors, then. It’s the only thing that makes sense, and it is something his father would do: he has given Ilya just enough rope to hang himself with. He has given him the freedom to play in this tournament, the hope of a future with the NHL in North America. But he has been quietly moving in the shadows of Ilya’s life all the same. Having a star hockey player for a son is only good if he doesn’t burn out. If he performs to the standard. If he brings home glory with every game. Glory and a hefty paycheck the NHL would give him that the KHL never would. 

But if Ilya cannot prove that his game is a worthy one, that he can make it to the money and to the glory, then he will become just another piece on his father’s board. A soldier in the national forces. A political puppet for his father’s ambitions. Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov’s soulmate, one way or another. 

Never mind that it’s illegal in most countries to force or fake a soulbond between two people; never mind that the UN has a treaty on international soulmate rights, which prohibit the forced removal of soulmark tattoos as well as the coercion of two people into a contract that supersedes the rights of a soulbonded couple. 

Russia is a different place, behind the cracked and faded genial front it presents to the international community. In Russia, soulmarks are nice. Sometimes, they are even celebrated. But not by Ilya’s family. Not by the people his father surrounds himself with.

In Russia, in some parts of Russia, soulmarks are to be covered up and ignored. Recopied onto other people’s bodies as convenient. A soulmate should never get in the way of a good business deal, is the saying.

There is another Russian saying about soulmates too. Ilya does not think about it often, but it is sometimes unavoidable when he coaxes dangerous fire to leap from half-burning embers. Like when he fucked his coach’s son beneath the empty seats of the hockey rink at night, when Sasha spat out his full name as if it were a threat. Maybe it was at the time, Ilya doesn’t know. Ilya never repeated Sasha’s back to him. 

Better to cut out a man’s tongue than hear him say another man’s full name. 

That’s also illegal under most of the UN treaties, of course. But Russia hadn’t signed those treaties, and everyone knows what the state police get up to late at night. They are not embarrassed about it; they’re not secretive.

Maybe that is a bright side to this, Ilya thinks. He strikes his lighter again. Again. If he is told to marry Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov, if he does it, if he sits under a tattooist’s needle and lets them give him a—flower or a piece of Cyrillic script as a soulmark, he will have far less opportunity to fuck men in the shadows of Moscow. Even less opportunity to hear them say his name, to say their names in return. It is a safe option. He likes his tongue where it is.

There are bright sides to everything if one has stared into the dark for long enough. Fire flickering against a cave’s wall starts looking a bit like the sun.

Ilya turns into the wind, away from the wall of the rink, strikes the wheel of this shitty defective lighter and presses down the stone. 

Fire catches. The flame holds.

Relief burns over his skin as he leans his mouth down to light the end of his cigarette. Though, really, he thinks, it’s unfair to the cigarette to think it can ease the heavy thoughts in his mind. Still, it is what he is allowed. All he has in the moment—maybe he shouldn’t smoke, maybe he is ruining his body and courting death with each flicker of his lighter, but it is still his body for now. It is still his future he can watch go up in flames.

Self-destructive. 

Maybe Sveta is onto something. 

Or maybe—

“Ilya Rozanov?” the voice wavers slightly, pitched up like it’s a question but also like the speaker already knows the answer too. Ilya’s name sits like a jumbled mess of consonants in the air until Ilya turns around to see Shane Hollander standing near him. 

Hollander’s face is open and flushed warmly red despite the cold around them. He has a toque pulled down over his ears, an overcoat and a sweatshirt on, but that’s all the defense he’s mustered against the winter. He gives him a small, genuine-looking smile when Ilya looks at him, taking a step closer and holding out his hand. “Shane Hollander,” Hollander says. “I–I wanted to introduce myself.”

Ilya blinks. Hollander’s shorter in person than he expected. Smaller, too, outside of his hockey gear. He’s watched tape of Hollander’s games in his coach’s office after practice, but the footage has never been clear enough to see much more than the blur of a 24 on a rainbow cascade of different jerseys, skating around a childhood’s worth of ice rinks. 

The tapes prepared him for Hollander’s speed, his puck-handling, his adaptability.

They didn’t prepare him for his freckles. 

They’re scattered across the bridge of his nose and the tops of his cheeks, darker brown dots splattered over golden skin like an artist has taken the edges of his paintbrush and flicked it over a complete canvas. The burn of the cold has rubbed Hollander’s face a light red, and his freckles stand out against the color. Impossible to miss. Impossible to prepare for.

Ilya watches his hand extend towards Hollander’s as if someone else is controlling his body. Sportsmanship is not—well, maybe it is done in some parts of Russia, but it is not done in Ilya’s rinks.

Hollander’s palm is rough in his own; his fingers are dry and calloused, like Ilya’s, toughened out from hours of stick-handling and weight-lifting.

Something about the touch, the handshake, makes Ilya’s stomach tighten and flip over. Something in him stirs. Danger, danger.

He lets go. Hollander blinks at him, dark eyes slightly wide like he doesn’t know what to say next. What to do. His hand is still held out in front of him. 

Ilya doesn’t know why he opens his mouth. Maybe it’s just his instinct to fan the flames of anything dangerous he comes across to see how big he can make his funeral pyre. Maybe he is numb and angry and he wants to make it someone else’s problem for a moment. Maybe he looks at Shane Hollander and feels a spark of jealousy at how warm the boy looks in the middle of a Canadian winter. Maybe he looks at Shane Hollander and feels a spark of something that would ruin his life if he ever let it catch fire and burn. 

Maybe it is a fuck you to his father. Maybe it is a fuck you to Russia, to Hollander, to himself. Maybe he looks at Shane Hollander’s polite face and doesn’t want the warmth of his kindness when he feels like he’s hollowed out on the inside and cold to the bone. 

“Mm, no,” Ilya says with a jerk of his head that turns his cheek but allows him to keep his eyes on Hollander. “That is not how you say my name.”

“I—oh,” Hollander’s cheeks redden. His hand drops; he shoves it into the pocket of his coat and blinks wide onyx eyes up at Ilya like he’s embarrassed. “I’m sorry, that’s just how I’ve heard it in Ottawa. I’ve watched your games. You’re, uh. You’re an awesome player to watch.”

“Yes,” Ilya agrees, exhaling a trail of smoke. It is good to hear; it is not enough. Not enough of a reaction from Hollander; not enough of a gift for Ilya. “Canadian announcers, da?”

“Uh, yeah, from our sports networks,” Hollander admits. He rubs at the back of his neck and his eyes drop down. He addresses Ilya’s shoulder next. “Anyway, I should go—”

“Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov,” Ilya says. He speaks slowly, lowly, letting each syllable linger against the backs of his teeth. “That is my name.”

Hollander’s eyes snap back up to his. He’s flushed bright red now. It is not done, probably, in Canada. Giving your full name to a stranger. It is not done in Russia either. There are social norms about these sorts of things. Cultural rules. It is dangerous, dangerous. 

Ilya smirks at him, putting the cigarette back between his lips and raising an eyebrow. Maybe he says it because he knows that it’ll fluster Hollander. Maybe he is trying to get under his skin before the games begin. Maybe he just wants to see what Hollander will do, how quickly he’ll anger, how quickly he’ll toss aside his polite Canadian sportsmanship act. 

Or maybe Ilya is going to lose this cup and go back to Russia with his tail between his legs and become the plaything of an army of corrupt politicians and their daughters and he’ll never again get to hear the way his name sounds on another boy’s tongue and that loss feels devastating when looked at with the naked, honest eye. So really, why shouldn’t Hollander give him this? Hollander stands poised to take away the rest of his life depending on how well he skates these next few days. If he wants to show him kindness, he can sound out Ilya’s name. He can give him this.

Ilya takes the cigarette from his lips and tilts his head back to blow the smoke up and away from the both of them. It swirls gray-white into the air, dissolves into the dark gray Canadian sky. “Go on,” he demands, turning his attention back to Hollander. He drops his voice, leans closer. It’s a challenge, it’s a dare. It’s an order. It’s almost like a plea. “Say it.”

Hollander blinks at him, and then, like the words are being pulled out of him without his conscious choice, he says, soft, “Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov.”

In the books and in the movies and in the songs, getting your soulmark is always described like seeing fireworks on the backs of your eyelids or feeling lightning running through your veins. 

What they don’t say is how much it fucking hurts to be struck by lightning. No one lingers on that part much. It doesn’t fit the beauty of the soulmate story. It is an ugly truth. The sudden jolt of heat and burning pain across the left side of Ilya’s chest, over his heart, that is an ugly truth.

He coughs, shoulders slanting forward with the movement, and the cigarette slips out of his fingers to land on the ground between them. The only reason he stays on his feet, the only reason he does not slip, does not cry out is because he is good at taking unexpected hits. Good at bracing against impacts he never saw coming. Good at holding his body steady and keeping his face blank when all he feels is pain. He’d fallen out of a tree when he was ten years old. The landing had broken his arm in two different places and he’d been late to dinner. His mother had already retired to her bedroom for the evening; his father had made him sit through the meal before calling for a doctor. He hadn’t cried once. 

This feels like that, like a sharp agony he can disconnect his brain from, like the fire is consuming someone else’s body. Like watching his brother cut into a slab of venison meat dripping with bloody sauce and feeling like perhaps he never made it out of the woods at all.

He can’t feel anything at all. He straightens his shoulders and stubs the cigarette out with the heel of his shoe. He can’t feel anything at all. He is Russian, it is in his blood. He is his father’s son, it is trained into him.

Hollander’s eyes are wide, like he can’t believe what he’s just done. Like he’s just committed a crime, stolen liquor from his parents’ cabinet, smoked a joint. Fucking ruined Ilya’s life, but the pain is background noise is controllable is gone as suddenly as it appeared. 

The skin over Ilya’s heart is oversensitized, tender against the fabric of his undershirt. This side of too much. Unignorable. Present. The aftershocks of lightning skitter up and down his spine, but it’s hard to tell if it’s from the blooming soulmark beneath his skin or if it’s because of the way Hollander’s looking at him.

It’s only been a few moments, a second or two at most, Hollander’s Rozanov is still ringing in his ears, and everything is different.

The decision is instinctive. He blinks at Hollander’s open face. Sometimes you just meet someone and you know they’ve never been a wounded animal. They’ve never limped through a dark forest with hunting dogs and Russian winter nipping at their heels, baying for their blood.

The decision, when he makes it this very first time, is instinctive. He’ll spend ages, later, trying to justify it to himself. The fancy reasons will come eventually, the excuses that shift the blame, that relieve some of its pressure from his shoulders. But the truth is that it’s instinctive. 

Ilya Rozanov’s soulmate says his name in a cold, gray arena parking lot in Saskatchewan, Canada. And Ilya thinks, in this order, that no one told him how much it would hurt to get his soulmark; that everything is different; that no one can know. 

The cigarette is out, but Ilya stamps at it again. He makes a show of leaning back against the wall behind him and coughing out a rusty laugh, like Hollander has surprised him so much he accidentally swallowed cigarette smoke instead of knives. 

The sneer he finds to cover his face feels awkward and too fixed. Svetlana, who knows him better than anyone, would see through it in a second if she were here. But she is not and Hollander doesn’t know.

Hollander doesn’t know.

“Better,” Ilya tells his future hockey rival, who’s still blinking up at him from beneath his long eyelashes like he can’t believe his own daring. “But is still terrible accent. I would not count that as my name and I do not think any gods would either, but I’m sure you try your best.” 

The English words slip and slide across his tongue. He can’t focus on them, knows his own Russian accent is heavy and his sentences are fragmented. But Hollander is still looking at him, and Hollander can’t—he can’t know. Ilya laughs again, can’t hold it in. He feels winded, he feels like he has taken a stick to the throat, a puck to the face. Maybe it’s too much, too telling, to bring up soulmarks even just tangentially, but it’s the only thing Ilya can think to say. Maybe if Hollander believes he has butchered Ilya’s name so badly that whatever god or higher power has given them soulmates would not qualify his attempt as Ilya’s actual name, maybe he will look away. Maybe it will be enough.

Ilya just needs a moment. Ilya just needs to catch his breath. 

And like a miracle, Hollander’s expression closes off. His eyebrows slant down together into a neat little furrow, and his button nose wrinkles. He thinks Ilya is laughing at him. “Fuck you, asshole,” Hollander is quick to snap, hands shoving deeper into his pockets.

Ilya’s own hands have found their way into his jacket now that his cigarette’s been stubbed out. “Very good sportsmanship, Hollander,” he mocks, leaning back against the side of the rink. This is good, this easy. He has years’ worth of experience letting his mouth run, riling people up just to watch them get mad enough to lose concentration on the ice. 

It is so very funny how quickly one’s brain can flick into survival mode. Ilya doesn’t even feel the cold anymore. His chest is on fire. His blood is singing. He’s never felt so alive.

“Whatever, Rozanov,” Hollander scoffs and he’s turning around. Stalking away. Yes. Yes, this is good. This is exactly what needs to happen because Ilya needs—Ilya needs to be alone. He needs to inspect the damage. He needs to think. He needs to sit down. He needs another fucking cigarette. 

But his chest aches when Hollander leaves. Like Hollander’s tied a leash around his heart and is yanking at it with both hands, ripping it out of his ribcage. Would it be so bad? If—if Hollander knew? Would it be so bad if Ilya followed him, grabbed his arm and tugged him somewhere private enough that they could lift up Ilya’s shirt and look at the mark together? Would the ache go away then? Would Hollander stay? 

Ilya tears his eyes away and lets his head thump back against the wall, staring up at the overcast sky. Yes. It would. They’re at an international fucking tournament about to skate for their countries. They’ve both already watched each other play because they both know that the other is going to be their rival, the sort of player that they’ll be defined against for their entire careers. There’s no room for soulmates in that equation. 

And—there’s Russia on the line, Ilya’s family to think about. Ilya’s future. If his father found out, if his brother did—

Better to cut out a man’s tongue...

And what would Hollander say if Ilya told him he wore his soulmark? Would he even believe him? Would he freak out? Ilya feels like freaking out. Ilya feels like he’s burning, like the lightning has burrowed inside of him and made a home in his veins. Hollander would accuse him of trying to get under his skin before the tournament, maybe. Or he would be disgusted. Or he would leave. 

He’s already left. 

It isn’t supposed to be like this, Ilya thinks, desperately. Fruitlessly. 

There were supposed to be fireworks. 

“Grayson,” Hollander says, and Ilya startles, hands fisting instinctively in his pockets as his eyes fly open.

Hollander is standing in front of him, arms crossed and scowling. He looks—

Well. He looks adorable, like an angry kitten. He looks beautiful. It makes Ilya’s heart race and his stomach tighten. That’s his soulmate. Hollander. Shane Hollander is his soulmate. He doesn’t need to rip open his shirts to check the skin of his chest. He doesn’t need to see the mark. He knows, down to his bones. He belongs to Shane Hollander. 

It will not be enough.

“I do not know this word,” Ilya tells him. He wants to reach into his pocket and grab another cigarette from the carton, but he’s afraid that his hands haven’t stopped trembling. He doesn’t want Hollander to see that. Doesn’t want Hollander to see him as weak.

Hollander exhales and turns his face away for a moment, jaw working furiously. Ilya doesn’t know what he wants more: to have learned every word in the English language so as to never have put that look on Hollander’s face, or for Shane to teach him what he doesn’t know.

“It’s my middle name,” Hollander says. His eyebrows are still furrowed, but when he looks back at Ilya now, he looks expectant. His foot taps the ground, quick tap-tap-taps that Ilya didn’t know people actually did in real life.

Shane Grayson Hollander. Ilya rolls the name around in his mind, lets it rest on his tongue, in the back of his throat.

He can say it. Maybe nothing will happen. Half-bonds are rare, but they’re not unheard of. Perhaps Ilya’s soulmate is Shane Hollander and Shane Hollander’s soulmate is not Ilya Rozanov. It’s a tragedy. It’s an ugly truth. Maybe nothing will happen.

And what will that feel like? If Ilya says Hollander’s name and Hollander shrugs and tries to shake his hand again before he leaves, unbothered and unmarked? How will that leave Ilya? How can anyone possibly survive that kind of hit? It would take him out at the knees. It would leave him blind and begging and half-alive. He knows himself well enough to realize this, to see it for the weakness it is. He has always wanted a soulmate; it was never supposed to be like this. If his soulbond is unreturned, if he’s faced with the cold and objective fact that there will never be a single person in his life who will love him the way he could love them, then he doesn’t…then he won’t….He won’t make it to the NHL. He’ll play the worst game of hockey anyone has ever played in their lives and no one will want to draft him. All the scouts will close their notebooks and wince to themselves, and Russia will burn out before they even make it to the quarter finals and Ilya—Ilya isn’t even sure he’d make it back to Russia. 

There is too much of his mother in his eyes, that’s what his father has always said. 

He can say it though. He knows it now. Shane Grayson Hollander. He can say it. Maybe Hollander will clutch at his heart or his arm or his leg and fall to his knees before Ilya, who will scoop him up and hold him to his chest and whisper every sweet name he can think of into his hair. And Hollander will be thrilled to have another boy, a boy like Ilya, to have Ilya, for a soulmate. And Hollander’s parents will be thrilled to have Ilya for their son’s soulmate and when Russia revokes his citizenship and his brother tries to cut out his tongue for the sin of saying Shane Grayson Hollander despite knowing the risks, Ilya can move into his soulmate’s country and his soulmate’s town and his soulmate’s house and they can play hockey together. They can be the first bonded pair of hockey players in NHL history, gay and in love and soulmates. The draft will not matter, because of course the NHL would never separate them, so they’ll go to the same team. And they’ll be soulmates and they’ll be in love and play good hockey. And Ilya will never see his family again, but it won’t matter. In a few years, maybe ten, he will go to sleep and wonder if his grandmother is still alive, if they still share the same sky. And he’ll wonder if his brother’s daughter, who is only just a baby, will ever even be told his name. But it won’t matter, because he will have his soulmate with him, and the songs and the movies and the books have promised that that is the kind of all-consuming beautiful feeling you give up everything else for, the kind you write songs and movies and books about.

Shane Grayson Hollander. He can say it. Maybe Shane will feel the burn of the soulmark across his chest or his leg or his arm and it’ll fill him with the kind of fear Ilya knows now intimately well. Maybe Shane will realize everything that’s at stake; maybe he will be better at keeping his head above the water than Ilya feels. Maybe he’ll be happy to have a soulmate, any soulmate at all, even one who is like Ilya. Who is Ilya. And they can be good and secret about it. They can figure this thing out in the shadows. Surely other people have. Surely there are other hockey players who have a man’s soulmark on their shoulder or hip or thigh, who were stupid enough to risk it all to say a man’s name. They can sneak around, they can have each other and have hockey and keep it separate so that Shane can keep his perfect family, who may accept that their son likes men or may not, and Ilya can keep Russia, which definitely won’t. And maybe that feels like enough, and no one ever slips up and no one else ever finds out and the secret doesn’t weigh on the both of them, doesn’t dim the kindness in Shane’s eyes, doesn’t make his shoulders slump, doesn’t make resentment bloom in his heart the way his soulmark once bloomed across his skin. 

Shane Grayson Hollander. Maybe maybe maybe.

Ilya rolls the syllables around his mouth. He lets his eyes travel over Shane’s face, down to his shoulders.

They look brittle, like a secret as heavy as a soul is could crush them.

No, they don’t.

But Ilya can’t risk it. He has hockey on the line. He has his entire future. He has Shane Hollander’s future now too, to think about. To consider. 

It’s cowardly; it’s selfish. But there are too many odds, too many unknowns. 

Shane Grayson Hollander. He could say it. He could know. One way or another.

“Well?” Shane Grayson Hollander says. The blush is back. Maybe, in another universe, Ilya gets to kiss it one day. Gets to count all his freckles and run his fingers over the soft pink of his lips. 

But not this one.

He makes his eyes go half-lidded, reaches for the smirk, reaches for the memory of that dinner when he was eight years old and his arm felt like it was being sawed off his body and all he could do was sit and wait and pretend he couldn’t feel a thing. When he pulls a cigarette out of his pocket, his hands don’t shake. He can’t feel anything. He puts it at the corner of his mouth and raises his eyebrows at Shane Grayson Hollander. 

At Hollander.

“Okay,” he says, like it’s a question. Like it’s an insult. Like Ilya doesn’t care about Hollander’s middle name, like he’d never say it, not even to rule Hollander out as a soulmate. Like he already knows there’s no way in hell that he’d be Hollander’s soulmate and he doesn’t know why Hollander wants him to try when he’s so much cooler and hotter and more desirable than Hollander could ever be. 

He can see the way it strikes Hollander in his vulnerable underbelly, like he didn’t expect it. Like Ilya Rozanov being an asshole has taken him by surprise.

Hollander will learn. Maybe.

Even if it makes Ilya’s chest twinge just thinking about teaching him.

“Asshole,” Hollander announces, like it’s a revelation. There’s no trace of kindness left in his eyes, just an annoyed flush on his cheeks. Ilya shrugs and pulls out his lighter.

“You say this now, but wait until we beat you,” he says, tilting his head and covering the tip of the cigarette with his palms. He doesn’t try to strike the lighter; he doesn’t know if he can handle it should the spark wheel fail to ignite the butane.

Hollander draws himself up, stiff with wounded pride or country pride or something in between the two. “That’s not happening,” he snaps. He gives Ilya another heated look, nostrils flaring and mouth tugged down into what can only be called a pout. Then he’s gone, stalking across the pavement and through the front doors of the rink without bothering to look back once.

Ilya watches him go until he’s disappeared. When his chest aches, begs him to follow, he rubs at it like one of the physical therapists at the club rubbing at a knot his shoulder. Like if he just gives it a little bit of pressure, the tension will dissipate. As if his luck has ever been that fair.

A minute passes. Then another. Hollander doesn’t return. Eventually, Ilya slides the unlit cigarette back into the carton. Then he’s on the ground. It’s a toss-up between whether his legs give out or he decides to sit. Either way, he ends with his back up against the wall, ass on the dirty concrete and eyes trained on the sky.

“Ekatarina Ivanovna Belousov,” he says to the light pieces of snow that have begun to fall. Nothing.

He closes his eyes. 

“Shane Grayson Hollander,” he whispers, just once. Just for himself. 

Lightning dances through his veins.

Occasionally, soulmarks match, the same design painted on two different bodies like a perfect copy of itself. Sometimes, they complement each other, like a bumble bee on a woman’s hip bone and a daisy flower on her soulmate’s clavicle. But there’s no exact science, no predicting what one’s soulmark will look like on their mate’s skin, what they’ll be given in return. Sometimes the marks correspond with the wearer’s cultural background, or their mate’s. Sometimes they look nonsensical, something that only makes sense to the soulmated pair. 

Ilya has always liked those the best, liked the idea of wearing some secret bit of knowledge on his body that no one would ever be able to understand save for the person the mark belonged to.

As far as anyone knows, there’s no exacting science behind the ink, the marks. How big they are, how detailed. The movies and the books and the songs like to pretend they have it figured out, that the bigger and more elaborate the mark, the more powerful and idyllic the love story.

That’s all bullshit, as far as the scientists and Ilya are concerned. The marks are a scientific anomaly, a modern-day commonplace miracle that everyone has to live with, but there’s only so much that can be hidden in ink. They’re not that telling; they don’t hold that much meaning.

It’s the appearance of the soulmark that triggers the realization that a person has just found their soulmate. But it’s not, really. That’s not how souls recognize each other. Most soulmates already know before they ever say their partner’s name.

You just know. Whether it takes ten seconds or ten years or twenty. You just know.

Ilya’s mother’s soulmark was a tree, a beautiful sapling stretched down the length of her spine. His father doesn’t have one, as far as he knows. He just has a tattoo on his sternum, done by a discreet professional somewhere in a gold-trimmed apartment in Moscow the night before their wedding.

His mother’s mark was real though and belonged to someone else. Ilya still doesn’t know what happened to his mother’s mate, if they left her before she met his father, before Alexei was born, or if the tattoo appeared there after the prison sentence was already read. When he was a child, the details were too scandalous for his ears; by the time he grew up, no one talked about Irina anymore. All her secrets died with her.

It’s hard to tell the story a mark illustrates when you only see one. A sapling tree can have a boundless, infinite amount of meanings, all spoken in a language no other tongue can wrap itself around. Its partner, its match, fills in the gaps, unfogs the mirror. Becomes a bookend, turns it from a soliloquy to a conversation. A story.

Without the sapling's soulmark match, all Ilya knows about his mother’s soul is that when given the chance to choose anything he wanted to manufacture the appearance of a soulbond, his father had chosen an axe.

Ilya’s soulmark is a bear. Just the head of one, a snarling, roaring beast of an animal with its teeth bared and its beady black eyes glaring out at the world, cold and unfeeling. It spans most of the skin of his left pectoral, its scruff trailing into nothing around the ball of his shoulder, at the bottom curve of his pec.

It’s sensitive to the touch, even though it doesn’t look like anything more than a months’ old tattoo.

He’d always wondered about what his soulmark would be. Where it would appear on his body. If it would relate to his soulmate or himself, if the marks would match or complement or whisper across his skin like a secret only his mate could understand.

It’s hard to tell, with just one half of the story. But Ilya will make do.

His fingers are shaking as he pulls his Underarmour shirt back down over the damning ink. His body immediately protests, shivers away from the brush of the material. In stupid, thoughtless retaliation, he presses the polyester unforgivingly against the mark. A sharp pain flares through his chest before it subsides into submission.

He braces himself against the bathroom countertop and stares at his reflection until the angles of his face start to blur.

It is a Russian bear. It is big, detailed. This means nothing, of course, Ilya knows it means nothing. Knows there’s no idyllic love story waiting for him in Shane Grayson Hollander’s arms. 

But it could be worse. It could be a—a maple leaf. Or a moose. Or some sort of Canadian bird. Something Ilya Rozanov would never in a million years choose to tattoo on himself. A snarling, vicious-looking bear is not something Ilya would get tattooed, he thinks. But no one else knows that. It fits his persona, all the masks he picks from when he leaves the safety of his bedroom and his rink to face his family and the Russian media.

He will have to hide it, of course. For a few months. If Russia wins the Prospect’s Cup, maybe he can sneak away from the celebration, before the flight back home. He can fake a tattoo appointment. Book a tattoo appointment, even, so that there is a paper trail if anyone looks. Not show up. Wait a month or so, tell everyone that he’d felt so proud to call Russia his homeland that he’d tattooed her bear on his chest to carry with him the rest of his life. 

Or if they lose, he will go back to Russia. Maybe he can find a tattooist that can put his name in his books, for a fee. Tell people he got it to remind himself that he carries Russian glory on his shoulders every time he steps onto the ice. 

The thoughts, both of them, make his stomach sick and his hands feel clammy. It yanks at something deep inside of him, the idea of lying about his soulmark. Whatever else it is, however life ruining and inconvenient, it is his. It is Shane’s. Hollander’s. He can never be honest about the bear that has etched itself across his chest; it’s the only thing that he wants to do.

It could be worse. At least it is a Russian bear. It could have been a maple leaf. It could have been something that screamed Shane Grayson Hollander. 

But it doesn’t. It has nothing to do with Hollander. It is just a bear; it is just Russia, staking a claim on his skin that he’ll never be able to shake off or run from no matter how far away he goes.

He ignores the tightening of his chest, the spark of disappointment that flares up in his stomach. It is much better that his soulmark carries no traces of Hollander in its lines, in its shadings. It makes things just a little bit easier. 

But Ilya doesn’t want easier. He wants—

He slams his hands on the countertop to scatter the thought away before it has time to form. He will have to dress separately from the team for the next week. He can show up to practice already dressed in his Underarmour, many players do that. It is cold outside, Canadian winter lingering even in the depths of the Saskatchewan arena, even in the corners of the locker room. It will be harder, after practices. He could stay on the ice longer, skate another fifteen minutes, another thirty. Leave without showering, shower at the hotel.

It will be hardest after games, but not impossible. Gross, maybe, to sit in his own sweat until he can wash off at the hotel or in an empty locker room shower. But covering the soulmark in bandages will be suspicious, will draw the eyes of his coach. Star players cannot be wearing bandages the week before the final.

Star players cannot be injured so close to life-defining games. Star players cannot be thinking about anything except their stick-handling skills, their powerplay formations, their shots on goal. Star players cannot be handing out their full names to pretty boys in parking lots. Bad things can happen. Terrible things. Things there’s no coming back from.

Ilya unlocks the bathroom door and slips into the silent service corridor. He’s due on the ice in two hours, the Canadian team practice falling just before Russia’s on the event's timetable. That means Hollander’s on the ice right now.

He shouldn’t—but really, there is no other option. No reason besides the obvious to avoid watching Hollander skate. He is Russia’s team captain. Of course he should scope out the competition, watch their practices from a safe distance away. No one will think anything more of it than that. 

He shouldn’t, because this stupid pull in his chest cannot define his life or his actions. And he has never trained a dog before, but he knows if you give them scraps from the table once, they’ll beg for the rest of their lives.

But—it is just a little thing. It is just one time. 

That is what Ilya tells himself as he sinks into one of the arena’s empty seats, sat far back enough that he’s unobtrusive. Unnoticed. It is just one time. It is for research purposes. He has seen so much game tape of Hollander. He wants to watch how he moves on the ice in front of him in real time.

It’s a little thing. 

It’s dangerous beyond words. 

Hollander is a phenomenal skater, crossing the rink at a breakneck pace and dodging his scrimmage opponents like they’re standing still, like they’re nothing more than cones on the ice to spin around. It makes everyone else look like they’re wearing wooden clogs while he has winged sandals. 

Where Ilya would rather fight through a board battle than give even a centimeter of ground, Hollander slips out from bigger, heavier bodies, stays at the edges and finds the puck the moment it leaves the tangle of other people’s skates to push it forward to the goal like he never moved backward at all.

It’s a different style of play. Watching it feels like watching a separate sport completely from the one Ilya plays, but it’s clear exactly how much Hollander knows hockey, knows how he moves on the ice, knows how the puck responds to his stick. 

Ilya slouches further into his chair and chews absently at the string of his hoodie. 

Maybe it is all some kind of cosmic mistake, a blip, a misunderstanding. Hollander is not really his soulmate, he is his opposite, his soul’s antithesis and someone’s wires just got crossed. A cosmic zero was accidentally dropped. Upon review, the math doesn’t hold up. 

But then, halfway through a shooting drill, when Hollander is waiting for his turn in front of the goalie, he looks up into the seats. His eyes find Ilya’s as if they’ve been drawn there magnetically. 

It does not mean anything; Ilya is the only one watching them practice. As unobtrusive as he’s being, of course Hollander has found him. There is no one else around to draw his attention.

From this distance, it’s impossible to read the look on Hollander’s face.

Ilya’s chest aches. The moment Hollander’s attention is called away, Ilya rubs at it with his hand, pressing the heel of his palm against the tight skin above his heart, like he can soothe the bear by petting it into submission.

It is both a surprise and not, when Ilya glances into the stands during his own practice and finds Hollander leaning against one seat, hands in his pockets and face fixed on the ice as a sharply dressed woman sits in the chair next to him, sharp eyes watching the players move below her like they're nothing but little bugs.

Of course Hollander has snuck into Russia’s practice; Ilya did it first. He is following Ilya’s cues. He is curious. He has seen Ilya skate on shitty, grainy footage. He wants to see him skate with his own eyes. Their motivations are the same; it is just a small, meaningless thing.

When Ilya’s chest twinges with insistent, pointed pain, like a muscle spasm, he presses his glove against it like he’s working out an old injury.

His eyes find Hollander again, instinctively. The boy’s back is turned to him as he follows the woman out of the stands, back to his Canadian team and his Canadian hotel and his perfect life. He makes it look so very easy, leaving Ilya. Like it is a small, meaningless thing.

For him it is. llya has ensured it. This is the victory he has won. 

“Rozanov!” His coach yells, sensing his distraction, and Ilya’s eyes jump away from Hollander. Back to the ice. Quickly, before anyone can notice where he’d been looking—who he’s been looking at.  “Is there something more important going on?”

Ilya shakes his head. Nothing. Of course not, Coach. 

There is nothing more important than this. Everything else Ilya has has already gone up in flames.

Sveta connects the call before the second ring. “Hello, this is Svetlana Vetrova speaking,” she says politely in perfect English. Ilya almost takes the phone away from his face to make sure he’s dialed the right number, but then there’s no need. She’s introduced herself. It’s definitely her. 

“Sveta,” he says, a question, eyebrows furrowing as he leans back against the brick wall of the arena. It’s Janaury now, 2009. Tonight, Russia will play Canada in the final round of the Prospect Cup. It is not a surprise to Ilya nor any of the announcers he has heard cover the tournament so far. They have called it fated.

Even just the memory of the word tastes like ash on his mouth.

Tonight, he will either win the cup and bring home temporary glory to a country that will tarnish it within seconds—or he will win nothing and find out how durable his father’s plans for his future have become in his absence. 

But right now it is still the morning. There is still time for a smoke, for a phone call. 

Maybe he should be surprised that his feet have led him to the same stretch of wall where he met Shane Hollander a week ago, but he is not. He thinks, probably, he will re-tread this ground many, many times in his mind. Maybe for the rest of his life.

“Ilya,” Sveta says, sounding surprised. “I thought you were an admissions officer!”

“Why would I be an admissions officer?” Ilya says, taking the cigarette from his mouth and exhaling the smoke back into the sky. “Why would an admissions officer call? Do they not email? I have heard everyone is emailing everything now.”

He can hear the eye roll in her voice. Strangely, this is what makes him feel homesick for the first time since boarding the plane away from Russia. “What do you know about academic admissions, Mr. Star Player?” she teases, and just the sound of her voice relaxes his shoulders. He lets himself slide down until he’s sitting, legs curled up almost to his chest. 

“This is a Canadian phone number,” he points out instead of admitting that he knows nothing about academic admissions. He will graduate from his preparatory school, but everyone knows that the senior classes have done shit for actually preparing him for his life. “I thought you only applied to fancy American schools.”

Sveta hums, and he can hear shifting like she’s in her bed. It is evening in Moscow but not late enough for her to be asleep. She only goes to bed early when she plans to stay up late into the night, go out partying with her friends until dawn.

It hits him suddenly that with the time difference between Russia and Saskatchewan, his game will air in the early hours of the morning. Perhaps that is what she sleeps for now. So that she can watch later.

He rubs at his left shoulder, but this time, the tightness in his chest has nothing to do with his soulmark. 

“I applied to many fancy American schools,” Sveta agrees. “And a few Canadian ones.”

“Oh?”

“McGill,” she says. 

“What the fuck is McGill?” Ilya asks, letting his head roll back against the brick. “I do not know it. It sounds like an American food.”

“It’s in Montreal,” Sveta tells him, laughing. She laughs a lot, so easily. It is nice. 

“Don’t go to Montreal,” Ilya says quickly. “You have to promise me. It is a terrible team to root for, and you know you will be expected to root for it.”

“You say that like there’s not a large chance that you become a Voyageur,” Sveta says. “They traded their centre and one of their goalies for the second draft pick, remember. You’ll have to eat your words if they give you one of their blue and white jerseys.”

Ilya brings the cigarette back up to his lips. “Don’t remind me,” he says, exhaling. “But you know I will not be second.”

The words get easier to say every time he tells them to someone else, like cockiness is a pair of new boots that must be broken in before you wear them.

“Hm,” Sveta says. It is not confirmation and it is not denial. She would never give him these things. Her love is not artificially soft, nor is it something she keeps stored up away from him where he cannot reach it. It is why he called her. It is why he always calls her. “I am waiting for word from Tufts,” she tells him. “That is in Boston.”

Boston. He smiles up at the Canadian sky, lips twisting and pressing white around the cigarette end. Sveta has her own plans and her own dreams that do not include Ilya, that have not been built around him and his future and whichever NHL team drafts him, if any do. 

But it is nice, he thinks. To be told that there is room for him in her life. That she has cleared out a space. That she has thought very long and very hard about what she wants out of her future, and she has left open the possibility that what she wants is for Ilya not to feel alone in a strange city far from home. 

“Svetlana Sergeevna Vetrova,” Ilya sighs, shaking his head and wishing that lightning was a sensation you could create if only you wanted to feel it enough. He doesn’t love Sveta like a soulmate, but God, he loves her like a friend and that is so very close.

“Stop that, Ilya Grigoryevich Rozanov,” Sveta replies, immediate and unrelenting. She’d said the same thing when they were seven years old and they’d traded names in the coat closet just off of the grand foyer of her house. She’d hit him in the chest afterwards with a closed fist. All these years later, Ilya still can’t decide if she’d been mad because they were not soulmates or because he’d forced the question.

Still, to this day, she’s the only person he’s ever said the full name of. He wonders if she knows that.

He wants to tell her. He wants to tell her about everything. About his father, about the unwieldy and unsurvivable future that lurks in front of him if he loses this tournament. About being captain to a team that scores goals but doesn’t know how to celebrate them in the locker room. About Shane Grayson Hollander.

God, he wants to tell her about Shane, which really means telling her about the bear, which would really only make sense if he first tells her about the freckles. Fuck, he wants to tell her about the freckles. And the bear. And Hollander.

But no one can know. Even if he loves them—even if he trusts them. No one can know. It has to be like it never happened. It has to be like Ilya Rozanov never met his soulmate, like his heart still resides in his chest, whole and content to be there. Like it is not straining against his ribcage every minute of the day, beating and howling and begging to be closer to the most annoying Canadian he has ever met in his fucking life.

“Why are you calling me?” Sveta asks, tone brisk, to business. He can imagine her sitting up in bed, silk bonnet curled around her head and eye mask discarded on the pillow next to her. “International calls are very expensive, Ilyukha. I should be charging you by the minute.”

“I’ll make you a deal, yes?” he says, examining the end of his cigarette. It has burnt down to nothing. He should not reach for another; he does anyway. “If I win, I will pay your entire phone bill for this month, international calls included.”

He can hear the smile in her voice. “And if you lose?”

“I will not be doing that,” he informs her, mock-serious. Very serious. Only a bit afraid. “Who do you take me for?”

“Hm,” she says, drawing out the syllable. “Deal.”

“Good,” Ilya says. He clicks the lighter, tilts his head to his shoulder to keep the phone pressed against his ear as he brings the flickering flame up to light his cigarette. “Now that we are speaking on my dime, tell me what you think about the competition.”

“Oh, I see what this is. You want to talk about Shane Hollander,” her voice is far too knowing. Or—is it? Or is Ilya just hyper-sensitized to that name? To the very mention of the boy?

“I have other competition,” he grunts, dropping the lighter before the heated metal can burn his fingers. He feels—disconcerted. On edge. Transparent.

Sveta sounds unbothered when she scoffs, and he can picture her waving a careless hand through the air. “You will have other players on the ice,” she corrects. “But Hollander is your only competition.”

Ilya’s exhale feels punched out of his mouth. “He is a good player,” he admits, because he wants to tell Svetlana the truth about everything, but he can’t. He has to fit it all into those five words and hope that maybe she will understand.

“Very good,” Sveta agrees. “But Russia’s team is better. Canada is very young this year, and it shows in their play. Sweden almost took them out, and the Swedish team is shit. You will win, Ilya. I know it.”

It sounds different to hear her say it. His father’s words had been a threat. Sveta just sounds unshakably confident, like she can see no path forward that does not include Russian gold around Ilya’s neck.

He lets his head drop forward. The Canadian winter has slipped beneath his hoodie. His chest feels tight with, cold and restrictive.

Sveta has moved onto analyzing Canada’s powerplay, which is one of her favorite things to do, so Ilya lets her talk and lets his attention drift. A team bus has pulled into the parking lot and up to the doors of the arena. 

A line of red and white clothed boys spew out of the arena’s doors. The Canadian team has finished their morning practice then. They’ll be going back to the hotel for a nap before the game. It is Russia’s turn on the ice soon.

Ilya watches the line move forward—each boy stuffs his things into the bus’s undercarriage before climbing aboard. Hollander is there, somewhere, among them.

“Ilya? You are not even listening,” Sveta complains into his ear. 

There. Hollander is in the line, second to last to board. Ilya knows it. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he does. He thinks maybe he could recognize the slant of Hollander’s shoulders anywhere. He thinks maybe he should never get closer to him than he is now, a parking lot away. Everything else is too risky. Too dangerous.

But his chest has loosened at just the sight of Hollander, standing at the back of his team’s line with both fists around the strap of his equipment bag like he’s afraid someone is going to take it away from him.

The Canadian winter feels suddenly so far away; the bear in his chest roars its approval.

“I am listening, I am listening,” Ilya tells Svetlana, standing and stubbing out the remainder of his cigarette. “I am just in shock. You’ve never been so nice before a game, Sveta.” 

“You’ve never called me nervous before a game,” Svetlana sniffs. Hollander has stowed his equipment with the rest of his team’s. He’s at the doors to the bus.

He turns his head; he looks at Ilya from across the parking lot. 

“I am not nervous,” Ilya says, even though his throat is dry and his heart is racing. His chest feels…light, buoyant, like his body sustains itself on photosynthesis and it recognizes Hollander as the sun. Like his body is a dog beneath the table and it has just been fed an unexpected scrap of food and now it knows it can beg for brief moments for the rest of its life and occasionally get its way. “I am…happy.”

Is he? He doesn’t know. He has a soulmate. Shane Hollander is his soulmate. He feels warm all over, heated from within.

“You have never called me like that either,” Sveta points out, but her voice has softened. There’s a hesitation now, when she asks carefully, “Has something happened, Ilya?”

Hollander breaks their staring contest when his teammate pushes at his back. He disappears inside the bus.

Ilya turns away from the arena’s front doors, from the Canadian team’s bus. His fingers are trembling, which is a pointless reaction. Weak. Telling. He rubs at his left shoulder, ghosting his palm over the bear’s twisted, snarling mouth. Lightning dances beneath his skin.

“Not a damn thing,” Ilya lies.