Chapter Text
The Montreal cold in February doesn’t just sit on your skin, it drives itself straight into your ribs. But for someone trained in the frozen industrial outskirts of Moscow, this Canadian weather isn't a punishment it’s a masterclass in camouflage.
My entire life has been a choreography of invisible patience. You don’t infiltrate the fabric of the West by jumping fences or hacking servers in a single, high-stakes night. You do it by letting the roots of your deep-cover identity rot slowly alongside the locals until everyone forgets which tree sprouted first. The Program taught us that the perfect asset isn’t the one who goes unnoticed; it’s the one who becomes utterly indispensable to the right person.
And my right person was a ten-year-old kid crying on a public rink in Ontario because his skate laces were tied too tight.
Shane Hollander was, even then, an open map of loud vulnerabilities and raw, terrifying talent. Too expressive, too eager to please. The exact structural inverse of the silent, cold machinery they had implanted in my chest. When I singled him out on that frozen pond under the watchful eyes of my handler "parents," it wasn’t an impulse. I had seen the files. I knew his lineage, his family’s deep-rooted connections to the athletic and media elite that would later serve as my ultimate ballistic shield. If you’re going to hide from global intelligence agencies, you do it beneath the blinding stadium lights of the NHL, where the entire world is too busy tracking the puck to look at you.
He was going to be my bunker. My definitive boarding pass into North American normalcy.
"Ilya, seriously, if you keep staring at that laptop like you're trying to murder it, I’m gonna ask the coaching staff to trade you to another line. Or another planet."
Shane’s voice cuts through the static of the hotel room. He’s splayed face-down on the adjacent double bed, shirtless, with a leaking ice pack awkwardly balanced on his right shoulder, dripping onto the carpet. The room smells intensely of ointment, stale hockey sweat, and that cheap citrus body wash he buys in bulk because he’s too stubborn to look for anything else.
"I am analyzing our neutral zone transition, Hollander. Someone has to do it if we expect you to stop coughing up the puck at the blue line," I reply, keeping my eyes locked on the glowing laptop screen. My accent, painstakingly polished over fifteen years of chewing through Canadian vowels, retains just enough Slavic gravel for the sports media to write it off as "exotic intensity."
"I lost the puck once. Once. And I backchecked," he grumbles, twisting his neck to glare at me. His eyes have that sharp, amber focus an absurdly high voltage he uses whether he's barking at a referee or trying to pick a movie on Netflix. "Besides, that’s literally why you're out there. To cover my back."
The phrase hangs in the air, thick and heavy like the steam rolling out of the arena showers.
To cover my back.
Shane says it with the reckless casualness of someone who still believes in locker-room brotherhood and unwritten hockey codes. He doesn't know that every time I glide into position behind him to break up an odd-man rush, I am calculating the exact clean line of sight in case the Kremlin ever decides Hollander isn't an asset anymore, but a liability. He doesn't know that the satellite phone hidden inside the lining of my gear bag received a three-word encrypted transmission last night: The nest wakes.
I stand up from the desk with the calculated stiffness of a tired athlete, masking the rigid, military tension tightening my shoulders. I walk over and sit on the edge of his mattress, close enough to feel the heat radiating off his skin.
"The ice is melting," I note, pointing to the plastic bag slipping down his collarbone.
"Then fix it. My fingers are freezing."
He’s spoiled. A golden Canadian boy who would shatter if he knew what it cost to earn a piece of bread in a starvation cell at twelve years old. But when I reach out to shift the ice pack and my fingers brush against the burning skin of his shoulder, the short circuit is instantaneous.
Shane doesn't pull away. His pupils dilate, swallowing the gold in his eyes, eating up the distance between us. There’s been a latent, violent friction to the way we look at each other since we turned twenty, an unspoken non-aggression pact that we both know is a countdown timer. He thinks it's competitive fire. He thinks it's the suffocating weight of the media pinning us together as the dual saviors of the franchise.
He doesn't understand that for me, this is terror. Panic at the realization that the fortress I built around him has become the only country I have left to defect to.
"You're wound up tight, Ilya," he murmurs. His hand, large, heavy, and heavily calloused from years of gripping the stick slides out from under the pillow and closes around my wrist. His grip is steady, electric. "You always look like you're ready to sprint out a fire escape. What are you running from?"
If you only knew, Shane. If you only knew that half the goals, I score are just to keep the international press cameras glued to my face, because Moscow can't liquidate a prime-time celebrity without triggering a global incident.
"I am not running," I tell him, dropping my voice until it’s barely a breath against his lips, leaning down because my survival instinct is finally losing the war against my hunger. "I am just making sure we aren't followed."
He tugs my wrist downward, and the prologue of my treason is written against his mouth.