Chapter Text
Boston
Ilya Rozanov—three-time Hart Trophy winner, nine-time Rocket Richard Trophy winner, ninth all-time points scorer in Major League Hockey history and its fifth all-time goals producer—stared at his agent in shock.
“Are you… serious?” he asked, speaking slowly despite the relative ease of the Russian words. He didn’t understand the point of the joke, if so. But the idea that Naomi was in earnest seemed even less likely.
“You said you wanted a real contender,” she responded, raising her eyebrows. “The reigning dynasty seemed like a shoe-in, no?”
Ilya’s lips quirked at the pun, despite his shock. Naomi was a second-generation immigrant rather than a native speaker, but her Russian was excellent, learned at her mother’s knee and polished with post-graduate work. It had been one of the requirements on the list he’d given Sveta, the last time they’d made a change, six… No, God, it was eight years ago, now. Despite his growing fluency in English, he needed the people closest to him to understand, to not force him to put his brain through a second language when he was at his most exhausted. Naomi, twice his age and with more class than him and Sveta put together, was perfect. She reminded him of… Well, not of his grandmother, but some kind of platonic ideal of the type, despite being a cutthroat corporate shark who could and had made grown men weep.
“I asked if you had any no-gos, and you said no—” she continued, her confusion shifting to concern as his silence stretched out.
“I just… I didn’t think Los Angeles was an option,” he managed to get out. “Why would the Reign want me?”
“Ilyukha!” his wife said sharply, from the chair next to him. As he turned to her, she placed her hand on her heart in mock offense. “Who wouldn’t want the best player in the League?”
He took her hand and kissed the palm, unable to keep from smiling despite the turmoil churning in his gut. She was his mainstay, his anchor—he owed her his freedom and his sanity. But…
“Plenty of teams don’t want me,” he reminded her. “The Reign are focused on playmaking, speed, finesse—not power or intimidation. I wouldn’t fit in there.”
“You are a playmaker, and fast, and clever,” she said, flapping her hand dismissively, “You have adapted to Boston’s style, not the other way around, and you can adapt to Los Angeles’s style as well. But how can they afford him?” she added, turning back toward Naomi. “With all that they’re paying their dynasty players, who have no-trade clauses—”
“You both said you would take a cut next year if necessary,” Naomi said, folding her arms across her chest and looking down her long nose at him.
“A cut, yes!” Ilya snapped back, “for a chance to win the Cup, fine, but not—it cannot be an embarrassment. The League would challenge it, like they did with Kovalchuk, they would call it a violation of the spirit of the cap. And it’s no good trading me to anyone who can’t afford me next year. I can’t count on going all the way this year, not with only six weeks to mesh with the team, and if I hop teams again, my image will never recover. The fans will forgive me for leaving Boston for a chance at a Cup—they won’t tolerate me leapfrogging all over the country.”
“I know, I know, Ilyushka,” Naomi said soothingly. Then she hesitated, drawing Ilya’s attention. Naomi never hesitated. She went on, every word sounding very careful and intentional, “There are things I haven’t been given permission to tell you. But I can promise there will be room under their cap. This year, and next, if you take a small cut.”
Svetlana and Ilya both stared at her for a long minute, then turned at looked at each other. It was moments like these when Ilya most valued his wife. After sixteen years of marriage and thirty-four of friendship—since the day she’d taken his hand and tugged him out of his father’s dim, musty office, leading him outside to play with her in the sunshine—they always knew exactly what the other was thinking.
“A player has to be retiring, then,” he said slowly. “During the season, so it must be either a family crisis or an injury. Hollander, Lafleur, or Roninberg. They are the only three with a salary high enough to make room for me.”
Svetlana nodded. “Hollander makes the most sense—he is old, and you would fit into his position perfectly—but…”
“He scored a hat trick yesterday,” Ilya finished, ignoring the pang that shot through his belly at the thought of his old rival retiring. They had barely seen each other, except on the ice, in sixteen years—he dreaded the day when even that would be gone. But it couldn’t possibly be here already. “He couldn't have done that if he were injured, and he would not play if there were a family emergency.”
“Roninberg has also been playing strong, no injuries,” Svetlana continued. “And while he contributes offensively, it would be ridiculous to replace their star defenseman with a power forward. But Lafleur…”
They were both silent for a moment, following their joint calculation to its logical conclusion. Lafleur would be very young to retire—only thirty-two, and a brilliant goaltender. When he’d been a rising star, the commentators had compared him to Brodeur, and wondered if he might be the one who could finally match the legendary goalie’s unbeatable record as the “winningest” of all time. But those speculations had quieted in the last five years, as Lafleur had been out of the Reign’s roster frequently, mostly due to some kind of problem with his right shoulder. He’d had surgery in the offseason that had been supposed to resolve the issue. If it hadn’t, or if he’d reinjured it…
“It must be. But then, why not trade for a goalie instead of a forward?” Ilya asked. “They already have Hollander—”
“There are no Cup-worthy goalies looking to move teams,” Svetlana said immediately, shaking her head. “And the Reign have no offensive depth—their first line is so powerful, with Hollander and Haas, that with Lafleur in goal, they haven’t needed it. But if they are thinking they will be allowing more goals against, due to weakness in the crease, it would make sense to bring in more power for their second line to compensate.”
Ilya frowned—not because he disagreed with the analysis, but at the part of it that concerned him. He’d never played on a second line, not even as a rookie. Still… He could just imagine the terror a team would feel at facing him after Hollander’s first line had already taken them apart. Their opponents wouldn’t know what had hit them…
“Speaking entirely speculatively,” Naomi added, interrupting his thoughts, “LA’s rookie goaltender, the first-round draft pick they got in that trade with Ottawa—”
“Vitny,” Svetlana supplied, her expression going thoughtful. “He’s had a decent first season; he’s been playing a lot to allow Lafleur to come back from the surgery slowly. He needs more time to develop, certainly, but everyone assumes he will be the eventual successor.”
Naomi nodded. “And the team likes him. He’s been living with Hollander, Lafleur has been mentoring him, and you know how much a team can coalesce around their goaltender. Bringing someone else in, passing him over—it could hurt his confidence permanently, damage the team’s chemistry.”
Ilya choked. “And bringing me in would not damage their chemistry? We have faced them in the finals twice, I play in the same position as their captain, and Hollander and I…”
He trailed off, unsure of how much to say in front of Naomi.
“That’s why we’re having this conversation,” she said, peering at him. “And no doubt someone else is having it with Hollander.”
“Have they not already gotten his sign off, then?” Ilya asked, even more surprised. Hollander was the Reign—their longtime captain, the man they’d structured their rebuild around, the player who had led their team to four Cup wins in less than a decade. The possibility of the Reign getting serious about a blockbuster trade like this without clearing it through Hollander was slim to none.
Naomi had to know that as well as Ilya did, but she just shrugged. “They haven’t confirmed that specifically. They’re probably worried about leaks, despite the NDAs. But they don’t seem to think they’ll have any trouble getting his agreement. Now, I’ve always been under the impression that that whole rivalry thing when you were young was exaggerated, no? I know the two playoff losses to him were hard… But you played beautifully together in the All-Stars, that one time the League didn’t keep you apart. What was it, in 2017?”
“No one takes the All-Stars seriously,” Ilya said softly, leaning back in his chair. Remembering the joy of skating alongside Hollander for that single game, over a decade ago. It had been scarcely ten minutes of ice time, all told, but it shone in his memory like a beacon. With only three years having passed after his marriage to Sveta, the fury and hurt feelings had still been snapping back and forth between the two of them like a cut wire. Yet they’d had an almost psychic connection on the ice, an ability to sense where the other was, what he was thinking…
“Hey, Ilyushech'ka,” his wife said softly, sitting down on his lap. He jerked his eyes open—he wasn’t sure exactly when he’d closed them—and looked around for Naomi.
“She gave us the room to discuss it,” Svetlana said. “You were lost to the world.”
“We never thought this would happen,” he said, in oblique apology.
She nodded. “But it’s the best-case scenario in some ways, isn’t it? If you don’t go to Los Angeles, you’ll likely have to beat them. I know that’s why we talked about setting up for next year, but if you could do it this year, wouldn’t that be better? The only other team I think you could do it with as things stand now would be Florida, or perhaps Colorado, and even then—”
“We’d have to get lucky,” he said, nodding. They’d already run through this analysis ad nauseum, over the past several months as he’d recovered from that last injury, gotten back onto the ice, and tried—and failed—to get Boston back into playoff contention position.
He shook his head, remembering past grievances. Twenty years of not enough leadership, not enough depth, badly timed personal crises, even worse-timed injuries, a lack of support in the crease, lousy referee calls, bad bounces of the puck… And the three times he’d actually managed to carry his team to the Cup finals, they’d been so battered by the journey that they’d been easy prey for the champions of the much-less-competitive Western Conference. Which had, more often than not, been the Los Angeles Reign. He tightened his lips as he remembered the look on Hollander’s face the two times he’d all but ripped the Cup from Ilya’s hands. Both times in a Game Seven, on Hollander’s home ice…
And so here Ilya was, thirty-nine years old, one of the most dominant scorers in the history of League, already a guaranteed Hall-of-Famer, and he’d never won his sport’s most prestigious trophy. He had been, perhaps, the most prominent victim of the Boston curse, the city’s longest dry spell without a major championship of any kind since big league sports had been invented…
While during those same years, Hollander had notched up six Stanley Cup rings—two with Montreal, four with Los Angeles—matching the best any single player had ever done since the League’s expansions in the seventies. He had to be hungry for his seventh, to establish himself as the most highly decorated hockey player of the modern era. So hungry, apparently, that he was even willing to play with Ilya?
“What are you thinking?” Svetlana asked. “I know I’ve pushed you to do this, but if you’ve changed your mind, if you would rather finish out your career in Boston, it’s not too late—”
“You know I haven’t,” Ilya growled. “Just… Give me a second, yes?”
He lifted her up as he stood, hefting her minimal weight easily, and set her down on Naomi’s desk. Turning away, he walked over to the huge bay of windows and looked down at the Boston Harbor—a more familiar sight than the Moscow skyline, given that he hadn’t been back since 2013. While he'd never ended up facing any legal trouble for the leaked sex tape, or his later acknowledgement of his bisexuality, he’d never dared to go back—Sveta managed both of their properties and kept up appearances for their families.
He paced back and forth a bit, his fingers itching for a cigarette. He had truly thought that he’d left his dangerous feelings for Hollander behind during that last furious conversation, just after Ilya’s marriage. What had there even really been to get over? They’d had three nights together over the course of four years. It had been nothing. But the wild sense of euphoria that had shot through him at the idea of Hollander wanting him for his team told Ilya that the emotions from that time weren’t as permanently buried as he’d hoped.
They were both married men, he reminded himself. And unlike Ilya, Hollander took marriage vows very seriously. He’d made that very clear when he’d walked away, over sixteen long years ago. There was no possibility that he was interested in picking back up with their ill-advised affair—especially not now, when it would be even more ill-advised, and even more of an affair. More likely, with so many years between them and their youthful exploits—and with Hollander’s picture-perfect life, his movie-star wife, their two-point-three kids, and the beautiful Hollywood mansion—he had forgotten all about what the two of them had once had, and was thinking of nothing but putting his name in the history books once more before he, too, retired.
In that moment, as his fists clenched with fury and frustration, Ilya knew one thing for certain: he’d rather win the championship with any team in the League other than Los Angeles. Hoisting that Cup would be forever a little cheapened if he didn’t defeat Hollander to get it. Worse, if it was Hollander, himself—the man who’d rejected him, who had beaten him far too many times—accepting it as Captain and then handing it off to Ilya, like a gift, instead of something he’d earned.
But Ilya would damn well rather win it that way than never win it at all.
He walked back to the desk and knelt down next to it, laying his knee on Sveta’s thigh. “Would you come with me?” he asked, unable to look her in the eye as he admitted his weakness. “I know we’d assumed you would stay here to manage the business…”
She stroked her hand through his curls. “Why not? Who would turn down the chance to live in Los Angeles for a while?”
He felt the tense muscles in his neck go limp with relief, and he exhaled, slow and shakily.
“Oh, Ilyushech’ka,” she said, leaning down and kissing the top of his head. “As if I would let you go face Shane Hollander alone. I can manage the dealerships remotely for a couple of months. I just may have to come back for the occasional trip next fall, if you don’t win it this year.”
He nodded, nuzzling into her thigh. With Sveta—his only true family—by his side, he could deal with Los Angeles. He could face Hollander. He could even face his own memories and deeply burning longing.
“Alright, then,” he said, finally turning his face back up toward his wife. “If the Reign are stupid enough to take me, I guess I’m stupid enough to go.”
Los Angeles
“Slipper!” Shane bellowed. Sliding the broken window up, he made sure that he’d cleaned all the broken glass off the sill and there were no jagged edges sticking out under the sash, and then stuck his head out, shaking his head at his younger daughter in the yard. “What have we said about playing hockey next to the house?”
“It wasn’t me,” she yelled, balling her fists at her hips. “It was David, and—”
“And don’t even try to tell me that your little brother would be shooting pucks that close to the windows if you hadn’t egged him on, young lady!”
Shane bit the insides of his cheeks to keep from grinning as he heard his mother’s voice slipping out from between his lips. Slipper—who’d declared at the age of three that she no longer wished to be called Claire, and had somehow managed to bully the entire family into following her lead—had a distressing tendency to sense when he wasn’t really all that mad at her… And given the combined forty-two million dollars that he and his wife had taken home last year—before investments or sponsorships, that had just been their salaries—he had a hard time caring about replacing a few windows if breaking them made his kids feel happy. Rose always said he was overcompensating for his guilt over how often their busy careers took them away from home. There was probably some truth to that.
This is the last year, he promised himself again. Whether we win or not. I want a seventh Cup, but it’s not worth missing any more of my children’s lives… Or my own.
“Where’s Kayla, anyway?” Shane called. He moved the dustpan he’d used to sweep up the broken glass from the windowsill to the floor and leaned even further out, peering from side to side. He didn’t see their nanny anywhere. Granted, at four and six, David and Slipper were allowed to be out in the backyard without supervision—they lived in a gated community with private security, after all—but Kayla usually kept a fairly close eye on them.
“She’s making lunch,” Slipper reported, looking immediately cheerier now that she wasn’t being scolded. “We’re having grilled cheese! Do you want any?”
“Not during the season, sweetheart,” he apologized. “But how about we put it on the list for the summer?”
She pouted cutely. “It’ll be too hot, then. Melted cheese is only good when it’s cold out!”
He couldn’t help grinning fondly down at her. “Okay, how about I have one bite of yours? If you promise not to play hockey this close to the house! Just stay on the other side of the red line, okay?”
“Okay, Dad!” She turned and ran toward the red stripe they’d created with the stone and mulch xeriscaping, brandishing her hockey stick in the air.
“You’re going to eat bread during the season?” a resonant voice asked, thickly threaded with amusement. “Will wonders never cease.”
He pulled his head back in hurriedly, then yelped as he hit his head on the window sash. Behind him, Lucy giggled, and he turned and mock-glared at his oldest child, wrapped in her mother’s arms.
“Here, honey, go climb on your dad,” Rose said, putting down their nine-year-old with a grunt of effort. “You’re getting too big for me to carry you around like this.”
Lucy ran to him, and he scooped her up with a grin, throwing her effortlessly into the air. “Did you have a good morning, sweetheart?”
She clung to his neck as he swung her around, giggling. “Mm-hmm.”
“Yeah? What did you do?”
“I went horseback riding with Grandma! And then I finished reading The Return of the King.”
“What was this, your third time through the whole trilogy?” he asked, amused.
“The fourth. It’s my favorite! But the Silmarillion is good, too—”
He shook his head. For all that she was the only one of the children who wasn’t Shane’s, biologically, she took after him the most: studious, advanced beyond her years, socially awkward, and she had his tendency to cling to familiar habits, and lose herself in her favorite activities.
“Can we play Scrabble after lunch?” she asked, turning her greatest weapon—those big, glistening brown eyes of hers—on him.
“Maybe,” he said, looking over her shoulder at Rose. “Why don’t you go see if you can get your sister and brother to come in for lunch, and we’ll join you in a sec?”
“They won’t listen to me,” she said, the voice of wise experience.
“Well, that means you’ve got to practice your leadership skills, right?”
She pouted, but nodded and squirmed to get down. He kissed the top of her head and shooed her toward the door, then turned to look at his wife.
“Where did we get the idea that it would be a good idea to be outnumbered in our own house?” he asked, only half-joking.
“With a live-in nanny, five part-time tutors, coaches, or babysitters, your mom over here more days than not, and your rookie in the carriage house, I wouldn’t exactly say we’re outnumbered,” she said, laughing.
“Fair point,” he admitted. “There are some perks to our princely salaries, I guess.”
“Any word, yet?” she asked, lowering her voice a bit.
“No,” he said, in the same quiet tone. There was no real reason they needed to worry about someone overhearing them right now, but they’d gotten used to using hushed voices when discussing confidential matters—especially after Slipper had accidentally let a key X-Squad spoiler spill out at preschool. “His agent said they’d have an answer by close of business, though, so there’s a few hours left.”
She nodded. “What do you think he’s going to do?”
He shrugged, turning away from her and looking out the window again. As Lucy had predicted, Slipper and David were still running around the yard, heedless of her shouting at them. “I was never very good at predicting what Ilya Rozanov was going to do. Even when I was sleeping with him,” he said, bringing his voice down to a whisper with the last few words.
She came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his waist, leaning her head against his back. He sighed and put his hands over hers, holding them at his belly.
“You know you can win another Cup without him,” she said.
“Our chances would be a lot better with him than trying to fight our way through him,” Shane said, shaking his head. “He’s going to be so hungry for it—this is his last chance, same as mine. We barely beat him the last two times we faced each other in the playoffs, and that was when his team was already exhausted after fighting their way through the East. If he goes to Colorado or Vegas, we’ll have to face him earlier—maybe even in the first round, when he’s completely fresh. Without Laffy-Taffy in the crease, we’ll be easy meat for a desperate Rozanov.”
“Maybe,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “But I don’t believe for a second that you’re doing this because you don’t think you can beat him. You love a challenge. You have fun with it.”
He sighed, staring at the frieze of broken glass scattered in the dustpan. “No, it’s not that,” he admitted, rubbing his hands across hers. “I… I don’t want to beat him, Rose. The last time… God, the look in his eyes when we shook hands. I can’t do that to him again. It’s not fun anymore.”
“So, instead, you want to win a Cup for him?” she asked, her voice barely inflected. “That’s almost… romantic.”
“Oh, don’t you start.”
“I’m just saying, you never really got closure there.”
“Understatement,” he said, snorting. “But it was never anything but sex for him, Rose. And he never knew it was anything more than that for me. Hell, I didn’t know, not really. Not until you broke me out of my closet. It’s not like we can just pick up back where we left off—or that I’d even want to.”
He disengaged from her embrace and took the dustbin back to its usual spot under his desk, a little hypnotized by the way the glittering shards shifted back and forth on top of the rest of the broken pane and shredded documents.
“This is all premature, anyway,” he said firmly. “We don’t even know if he’s going to accept the trade, and Boston’s not going to do it without his say-so. It’s not like they want to lose him; they just want to give him one more chance to win.”
“I would have never thought to see Boston rooting for another team to win the Cup,” she said. “It almost seems like the whole League is conspiring on his behalf.”
“Yeah, well. He’s come a long way from the player everyone loved to hate. And seriously, with all the times he came so close? It hurt to watch. But that doesn’t mean anyone else is going to go easy on him. Sympathy goes out the window during the Stanley Cup Playoffs. Florida’s hungry for another Cup, so is Colorado, Vegas wants their first after we robbed them two years ago—”
“And I didn’t mean to start another dissection of the playoffs,” she said hastily. “Much though I love you, Shane. I asked because I have to leave for the airport soon—”
He laughed and kissed her cheek, then laced her arm with his as he turned toward the door. “Have a good two weeks living it up as a single woman in New York,” he said. “No kids, no husband—any fun plans lined up?”
“Oh, a few. Tessa and Lea want to take me out clubbing—apparently there’s some new hot spot that’s all the rage. And I’ll probably spend a night or two with Edward… Oh! And Scott and Kip invited me over for dinner—they’ve got an idea about a new acting program for that school of theirs—”
Shane smiled as they walked down the stairs toward the kitchen, Rose still chatting away. She worried about him too much. He’d left his feelings for Ilya Rozanov behind years ago, discarded in the dustbin of his personal history just as he’d swept up the broken glass shards from the window. Now… He just wanted to win one more Cup, side-by-side with one of the best players he’d ever come up against. With the two of them together, the other teams wouldn’t stand a chance.
Anyway, they were both seasoned veterans. The whole “heated rivalry” thing had been over for more a decade. They would both be professional about it. He’d win a Cup with Rozanov, fulfilling his last hockey dream, and then retire. He would wait a year or two, until the media stopped paying attention to him as anything other than Rose Landry’s husband, and then quietly come out to their family and closest friends. He could finally date, and find a lover who would accept and love his family as much as he did. It was a good, solid plan.
And after all, if Rozanov had any problems playing with him, he’d just say no to the trade. So what could go wrong?