Rating:

General Audiences

Archive Warning:

Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Game Changers | Heated Rivalry - All Media Types, Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationships:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Ilya Rozanov, Shane Hollander & Rose Landry & Ilya Rozanov & Svetlana Vetrova

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Rose Landry, Svetlana Vetrova, Ryan Carmichael, Victor St. Simon, Hayden Pike, Gerald (the Zamboni), Lily Hollander-Rozanov, Jane Hollander-Rozanov, irina hollander-rozanov - Character

Additional Tags:

One Shot, Future Fic, Established Relationship, episodic, years passing, Sequel, Companion Piece to Hostile Ice, Domestic Fluff, Earned Happiness, They Finally Got It Together, Long Term Relationship, Married Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov, Found Family, Fluff, Worth the wait, Happy Ending, Hockey Dynasty, Parenthood, NHL Hockey - Freeform, Gerald the Zamboni Deserves His Own Tag, Carmichael Knew First, Marlow Always Knows, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov

Language:

English

Series:

Part 2 of The Ice Between Us

Stats:

Published: 2026-05-16 Words: 4,890 Chapters: 1/1

Open Ice

Summary

The ice was not quite regulation size because he refused to take out the birch trees.

But it was, Shane Hollander thought, perfect.

This is not the story of how Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov fell in love - that story already happened - in hotel rooms and stolen moments between games, in secrets leaked and for hard fought for happiness. This is what comes after.

Their relationship. Their marriage. The Cups. The years.

The daughters who arrived and changed everything.

Two little girls on a rink in Lanaudière, Quebec who were supposed to grow up and play together in the PWHL - until it became clear to their fathers as they circled each other on the ice with such a competitive heat, that rivalry was very much in their blood.

The rink Shane had built at the cottage in Lanaudière, Quebec, was not regulation size. 

 

He had known this going in - regulation size would have required taking out two of the birch trees that lined the eastern edge of the property, which he had refused to do on the grounds that the birch trees had been there considerably longer than he had and deserved the courtesy. So the rink was smaller than a proper one, the surface maintained by a Zamboni that was comically oversized for the space and that Ilya had named Gerald and spoke to with genuine affection every time he used it. 

 

It was, Shane had always thought, perfect. 

 

This morning the ice was catching the light the way it did in early March when the sun came back with real intention, through the wall of windows that overlooked the lake, and dancing across the features of the two young girls skating on it: Lily and Jane. 

 

They were four years old and they’d been on skates since they were two and a half, because Ilya had put them on skates at two and a half with a calm certainty that it was a completely reasonable thing to do, and Shane had stood there watching with his heart in his throat and had not said anything, because they had been fine. They had been better than fine. They had taken to it with the ease of children who had been born into a household where skating was as ordinary as walking and where the smell of ice was a constant, where two of the best hockey players of their generation ate breakfast across from them every morning. 

 

Lily had her father’s edges. Shane’s edges - the precise, economic use of the blade that his coaches had always said was the most technically correct skating they had ever seen at the junior level. She moved with a tidiness that was almost uncanny in a four year old, every stride deliberate, her small face set with the focused concentration that Shane recognized because he had seen it in his own mirror for years. 

 

Jane had Ilya’s instincts. The improvisational quality, the willingness to take the ice at angles that didn’t look right until they suddenly were, the grin that appeared when something worked that had no business working. She was faster than Lily and considerably less interested in doing things correctly, and she was currently in possession of the puck and had been for the last four minutes despite Lily’s increasingly determined efforts to take it from her. 

 

Lily, Shane noted, was getting annoyed.

 

This was going to be interesting. 

 

Beside him, Ilya made a sound that was not quite a laugh. He had Irina strapped to his chest in the carrier - not quite a year old, blonde-haired, currently asleep with her face turned against Ilya’s sternum with a trust so absolute and not a double that the surface beneath her was reliable. His large hand rested on her back, steady and light, the unconscious gesture of a man who had been doing this for three months and had not yet stopped marveling at it. 

 

“She is going to take her down, yes?” Ilya said, watching Lily stalk Jane around the near boards. 

 

“She’s definitely going to try,” Shane agreed. 

 

“She will succeed,” Ilya hummed, confident in the situation he assessed and the conclusion that he’d arrived at. “She has your face on right now. The face.” 

 

“I don’t have a face.” 

 

“You have a face,” Ilya chuckled. “I have been watching this face for many years. When it appears… things happen.” He paused. “Usually bad things for the one on the other side of it, da?” 

 

On the ice, Lily made her move.

 

It was not elegant. It was not technically correct. It was the move of a four year old who had decided she was done with waiting, executed with a ferocity that was entirely out of proportion with her size, and it worked - Jane went down, not hard, landing on her well-padded bottom with a look of genuine surprise, and Lily collected the puck with a satisfaction that was visible from where they were standing. 

 

Jane looked up at her sister. 

 

Then she grinned.

 

“Uh oh,” Shane laughed. 

 

“Oh yes,” Ilya agreed.

 

Irina slept on, indifferent to the developing situation, her small chest rising and falling against Ilya’s with a steady rhythm, no concerns whatsoever. 

 

Shane looked at their daughters on the ice - at Lily already moving with the puck, at Jane scrambling up with that grin still in place, at the particular competitive heat already visible between them at four years old, and felt the unhurried weight of a life that had taken a long time to become what it was. 

 

---

 

The conversation had happened six weeks into the season, In Ilya’s penthouse, which by that point Shane had spent enough time at that he knew where the good mugs were kept and that the second burner on the stove ran hot and that Ilya had kept exactly one kind of tea in the cabinet because it was the kind his mother had kept and he had never thought to buy anything else. 

 

It had not been a dramatic conversation. That was the thing Shane remembered most about it afterward - the absence of drama, the way it had arrived like something inevitable finding its time. 

 

They had been on the couch. Some game on the television that neither of them was watching. And Ilya had said, without looking at him: “I meant what I said, in Montreal, that this is not nothing.” 

 

Shane had looked at the television. 

 

“I know,” he said. 

 

“I want to–” Ilya had stopped. The frustrated hand gesture. The one Shane had seen once, and had never forgotten because it was the most unguarded thing he had ever seen from him. “I want to do this… right? I have not always - I know I have not always–” 

 

“Ilya.” 

He had stopped. 

 

“I know,” Shane said again. Quieter this time. He’d turned to look at him - at the jaw, the careful steadiness, the thing underneath the steadiness that Shane had been learning to read for a long time now. “I know you’re trying. I can see that you’re trying.” He paused. “I’m in love with you and I have been for a long while. I thought you should know that before we figure out what we’re doing.” 

 

Ilya had been very still for a moment. 

 

Then he said: “I love you also. I have been - yes. For a long time.” 

 

Shane nodded. 

 

Okay?” he asked. 

 

“Okay,” Ilya had agreed. 

 

It was not a grand declaration. It was not the conversation either of them had probably imagined, in whatever version of this they had carried privately for years. But it was true and it was theirs and it was, Shane had thought, sitting on Ilya’s couch with the game on in the background, like something had finally settled, exactly enough.

 

---

 

The team had found out on a Tuesday in February, which was a completely ordinary Tuesday in every other respect. 

 

It hadn’t been planned. That was the thing. They had been careful - not performatively careful, not hiding exactly, but aware of the specific territory that they were navigating and the people whose jobs and livelihoods existed in the same space as their relationship. They had been careful and they had been professional and they had not been, apparently, careful enough… because Carmichael walked into the film room twenty minutes early and found them. 

 

It was not - nothing scandalous had been happening. Shane wanted to be very clear about that, at least to himself. They had been talking, quietly, and Ilya had his hand on the back of Shane’s neck like he sometimes did when they were in private spaces, and Carmichael had stopped in the doorway and looked at them and then looked at the ceiling and then said: 

 

“I feel like I should tell you that I have known about this for approximately four months and I have been very patient.” 

Ilya had removed his hand from Shane’s neck so fast that he couldn’t help but smirk. 

 

“How?” Shane asked. 

 

“You have a tell,” Carmichael said… to Ilya… with the satisfaction of someone who had been waiting for a long time to deliver this information. “When he walks into a room you do this thing with your face–” 

 

“I do not do a thing with my face,” Ilya said with indignation. 

 

“You absolutely do a thing with your face!” Carmichael doubled down. “It’s very subtle. Victor and I clocked it in October.” 

 

“St-Simon knows?!” Shane gaped. 

 

“St-Simon knew first,” Carmichael said. “He told me. I told Marlow. Marlow already knew. Hammersmith figured it out from the stats, I don’t know how, I didn’t ask.” He paused. “I think Dubek knows but he hasn’t said anything because Dubek doesn’t say things until he’s completely sure.” 

 

The meeting with LeClaire happened the next day. It had been, in the way of LeClaire generally, efficient and uncomplicated. 

 

“I assume you want this to stay internal for now,” he’d said. 

 

“Yes,” Shane agreed. 

 

“Then it stays internal,” LeClaire smiled. “You’re both professionals. You’ve been professionals. I don’t see why that changes.” He looked at them for a moment. “Is there anything you need from me?” 

 

“No,” Ilya shook his head. 

 

“Then we’re good.” Then LeClaire picked up his pen and had gone back to whatever he had been working on before they came in. 

 

Shane and Ilya had shared a look and a shrug. 

 

That had been it. 

 

The locker room adjusted rather quickly because it was frankly a group of men who had known and had just been waiting to be allowed to acknowledge it. Carmichael had celebrated by doing nothing but smiling for three days straight in a way that Shane had found deeply irritating. St-Simon had switched to calling Ilya mon ami instead of Roz, which Ilya had accepted without comment. And Marlow had said nothing at all except, once, quietly, to Shane: “Good.” 

 

It was, Shane had thought, exactly what a locker room was supposed to be. 

---

 

In June of 2019 they’d won their first Cup together, in Boston, in overtime, on a goal that Ilya scored and that Shane had set up from behind the net with a pass that the sports analysts spent the next week calling one of the best plays of the season. 

 

The celebration on the ice was the kind of chaos that Shane had experienced twice before and still could not fully prepare for - the noise and the weight of the Cup and his teammates everywhere and the unreality of the whole thing that they’d worked for arriving all at once. 

 

He found Ilya in the middle of it. 

 

Or Ilya found him - the distinction had always been unclear to them, the question of who was moving toward who. They met somewhere in the center of the ice and Ilya grabbed him, both arms, the Cup still in one hand, and Shane grabbed back, and they stood there in the middle of the celebration with the crowd roaring around them and Shane’s face pressed against Ilya’s shoulder. 

 

“We did it,” Ilya said in Russian, which he did sometimes when the English wasn’t sufficient. 

 

“Yes,” Shane said back. “We did.” 

 

Nobody took a photograph of that specific moment. Or if they did, it didn’t circulate - it was lost in the general chaos of the celebration, two players embracing on the ice after a Cup win, which was not unusual and didn’t require explanation.

 

It was theirs. 

They kept it. 

 

---

 

Coming out about their relationship in 2020 had been Shane’s decision, made on his own timeline, in his own way, which was the only way it was ever going to happen. 

 

It was not an announcement. It was not a press conference or a prepared statement or a carefully managed media moment. It was an interview - a long one, for a magazine that had been asking for two years and that Shane had finally said yes to because the journalist was good and because the timing felt right and because Scott Hunter had kissed his boyfriend after winning the Stanley Cup three years ago and the world had not ended. 

 

The piece ran on a Thursday in March. 

 

By Friday morning it was everywhere.

 

By Friday afternoon Shane had received messages from more people than he could count - teammates, former teammates, players he had competed against for years, people he had never met. His mother had called seventeen times and his father had called once and said “proud of you, Shane,” and hung up, which was more efficient and equally appreciated. 

 

Ilya had not called. 

 

Ilya had knocked on his door at eight in the morning with coffee and sat on his couch for six hours while the world processed the information, saying very little, being entirely present, which was - Shane had thought, watching him - the most Ilya thing he could possibly have done. 

 

“You did it,” Ilya said at some point in the afternoon. 

 

“Yeah,” Shane had said. 

 

“Good,” Ilya smiled. “I love you.” 

 

“I love you too.” 

 

They watched the coverage together. Some of it was good. Some of it was not good. All of it was loud because the internet had decided to have opinions about it and Shane had sat with it and let it be loud and found that the loudness, which he’d been afraid of for years, was manageable. Was survivable. Was, in fact, considerably less terrible than the silence had been. 

 

“Your turn,” Shane had said, at some point in the evening, without looking at him. 

 

A pause. “Yes,” Ilya smiled. “I know.” 

 

Ilya’s piece had run a week later. Different magazine, different journalist, same essential information. His had included a line about Russia and the laws there and what it had cost him to stay silent, which had been - that one had been harder to read. Shane had sat beside him while he read the final draft and had not said anything and had put his hand over Ilya’s, and Ilya had turned his hand over and held on. 

 

The response to Ilya’s piece had been, if anything, louder than Shane’s. 

 

By the end of it they were, as Carmichael put it with characteristic charm, extremely famous for reasons that had nothing to do with hockey, which was both true and slightly annoying given that they were also, by any objective measure, two of the best players in the league. 

 

---

 

They had gotten married on a Tuesday afternoon in October 2021, which was technically during the regular season, which meant the guest list was small by necessity and by choice. 

 

Marlow had been Ilya’s best man. 

 

Hayden had been Shane’s.

 

Rose had been there, with her partner of three years, a quiet architect named Daniel who had the ease of someone who had made peace with the fact that his girlfriend’s closest friend was Shane Hollander and that this was simply a feature of his life now. Svetlana had been there, via video from Moscow, because she was having a visa situation that had not been resolved in time, and she had spent the ceremony alternating between crying and criticizing the floral arrangements, which made Shane smile uncontrollably. 

 

His parents had been there, and while Ilya’s mother, Irina couldn’t be there Shane had felt her in the room anyway, in the way Ilya held himself during the ceremony, in the way his jaw had worked when he said his vows, in the careful deliberateness of the way he said the true things out loud to the one person he trusted with them. 

 

The vows had been simple. Shane had written his and read them from a card because he had known he would not be able to do it from memory without losing the thread, and Ilya had not written his, had stood there and looked at Shane and said, in very English that was still very heavily accented despite spending so much time in North America: 

 

“I have been trying to say things correctly to you for a very long time. I am still learning. I know that I want to keep learning. For as long as you will let me.” 

 

Shane had looked at him. 

 

“That’s a long time,” he smiled. 

 

“Yes,” Ilya agreed. “I know this.” 

 

---

 

Rose had offered to be their surrogate over dinner with her usual directness that she had in all things.

“I’ve been thinking about it,” She’d said, reaching for the bread. “And I would like to do this for you, if you’ll let me.” 

 

Shane had looked at her across the table. 

 

“Rose–” 

 

“I know what I’m offering,” She had said. “I’ve thought about it carefully. I’ve talked with Daniel about it and he’s on board.” She met Shane’s eyes. “You two are going to be extraordinary fathers and I want to be a part of that in whatever way that makes sense.” 

 

Ilya had been very still. 

 

Then he had said in Russian, something that Shane still needed help translating later, which turned out to be approximately: This is the kindest thing anyone has ever offered to do for me… for us. 

 

The pregnancy had been as straightforward as pregnancies could be. Rose had been characteristically calm about it - had sent them updates with the same tone she used for everything, informative and warm and devoid of drama. Ilya had gone to every appointment he could get to, which given their hockey schedule was not all of them, and had apologized for the ones he missed with a sincerity that Rose had found both touching and slightly excessive. 

 

Lily and Jane had arrived in April, six weeks early and absolutely perfect, as if they’d decided that the birth schedule was just a suggestion. 

 

Lily had come first and then Jane - four minutes later, with what the nurse described as impressive volume for someone that size. 

 

Shane had held Lily first, in the hospital room, and had looked at her face - the dark hair, the dark eyes, the infinitesimal perfection of her hands - and had felt something happen in his chest that he did not have a word for in any language. Not love exactly, or not only love, but something larger and more specific than that… as if everything he understood about himself had just rearranged itself. 

 

He had looked up at Ilya, who was holding Jane and looking at her with an expression that Shane had never seen on his face before - completely open, entirely unguarded, the face of a man who had spent his whole life keeping things in and had just run out of reasons to. 

 

“Hello,” Ilya had said, to Jane. Softly. In Russian. 

 

Jane had blinked at him. 

 

“Hello,” he had said again. 

 

Shane had looked at their daughters in their arms and thought about all of the things they were going to be - all of the versions of themselves that they would move through, all the things they would learn and unlearn, all the mornings that were ahead of them - and had felt, for the first time in his life, that the future was not something to be managed but something to be waited for with genuine interest. 

 

---

 

The Cups had come, after that, with a consistency that the league found both remarkable and slightly alarming. 

 

The second one, when Lily and Jane were one, had been won on the road, in overtime, and Shane had called home from the locker room and held the phone up so the girls could hear the noise, which they’d responded to with the interested incomprehension of one-year-olds being exposed to loud sounds. 

 

The fifth had been Shane’s best season statistically. Eighty-eight goals, sixty-two assists, a performance that had the analysts using words like historic and unprecedented for a player his age. Ilya had been characteristically unbothered by the statistical comparison, right up until the moment he had scored the Cup-winning goal and had looked at Shane across the ice with an expression that clearly said: still here. 

 

The sixth had been the one that mattered the most, and not because it made them beat Montreal’s record of longest consecutive Cup wins. 

 

It had been Ilya’s last season. 

 

He had told Shane in October, before the season started, sitting at the kitchen table in their Boston penthouse with the girls in bed and the house quiet. “This is my last year… I have decided.” 

 

Shane looked at him. 

 

“Okay,” he’d said. 

 

“You are not - you do not want to argue with me?” 

 

“No,” Shane shook his head. “Your body. Your decision.” 

 

Ilya had looked at him for a moment. “You are going to keep playing, da?” 

 

“One more year,” Shane nodded. 

 

“And then coaching, yes?” 

 

“Yeah.” 

 

Ilya had been quiet for a moment. “LeClaire is going to retire soon,” he had said. “I have heard things.” 

 

“I know,” Shane nodded. 

 

“Assistant coach first,” Ilya said. “Then head coach. You are going to be very good at it.” 

 

“You don’t know that.” 

 

“I have watched you, Hollander, since we were seventeen,” Ilya had smiled. “I know exactly that.” 

 

The sixth Cup had been won at home, in Boston, and the celebration had been the loudest Shane had ever heard in the building. Ilya had lifted the Cup for the last time and had skated a lap with it and then had skated directly to Shane and handed it to him, which was not the protocol, and Shane had held it and looked at Ilya and felt the weight of the thing in his hands - not just the Cup, but everything it represented, everything that they had built together in this building and this city and this life. 

 

“Your turn,” Ilya had said. “Now you go and win one more.” 

 

---

 

Svetlana had called that summer. 

 

She had been characteristically direct about it, in the way she was direct about everything. “I want to do what Rose did,” she had said, on a video call, with the particular quality she always had of someone who had made a decision and was informing rather than asking. “If you will let me.” 

 

Ilya had looked at the screen for a long moment. 

 

“Sveta,” he had said. “You do not have to–” 

 

“I know I don’t have to, Ilyusha,” she had said. “I want to. You and your very good-looking husband,” she had glanced at Shane. “Hello Shanya, you played very well last season… better than Ilya–”

 

“Thank you,” Shane had said. 

 

“He did not play better than–” Ilya had started. 

 

“Your goals percentage this season,” Svetlana had said, producing a statistic with the ease of someone who had been tracking it, and the conversation about whether Ilya had played better than Shane had occupied the next twenty minutes and the actual decision had been made almost as an aside. 

 

Irina had arrived the following spring. Named for Ilya’s mother, which had been Shane’s suggestion, made quietly and without ceremony, and which Ilya had cried about and said yes to immediately, because there had been no other possible answer. 

 

She had Ilya’s coloring. Blonde and blue-eyed in a way that neither Lily nor Jane was, and Ilya had held her in the hospital with a practiced confidence, because he had been holding small humans for two years now and had gotten very good at it, and he’d looked at her for a long time without saying anything. 

 

Then he had said her name. Just that. Irina. Soft and specific and weighted with everything it carried. 

 

Shane had put his hand on Ilya’s back and left it there. 

 

---

 

Shane had become assistant coach after he’d retired the year following Ilya. 

 

The transition had been - not easy, exactly, but almost natural - as if he knew that this was what he was supposed to be doing. Shane had spent his entire career thinking about hockey the way coaches thought about hockey - in systems, in tendencies, in the chess of it - and having the authority to act on that thinking rather than just execute a small piece of it had been, he had discovered, deeply satisfying. 

 

LeClaire had talked to Shane after he’d announced his retirement that he had known since Shane’s second season as a Boston Bear that he was looking at the future head coach, and had been waiting for him to figure it out. 

 

“You could have told me,” Shand had said. 

 

“You would have argued with me,” LeClaire chuckled. “You always argue with me.” 

 

“I don’t–” 

 

“You do,” LeClaire smirked and shook his head and then he’d retired to a house in Vermont that he’d been renovating, in spirit, for fifteen years. 

 

Ilya watched every game from the stands, with Irina in the carrier. He had retired into fatherhood with the same commitment he had brought to everything else - fully, without reservation, and with delight. 

 

He coached the girls on the cottage rink. 

 

He made breakfast every morning with a focused efficiency that he’d once brought to game preparation. 

 

He learned, over the years, to braid hair, which was a skill that he approached with the utmost seriousness because Jane had told him once that he was doing it wrong and he had vowed to make sure to do it correctly. 

 

He was, Shane thought regularly and with warmth, still capable of being surprised by him. 

 

---

 

The cottage in Lanaudière had been Shane’s before he and Ilya had officially crossed the line they’d been walking for years, technically - although Shane’s was a complicated word for a place that had been their shared retreat for so long, and that was full of the noise of three girls and one opinionated dog named Anya, that had a rink and Gerald the Zamboni and the birch trees that Shane refused to cut down. 

 

They had spent every off season there that they could manage after Shane had signed with the Bears, and they loved it there. Shane smiled to himself as he remembered the first time Ilya had panicked when he’d heard a loon - damn Canadian wolf-bird. Shane loved it there in a way that he found difficult to articulate. He loved the quiet and the lake in the morning before anyone else was up, and the birch trees in the wind, and the sound of the ice when the rink was running. 

 

He loved the sound of his daughters on that ice. 

 

Lily and Jane were circling each other on the ice, a competitive heat between them, like two people who had decided - without discussion - that they were rivals, who were four years old, and who were going to be - Shane could already see it, and had been able to see it the first time they’d stepped into skates - extraordinary. 

 

Ilya stood beside him with Irina strapped to his chest, one hand resting on her back, watching. 

 

“She is going to take her down again,” Ilya smirked, watching Lily line up another move. 

 

“Probably,” Shane agreed. 

 

“Jane will not mind.” 

 

“Jane never minds,” Shane smiled. “That’s what makes her dangerous.” 

 

Ilya made a sound that was not quite a laugh and Irina stirred slightly against his chest before resettling and going back to sleep. 

 

“You know what I am thinking?” Ilya glanced at him out the side of his eyes. 

 

Shane did know. He had been thinking it too, watching them. The way Lily moved - precise, tactical, Shane’s edges and something else underneath, something with more fire in it than Shane had at four years old. They way Jane moved - improvisational, instinctive, Ilya’s read of the ice and a reckless joy in it that Ilya had never quite allowed himself to have. 

 

“PWHL?” Shane asked. 

 

“I was thinking this also,” Ilya said. “Playing together. Side by side.” 

 

On the ice, Lily made another move. Jane read it - actually read it, anticipated the angle and cut off the lane before Lily could use it, which was not something a four-year-old should be able to do and which Jane had just casually done as if the geometry of it was simply obvious. 

 

Lily stopped.

 

She looked at her sister.

 

Something passed between them - some private negotiation, conducted entirely in the twin language of looks and small gestures that Shane had never fully decoded and suspected that he never would - and then they both looked at the puck. 

 

And they went for it at exactly the same time, from opposite directions, with the same expression on their faces. 

 

It was, Shane realized, his expression. And Ilya’s. Simultaneously. On two different small faces. 

 

He started laughing. 

 

Ilya looked at him. 

 

“What?” Ilya asked. 

 

“They’re not going to play together,” Shane chuckled helplessly. “They’re rivals. Look at them.” 

 

Ilya looked. 

 

On the ice, Lily and Jane had arrived at the puck simultaneously and were now locked in a standoff, two people who were not going to yield and who were figuring out what to do about that. 

 

Ilya watched them for a long moment. 

 

Then: “It is in the blood,” he said, quiet, satisfied, and at peace with the conclusion.

 

“Yeah,” Shane smiled. “I think it might be.” 

 

On the ice, Jane finally got the puck. 

 

Lily immediately set about taking it back. 

 

Rivalry, it turned out, was very much in their blood.