Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

Heated Rivalry (TV), Game Changers Series - Rachel Reid

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Scott Hunter (Game Changers), Svetlana Vetrova, Yuna Hollander, David Hollander

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hostage Situations, Kidnapping, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Major Character Injury, POV Shane Hollander, POV Outsider, POV Alternating, Mild Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Homophobic Language, Violence, Aftermath of Violence, News Media, Journalism, Developing Relationship, Hopeful Ending, newfound family, Healing, I promise this isn't as bad as the tags seem, Episode: s01e02 Olympians (Heated Rivalry), Ice Out HR 2026 (Game Changers)

Language:

English

Collections:

ICE OUT HR 2026

Stats:

Published: 2026-04-20 Words: 7,300 Chapters: 1/1

The Sochi Affair

Summary

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called it an international emergency in his address to the Canadian public. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin claimed Russia was devoting every resource to it. The endless loops of crawling chyrons titled it Hockey Held Hostage. Eventually, Wikipedia settled on ‘The Sochi Affair’:

The Sochi Affair (Russian: Сочинское дело; French: affaire Sotchi) was a multinational hostage and extortion crisis that began on Thursday, February 20, 2014, when Olympic ice hockey players, Shane Hollander of Canada and Ilya Rozanov of Russia, were abducted from the Iceberg Skating Palace during the Sochi Winter Olympics and held hostage in southwestern Kazakhstan for 3 months, 19 days.

The world was captivated when Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander went missing, but no one will ever know what they found in the face of survival.

Notes

He couldn’t remember much of before. Hard eyes. Stiff, hunched shoulders. An exhausted volley. Are you okay? Please, go. You didn't answer my text. No, I did not answer your boring text. Now will you go? Fine. Fuck.

Then the gun. Then nothing.

—

There was a catastrophic unknown when Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov were abducted from the Sochi Olympics last February.

Both were reported missing, but at different times. Both were reported missing, but by individuals from their respective countries—for Hollander, his Canadian teammate and roommate, Gregory Huff, and for Rozanov, his friend, Svetlana Vetrova.

Most critically, no one knew they were missing together.

For the first seventy-two hours of the crisis, there were two response efforts: a waste of resources and a waste of precious time.

By the time authorities learned the men were last seen together from Scott Hunter, then-captain of the USA men’s hockey team and a conference opponent of Hollander’s Montreal Metros and Rozanov’s Boston Raiders, nearly four days had passed.

After that fourth day, Canadian, Russian, and American authorities, in coöperation with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Interpol, created a joint task force to rescue Rozanov and Hollander.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper called it an international emergency in his address to the Canadian public. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin claimed Russia was devoting every resource to it. The endless loops of crawling chyrons titled it Hockey Held Hostage. Eventually, Wikipedia settled on ‘The Sochi Affair’:

The Sochi Affair (Russian: Сочинское дело; French: affaire Sotchi) was a multinational hostage and extortion crisis that began on Thursday, February 20, 2014, when Olympic ice hockey players, Shane Hollander of Canada and Ilya Rozanov of Russia, were abducted from the Iceberg Skating Palace during the Sochi Winter Olympics and held hostage in southwestern Kazakhstan for 3 months, 19 days.

Seventy-two hours was already too late. As any law enforcement agent will say, after forty-eight hours, the likelihood of recovery—and the likelihood of survival—for a kidnapping victim decreases exponentially.

But Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov were not kidnapped.

That is what Hollander will insist upon when sitting down for the first full-length interview since his release on a late summer morning at the Hollander family cottage in the Lanaudière region of Quebec.

“We weren’t children,” Hollander explains. “I don’t think adults can be kidnapped.”

The first thirty or so hours of Hollander and Rozanov’s captivity were spent bound, gagged, and blindfolded, shivering in the rear of a delivery truck as they were driven to disorientation, and then through rural Russian roads to a decrepit apartment on the Kazakh side of Russia’s southern border.

“Sometimes I think we’re still there, in that truck,” Hollander says. He starts to say something else when his voice falters. He excuses himself for the first of what will become many necessary breaks.

—

Coughing woke him.

In dim, curtain-drawn light, Shane sat up on the thin, stained pallet mattress. Beside him, Rozanov coughed again, wet and hacking. They argued last night, hushed and half-hearted. Now, Rozanov trembled. Under his measly coat and shirt lay bruises; violent violet splotched and layered along the length of his ribs. Shane had no idea where his Team Canada fleece went. He awoke in the truck without it.

The pallet had one threadbare quilt. That was what they argued about; Shane thought Rozanov should use it. Rozanov thought the opposite. But Shane’s ribs weren’t broken, so he won—a hollow victory to match the hollow caverns underneath Rozanov’s eyes.

Shane thought they had been there for a week. Rozanov counted five days. That was another argument. Rozanov ended it when he said it wouldn’t matter. There was no difference in a week and five days when each day was one closer to his death.

That was their third argument. Shane insisted help was coming for them. Rozanov held firm that help was coming for Shane.

Rozanov’s ribs were fine when they first arrived in the apartment. But two days ago, he was pulled from this room by whoever was keeping them. Shane tried to follow; he stopped when the barrel of a handgun pointed between his eyes.

He tried to cover his ears. He didn’t want to hear. It didn’t help. He bit into his arm until it bled. He hadn’t done that since he was a kid.

Shane pressed the back of his hand to Rozanov’s forehead, like his mom did for him. God. He couldn’t think of his mother. He had to think of something, anything else. He focused on the heat under his hand, and the damp pricks of clammy sweat that lingered when he pulled away.

Rozanov shifted, fever-glazed eyes blinking open. “Hollander?” he rasped.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Shane said. He reached for one of the plastic water bottles that their captors tossed into the room this morning while Shane was still half-asleep. “Here, drink this.”

Rozanov struggled upright; Shane tried to help, but Rozanov batted his hand away. “I’m fine.”

“Okay,” Shane said. Rozanov was not fine. Neither of them was fine. “Please drink the water.”

Rozanov closed his eyes as he tipped the bottle back, his hand crackling plastic. He sipped once, twice, and waved the bottle toward Shane.

Shane shook his head. Rozanov shook the water bottle. It’s such a fucking mockery of their draft night that Shane could laugh if he were sure it wouldn’t die a sob.

“What, I have germs?” Rozanov rested his head against the peeling, molding wallpaper, dehydrated piss brown. “Broken ribs don’t catch.”

“No,” Shane agreed. But what if it wasn’t just broken ribs? What if Rozanov—no.

He watched too many stupid movies. That wouldn’t happen to them. They would be found, and they would be fine.

—

Scott Hunter is at ease in a quiet café corner in the West Village, not far from his Chelsea penthouse. The Rochester native is known as many things: a consummate professional, a respected NHL veteran, the New York Admirals’ favorite son, and, most recently, as the man who captained USA men’s hockey to their first gold medal since the Miracle on Ice in 1980.

He is also known as the person who looked at a working timeline and asked authorities if they knew that Ilya Rozanov and Shane Hollander were speaking together during the men’s figure skating finals at the Sochi Olympics—what was later learned to be the last time either was seen, and Hunter the last to see them.

As Hunter and his USA hockey (and Admirals) teammate Carter Vaughn have explained to perhaps every news outlet on the planet, they were the last individuals to interact with Shane Hollander before he disappeared. The trio attended the event and sat together.

I ask—as many others have—if he knows why Hollander left his seat to speak to Rozanov that ill-fated evening.

“Hockey is a unique sport,” Hunter says. Each word is carefully chosen; he is known for his thoughtfulness with the media. “Guys grow up together, move around a lot. It’s a community. Even your most heated rivalries are respectful of each other. I know Hollander wanted to check in on Rozanov after Russia’s performance. He’s a good guy like that.”

Hunter is referring to the fact that the day before his disappearance, Rozanov captained the Russian men’s hockey team to a blowout loss against Latvia, a shocking upset that took the Russians out of medal contention.

A national embarrassment on home ice, captained by a twenty-one-year-old whose selection as captain was lambasted by the Russian media—for his qualifications and experience prior to the tournament, and for his performance following it. Until it was discovered that he was abducted, it was assumed by many that Rozanov fled because he couldn’t handle the pressure or the criticism that he was too green to lead the white, blue, and red to victory.

Hunter disagreed with that assessment from the start. “I think Rozanov is an excellent captain. A pain in my ass—in everyone’s ass—but a good leader. He understands the game. And more than that, he understands the players. All that noise about him not being able to handle the pressure…I think everyone in the league had a good laugh at that.”

As captain of an original six franchise, Hunter can relate—somewhat. “There are only six of us, right? I think I’ve got it pretty easy compared to the guys in Boston, Toronto, Montreal. The expectations for him in Boston, even before Sochi, were crazy, and I thought he was handling it well. A cool head under pressure, you know? I always respected that about him.”

Hunter led the charge to extend the delay of the NHL’s return to play on behalf of the NHL Players’ Association (NHLPA). Though ultimately futile, I shared how touching I found the effort.

“I understand why it wasn’t feasible,” Hunter says. “It’s not just us players that are affected by a season pause. It’s a whole industry, and that disrupts people’s paychecks, their families, everything. I thought it was commendable that the league actually heard us out. It goes to show that hockey is a family, like I said before.”

Hunter also joined Hayden Pike and Cliff Marlow, the alternate captains of the Metros and Raiders, respectively, in issuing and wearing the now-iconic ‘424&81’ helmet stickers that went mega viral. The design made its way onto buttons, bracelets, t-shirts, hats, and into the homes of hockey fans around the world. Hunter and Marlow even presented President Obama with a custom lapel pin when the men's and women’s hockey teams celebrated their dual golds at the White House.

(Both Pike and Marlow ‘regretfully declined’ their interviews due to scheduling conflicts; Pike had six weddings to attend in six weeks, and Marlow volunteers at a youth hockey camp in Pittsburgh, his hometown.)

“Well, I just think the design is neat,” Hunter says of the initiative. “My friend Kip Grady made it. And it wasn’t hard to convince guys to wear it. I think we were all looking for a way to show our support, and that we hoped they would fight through it together.”

—

“Pawn to F4,” Shane said. He hated playing as white. He hated making the first move even more.

Across the cramped room, Rozanov was upright for the first time in three days, his legs spread in a vee, his hands limp in his lap, his soot-gray white socks brushing against Shane’s. But they weren’t talking about that.

Rozanov was teaching Shane chess. They could play without a board or pieces, which was cool, though Shane thought he’d probably be learning a little faster if he could see the game somewhere beyond his head.

“Pawn to E6,” Rozanov said. His eyes were closed, but that’s usually how they were when they played. He was a pretty good teacher.

“Uh…” Shane tried to picture the board. “Pawn to G4?”

“Is question or move?”

“Move?”

Rozanov exhaled, his mouth turning up at the corners as he shook his head. “Queen to H4. Checkmate.”

Fucking—

“This game sucks,” Shane complained, crossing his arms. It wasn’t the first time he’d said it, always in the same hushed tones to not get yelled at by their captors.

They hadn’t learned much about them. Their captors. Rozanov shared the basics of what he’d learned when they were hitting him, and what he’d overheard since.

It was just two men, though sometimes a third sat below their window. They were on the outskirts of a city because they could see the shadows of neighboring buildings and houses and could sometimes hear traffic pass by, but they faced nothing but flat, endless land that stretched to the horizon with no aberration from trees or hills or anything except telephone and electric lines.

Either the third man came and went in a vehicle they couldn’t see, or he was the same person as one of the two men who took them. Their names were Nikulin and Kulakov, though Rozanov didn’t know which was which. When Shane asked if they were part of the mob, Rozanov stared back, dead-eyed and tired, and refused to answer. So, maybe they were, but maybe they weren’t. They didn’t even know if they were still in Russia. They were in the truck for so long.

“Very stupid mistake. Baby mistake,” Rozanov said. “Is called Fool’s mate. Can’t believe they don’t teach you this in school.”

“I was pretty focused on learning to play hockey.”

“And still I go first.” Rozanov smiled a real smile then, his parched lips pale and cracking as they stretched thin over his teeth. They don’t—they haven’t talked about before. And they certainly haven’t talked about the night in Shane’s apartment. Shane tried, but Rozanov insisted they not talk about it.

“Don’t want them to hear we are faggots,” he said with his mouth rent into an ugly twist, “don’t want to know what they will do to us.”

The word, the thought, the reminder weighed on Shane, an emetic omnipresence. Could they—tell? Like Rozanov was clearly able to tell?

Shane didn’t want to find out, so. They didn’t talk about it.

They played a few more games that Shane lost, until the last of daylight left from their solitary window.

“I think this is enough chess today,” Rozanov said. He wheezed and winced as he stood and swayed toward the bed. Shane jolted to his feet to catch him.

“Hey, why don’t we keep sitting for a bit?” Shane couldn’t look worried. He wouldn’t. “It can be on the bed, just. Upright?”

Rozanov eyed him. The coughing was getting worse. Every time he hacked, it was wet with mucus and accompanied by a pained groan from his still-broken ribs. Shane didn’t know how long it took ribs to heal, but he thought Rozanov’s were kind of taking their sweet time.

He helped Rozanov sit on the pallet and joined him, so they were shoulder to shoulder, their backs against the wall. He could hear the clogged rattling in Rozanov’s lungs. He could hear an owl beyond the window. Nikulin and Kulakov were watching television in the other room, and Shane could hear the canned laugh tracks through the paper-thin walls.

“Maybe you could teach me Russian,” Shane said.

Rozanov stiffened against Shane like he had sat up a little straighter, though Shane couldn’t tell if he had actually moved or not.

“No,” he said, short and hoarse.

“Why not?” Shane turned his head to look at Rozanov, impossible in the lifeless dark he only knew from this room, the kind of black that crawled and clawed at his skin and instincts. “I’ll probably be better at it than chess. And maybe I can listen to learn more about who these guys are.”

“Hollander,” Rozanov said, “no. Don’t ask again.”

Oh—he was. This was serious. The same immovable tone he spoke with on the rooftop in Vegas a couple of years ago.

“Why not? It couldn’t hurt, and—”

“If they know you understand Russian, they try to get information from you.” His voice somehow dropped lower as he said, “I will not let this happen.”

Shane remembered how Rozanov shouted himself hoarse those first few days, and remembered the horrible thumps and slaps and groans that he heard from the other room.

“I think they might do that to me even if I don’t speak Russian,” Shane said, pulling his knees to his chest and wrapping his arms around his knees like a little kid. He was scared. He didn’t want to get hurt, but he didn’t want Rozanov to take the brunt of their anger. His voice sounded so small, so young, when he asked, “What do you think they want?”

“Money,” Rozanov said immediately. “It’s always money.”

—

Svetlana Vetrova requests that we meet at o ya, the sleek sushi bar in the Leather District, a perennial favorite of Boston’s modern brahmins.

Born in Detroit and raised between Boston and Moscow, Vetrova is a fascinating tangle of culture and identity. While she’s fluent in English thanks to her American mother, Denise ‘Denny’ Morgan Vetrova, the legendary Detroit Free Press beat reporter who was the first Black woman in every professional team’s press room across Motor City, Vetrova is delighted that I speak Russian. She continues the interview in the language of her father, Russia’s minister of sport Sergei Vetrov, the legendary goaltender for the Detroit Red Wheels and Boston Raiders. Vetrov was instrumental in cutting through Kremlin bureaucracy to coördinate with all parties involved in the Sochi Affair.

“He was instrumental?” Vetrova laughs. “Because I made him so, maybe. He knows how important Ilya is to me.”

They are childhood best friends, she explains, though her mother and father separated and subsequently divorced in 2003, and Vetrova finished her schooling in New England, returning to Moscow for her summers.

“We would email nonstop. He was Dynamo’s [HC Dynamo’s sports school and development teams] during the year, I was my mother’s, but every summer we were terrors.”

Vetrova moved to the US permanently in 2011 to attend Brown. She tells me she turned down Harvard because it’s boring, and that she divides her time between her childhood home (or one of them) in Brookline, Rozanov’s house just outside of Boston, and her apartment in Providence.

“I love my mother, I love Ilya, but if I were in Boston full-time, I would go crazy,” she says. “And the cops don’t even pull me over on 95 anymore.”

Vetrova and Rozanov share a love for fast cars and vexing the Massachusetts State Police. I ask her how much the two have racked up in fines and ticket fees, and she declines to answer.

“Ilya liked to say, ‘what’s the point of having fuck you money if you can’t drive fuck off fast in a fuck me car?’” Vetrova smiles, fond and clearly more than a little sad at the memory.

Money—or lack thereof—was why Rozanov was taken in the first place.

“[Rozanov’s older brother, Alexei Rozanov] had debts,” Vetrova says. “Everyone knows that. It was obvious that whoever took Ilya wanted Alexei—or his father—to pay up, and with interest.”

Grigori Rozanov is a decorated Soviet officer who led Moscow’s police force in various roles for nearly three decades. A once-influential figure of Moscow’s elite, he has retreated from the public eye in recent years. I was unable to reach him for an interview or comment.

Vetrova lays it out bluntly: “He’s sick. Dementia, or maybe Alzheimer’s. Ilya would kill me for saying this, but fuck it. He barely remembers where he is most days, let alone where his money is kept, or that he ever had it in the first place.”

And his mother?

“Dead,” Vetrova says. “Since 2003. Don’t ask me about his father’s second wife. She’s useless and blonde, just like my father’s second wife. She knows nothing about the money, either.”

Like the rest of us, Vetrova didn’t know that Hollander’s disappearance was connected to Rozanov missing a gala thrown by her father, or her and Rozanov’s planned visit to the skeleton finals. Though in the end, she wasn’t surprised that the two were held together.

“Hollander was collateral damage,” Vetrova says, sipping a glass of Japanese whisky. “If he hadn’t been with Ilya, he wouldn’t have been taken. But once they did, I’m sure they ran his name through Google and saw bags of money.”

—

Shane counted five weeks. Rozanov gave up on counting.

The door to their room flew open.

That happened less and less lately. They were thrown slices of stale bread or protein bars and water sometime during the night when they were both asleep. The bucket in the corner was changed whenever Nikulin or Kulakov could smell it.

Rozanov was getting worse. A few days ago, Kulakov—they were pretty sure the ginger was Kulakov—threw a bottle of pills into their room. The label was in Cyrillic, but Ilya said it was Russia’s version of children’s Tylenol.

That really pissed Shane off. That they didn’t even get adult Tylenol. Rozanov said it was so they didn’t kill themselves. There’s no way someone could do that, though, right? How many Tylenol did someone have to swallow to kill themselves?

He was still monitoring Rozanov’s doses as best he could. As far as he could tell, Rozanov had a mild fever on and off for about a week. His coughing was much worse. At night, he shivered, and yesterday he had finally allowed Shane to hold him as they slept, to try to pass some warmth between them.

Nikulin stood in the doorway as Kulakov threw a newspaper at them. It was in Cyrillic, but the main article was about them, with their Olympic roster headshots on one side, a photo of security footage from where they were talking at the rink in Sochi, and another of their last game together before the break, the night that—

“Hold,” Kulakov grunted. Shane exchanged a glance with Rozanov and held up the paper. His hand was trembling. The last time he ate something that wasn’t water, bread, or a shitty protein bar was that fucking frozen yogurt with Scott Hunter and Carter Vaughn.

Kulakov lifted a flip phone. There was a weak flash and the corny chime of a digital shutter, and then a clunky laptop was kicked into the room.

Shane opened his mouth to say something, and Nikulin barked, «Shut up!»

Shane knew that, at least. It was yelled often enough.

“Watch,” Kulakov said. He pressed play, and a weak sob ripped itself from Shane’s throat as his mom and dad filled the screen.

“I don’t know who you are, or what you want, but we need you to know that we love Shane more than anything in the world.” Mom’s voice wavered, and as she began to cry, so did Shane, humiliated at showing weakness in front of these assholes, and so despairingly exhausted all at once.

He stopped asking himself, why me? after that first week. Now, a new question fractured in his throat: why them?

“He’s our only son, our sweet baby boy,” Mom continued. Dad had one arm around her, and his other hand was gripping hers so tightly his knuckles were white. He was crying too.

Shane had never seen his dad cry.

“We will pay any amount of money,” Dad said, his voice gruff and scraped raw even through the tinny laptop speakers. “We will do anything you ask.”

“Please,” Mom begged. “Please give us Shane back. Please, we’ll—”

The laptop slammed shut. Shane stood, his fists clenched, nearly blinded by tears. “Let us go. They couldn’t have other children, you, you fucking monsters, you’ll pay for this, you’ll—”

A crack thundered off the walls. Lightning rang in his ears. Shane opened his eyes, and he was on the floor.

Nikulin said something to Rozanov. Shane watched their dirty shoes leave the room and heard the muted thud of the door slamming shut.

He flinched when Rozanov’s hands landed on his shoulders, but he—they were gentle. He tilted Shane’s head to the side and ran his fingers over the skin Shane couldn’t feel, the entire right side of his face numb and reverberating like the sound in his ears.

Rozanov’s fingers came away bloody. Oh. Shane was bleeding. Kulakov wore rings. Rozanov told him that when he came back from getting hit and kicked.

Rozanov was saying something between coughs as he helped Shane to the pallet. The despairing exhaustion drained from him with every shuffling step, and by the time they were both lying down, he was done. He was done with all of this. He didn’t sign up for getting fucking kidnapped when he accepted his invitation to the national team. He didn’t sign up to hear Rozanov get kicked over and over again. Or what Rozanov sounded like when he groaned and coughed through broken ribs and waterlogged lungs. Or what his dad looked like with tears on his cheeks. Or what his mom said when she begged for his life.

Someone was crying.

Rozanov wrapped himself around Shane. “Shh, Hollander, Shane, you’re hurting yourself. You have to be quiet. You can’t let them hear you.”

His arm hurt. His heart was racing. He couldn’t breathe. Ilya kept repeating himself, over and over, and eventually, held Shane’s head in his hands until Shane trembled back to reality.

“I don’t want to do it,” Shane croaked when he released his teeth from his bleeding forearm. “I don’t—it’s not fair. Why is this happening?”

Rozanov wrapped his hand around Shane’s wrist, a careful distance from the reopened bite wound. “I know. I know. But they can’t know this. That’s how they win. They can't win. You so competitive, yes? You have to beat them.”

Shane nodded into the thin, lumpy pallet and tried to wipe his eyes. He didn’t want to jostle Rozanov’s ribs with panicky inhales and exhales, so he tried to keep each breath controlled, and that helped calm him, too.

He didn’t know how long they lay there, but after a while, he realized Rozanov was matching the rise and fall of Shane's chest.

He pulled away. He was supposed to be keeping Rozanov warm, not the other way around. He wasn’t the one who was sick. Rozanov hesitated, but he allowed Shane to wrap around his body and pull him close.

“What did Nikulin say to you?” he asked, careful to keep quiet and close to Rozanov’s ear.

Rozanov’s thumb stilled against the bony knob of Shane’s wrist. He’d been rubbing back and forth, just like the night before. It was nice.

“He said nobody think I’m worth money or video, so I’m lucky I have you.”

Shane gave up on his murder plans a week ago, sure that he thought through every possibility to kill Nikulin and Kulakov and escape. It was still nice to imagine their brains splattering against this ugly fucking wallpaper.

Once he was sure he could keep his voice low, Shane asked, “Your family won’t send money?”

“My brother owes the men,” he said, which he told Shane before. “My father can’t pay. I tell them I will wire from my accounts, they won’t take it. Will show who took us.”

“Why can’t your father pay?”

“He is sick,” Rozanov said. He inhaled, stilted, like every movement from his weakened body. “Dementia, I think. He is getting worse.”

“Jesus Christ, that’s…” Shane couldn’t find the words. He saw how gray his mother’s hair was in the video, the deepened lines in his father’s face. They would survive this, but the damage it would do—they were getting older—

But, also, what wasn’t Ilya saying? Shane shouldn’t ask. Fuck it. “What about your mother?”

“Dead,” Rozanov said, blunt but banal, a lead vest weighing on his tongue that he learned to speak through.

“Fuck. Fuck, I’m so. I’m so sorry, Rozanov,” Shane said, his voice cracking.

“You can call me Ilya,” Rozanov, Ilya, said. Ilya called him Shane earlier. That was real, not just the ringing in his ears. Ilya huffed a laugh thick with phlegm. “If I’m going to die in your arms, I think you can call me my name.”

“You’re not.” Shane buried his face in Ilya’s neck. He couldn’t. He wouldn’t.

“It’s okay. I can see my mother again.”

“Ilya, don’t say that, please.”

“Okay,” Ilya said, a soft acquiescence, like he was too tired for anything else.

“We’re going to get through this,” Shane said. His voice didn’t waver. He made sure of it. “My mom is so smart. She’ll get us out of this. We just have to survive, okay?”

It took a long time, but Ilya finally said, “Okay.”

—

Yuna Hollander brings her son a cold glass of ginger ale and takes a seat next to him. David Hollander announces from the kitchen that lunch will be ready soon.

The Hollander cottage is surrounded by photos of Shane as a boy, cataloging his progression through the levels of junior hockey, his various jerseys framed and trophies lining every mantle and shelf.

“David and I weren’t able to have other children,” Yuna says. “I don’t know if people think that’s why we fought so hard, but if they do, that’s bullshit. Ilya isn’t our son, but once we learned he and Shane were there together, we fought like hell for him, too. We would have sent money immediately if the government let us.”

When a Canadian national treasure is taken hostage by hostile individuals on the other side of the world, the Hollanders learned that negotiations become wildly complicated—and out of their hands.

“It’s odd to have that much attention and still not be able to do anything,” David says. He is a career public servant who is planning to retire from the Treasury Board of Canada next year. He and Yuna are both graduates of McGill, where they met after a hockey game David had just won.

Lunch is grilled chicken and pasta salad, and incredibly delicious.

“Of course it was easy to fight for Shane,” David says. “It was easy to fight for Ilya, too, even though we didn’t know him.”

Did Hollander know that across the world, his parents, friends, and peers were on his side?

“I think so. I mean, my parents, obviously. They showed us.” He cuts himself off and visibly resets. “They showed us the videos. But mostly, I tried to fight for us. I tried to get Ilya to do the same.”

Hollander is hesitant to share details of their day-to-day. Investigations are ongoing, and he doesn’t seem keen to rehash the experience.

“It took a long time for Ilya to get really sick,” he shares, albeit reluctantly. “We were two young guys at peak physical performance. I just didn’t expect it to get so bad so quickly near the end. But before that…”

Yuna moves to take her son’s hand, but he shakes her off.

“Humans have an overwhelming ability to accept a new normal,” Hollander says. “I read that in a sports performance book. And in every scouting report I’ve ever read about Ilya, it said that he was highly adaptable on the ice.”

I point out that nearly every scouting report of his says the same. Hollander waves it off.

“Yeah, but not like Ilya.”

—

He never thought there would be good days in captivity and bad days in captivity.

Most days just—pass. They wake. They wait. They piss, shit, cough. They sleep.

They’ve been here for more than three months. Almost four, depending on who is putting the effort into arguing. Shane had some grand notion of the KGB bursting in on day 81, and the whole world would be amazed at the symbolism. And then 100 days, but they passed that, too.

Day 81 was bad. So was 100. And 101. They were becoming frequent. Ilya was getting sicker. He used to only sleep through the bad days, but then he started sleeping through the normal days, and then the normal days were indistinguishable from the bad days.

Shane couldn't help. It was paralyzing.

He was giving most of the food and water to Ilya, and it was starting to take its toll. It was a bad sign that Ilya let him. That Ilya indulged Shane by letting him win at chess, until their games stopped because Ilya couldn’t keep track of the pieces in his head.

So then Shane just—talked. It was all he could do. He talked about what they would do when they were found. How Ilya could show Shane around Moscow, where he grew up, the rinks he learned to skate in. Then he talked about Ilya visiting him at his parents’ cottage, about the home Shane was building down the road, and the private lake he bought last summer. How a plastic rink was installed in the basement, and they could go there and train and fuck.

When Ilya wasn’t asleep, when he drifted through consciousness, he would nod and hum and say, that’s nice, like he was still trying to make Shane feel better, even now, even as he—

But today. Today was a good day.

Shane couldn’t remember the last time he woke up, and Ilya was awake and alert. He told Shane about the dream he had: they were somehow drafted into a two-man bobsled, on the same team, and they both laughed the entire run. Ilya even ate most of the bread and drank most of the water. They played chess, and Ilya put up a fair fight.

Now, Shane was wrapped around Ilya, curled together not because they were cold—they were, but the weather seemed to have finally turned—but because Ilya said he wanted to be close. It was like that night in Shane’s apartment, the first time they fucked for real, when Ilya stayed inside Shane after, like he couldn’t bear to leave Shane’s body. Shane hadn’t known that was something people did.

Ilya’s hand rested loosely around Shane’s bony wrist until he twitched and tightened in the space between a stuttered breath. He shifted, exhaled, and pulled his hand downward until Shane was brushing against the mostly hard length of Ilya’s dick, prominent in his jeans.

They haven’t—it’s not like they’ve—

He won’t speak now. If Ilya wants this, if Ilya needs this, Shane will do it. Shane would do anything for Ilya if it would make him better. Shane would die for Ilya if it saved him, and that terrified Shane, that he could feel that deeply about someone, that somehow, between Ilya kissing his neck as he thrust inside, or teasing Shane before their lips met so sweetly on the stairs of his apartment, to now, that he—loved Ilya. Of course he did.

But it didn’t matter if Ilya didn’t survive.

All that love, all that fighting, the stupid things he said when he first introduced himself in Saskatchewan, would be for nothing if Ilya didn’t survive.

How could Shane ever play hockey again, if it wasn’t against Ilya?

Shane fumbled with the fly of Ilya’s jeans and thumbed over the leaking head of his cock. Ilya hissed as Shane began to work him over, kissing anything he could reach: the clammy sweat at the base of Ilya’s neck; his greasy, unkempt curls; the wiry hair that covered his jaw in sparse patches.

He had just begun to jerk Ilya properly when Ilya turned over, so they faced each other. Their noses brushed together, and Ilya reached for Shane’s Team Canada joggers, pulling them down until they each had the other’s cock in hand.

They said nothing; they barely breathed. Shane’s eyes never left Ilya’s, even as they both lurched toward their orgasm.

“Can I kiss you?” Shane whispered. There were tears in Ilya’s eyes, and it dawned with another slick pull that Shane was crying, too.

Ilya shook his head. “No, no, just like this.” His hand was so gentle around Shane. It was the kindest touch he ever had, save for Ilya’s, barely five months ago, and a world away. “Our kiss, your apartment? It was so good. I want that to be—”

“What? Want what?” Shane asked, breathless, his eyes trying to find any end to that sentence in Ilya’s eyes before they closed and Ilya spilled into Shane’s hand.

He wanted, needed to say something more, to ask again, to will Ilya closer somehow, when Ilya twisted his wrist, and Shane came with a wordless cry.

—

We know how this story ends. It’s the one subject completely off-limits for interviews. As Yuna Hollander wrote in response to our initial outreach:

“The whole world saw the worst. The news coverage will follow us for the rest of our lives. We can talk about the before. We can talk about the after. We will not talk about that day.”

She is referring to the first photos that emerged from the Red Cross and Interpol’s rescue of Hollander and Rozanov, limp on stretchers and covered in blood and brain matter.

Out of respect to the Rozanov and Hollander families, we will not reprint the photos.

—

It was happening.

The deafening roar of a helicopter outside the building. People kicked down doors and searched the floor below them.

It didn’t matter. Shane knew he and Ilya wouldn’t live to see their rescue. They would cart their bodies home, and Shane would break his promise to Ilya and break his parents entirely.

The room was so, so dark. Maybe that was good. He wouldn’t be able to see how Ilya choked to death.

Nikulin hissed something in Russian as his arm tightened around Ilya’s throat. Ilya’s eyes were half-closed, but Shane could still see the panic in the wild jaunt of his irises underneath, the way his hands clawed at Nikulin’s arms. «Be quiet!»

“Let him go,” Shane hissed back. He tried to pry himself from the iron-clad grip Kulakov had on him, trying not to panic at the ice-cold barrel pressed against his temple. Ilya wheezed and coughed again, and the man held him tighter. “If you let him go, he’ll stop coughing.”

«Be quiet,» Kulakov said as he pushed the barrel harder against Shane’s skull.

Ilya coughed again, and all Shane could see in the low light was the glint of something silver before Ilya’s body hit the ground, gurgling and gagging as blood poured from his slit throat.

“Ilya!” Shane gasped, begged, tears falling as he once again tried to wrench himself away.

«Be quiet!» Nikulin said, the silver knife glinting in Shane’s direction. Shane heard the gun’s safety unlock like a piercing scream in his ear. He wanted to close his eyes, but he couldn’t take his eyes off Ilya. If Ilya is. If he’s going to. He shouldn’t be alone. Shane owed him that much.

Two shots rang out, light flooding the room.

Shane thought he was dead, that the light was heaven, but Kulakov’s arms fell away from Shane. He could barely see through his tear-soaked eyes, but he could find his way to Ilya blindfolded. He had before, and he did now, scrabbling across the floor. He fell atop Ilya’s gaunt, lifeless body, and desperately pressed his hands to the gaping maw carved across Ilya’s throat.

“No, no, no,” Shane said to himself as he swallowed his vomit, acid searing the length of his esophagus as bile fought its way back up. His hands were red, so red, so slippery and red, and Ilya’s eyes were all the way closed now. “Ilya, no, Ilya, please, you can’t. Ilya, I promised. You can’t go. Please. Please!”

Someone yelled in Russian, and then someone yelled Police! in French, and that was the last thing Shane heard before everything went black once more.

—

My interview with the Hollanders coincides with a homecoming of sorts.

In the early evening, a sleek Porsche pulls into the cottage’s gravel drive, and from it emerges Ilya Rozanov, fresh off a plane from Boston with Massie Mirov in the passenger seat.

Mirov was hired by the Boston Raiders, who sought an all-in-one caretaker who spoke Russian and could take charge of Rozanov’s recovery, and has become a familiar face on Rozanov’s personal social media accounts, as well as the Raiders team accounts and YouTube channel.

“Masha does everything,” Rozanov says. He speaks softly in a way that seems antithetical to his mythos, and with a harsh rasp as his vocal cords continue to heal. “What she says goes. She’s terrifying.”

Mirov has a background in nursing and recently completed her doctor of nursing practice studies at the University of Massachusetts' Chan Medical School, and wasn’t quite ready to return to a clinical setting when she was recommended for the job.

“Let’s just say this pays better,” Mirov says, wryly. “And Ilya is never boring.”

Mirov was flown to Volgograd to manage Rozanov’s initial stabilization and has been by his side since he and Hollander returned home, including a lengthy stay for both at Massachusetts General Hospital. All three Hollanders agree that Mirov is not just the person who coördinated Rozanov’s surgeries, medications, and—as of late—his physical rehabilitation, with an eye toward returning to full-time play. She’s family.

So is Rozanov.

“Shane would tell me about the cottage,” Rozanov says. It’s his first time here—he doesn’t like being away from Hollander for long. (The same goes for Hollander.) “Long days, nights, he talked about the lake, his dad’s cooking, his mom’s love for hockey. It’s like my home even though I’ve never been.”

The reunion is tearful for Rozanov and each Hollander, though Shane and Ilya have only been apart for a week. Though Hollander’s physical recovery was less intense, a multitude of factors—he sidesteps around a full explanation, but does say included medical reasons—have kept him within arm’s reach of Rozanov when possible. Later, they will adjourn to Hollander’s newly-built cottage about ten minutes away. The goal is to train together to prepare to face off as rivals once October rolls around, but they both know there’s a long road ahead.

Sitting side-by-side on a bench swing overlooking a peaceful lake shimmering with golden-hour iridescence, the twenty-two-year-olds look a far cry from the emaciated photos of them resolute but terrified, their hands wound together in the space between their hospital beds in a Russian ICU.

They’re not untouched by the trauma—Rozanov has two scars laced across his throat, the first from his captors and the second from his tracheostomy tube. Hollander has a perfect bite mark scarred on his forearm and moves nearly constantly, jittery and unfocused. The only time I’ve seen him still is here, next to Rozanov. Both of them seem different when together, with something unspoken and effortless between them—a warrior’s bond?

Rozanov laughs as Hollander shakes his head.

“When you go through something like that—we were always going to be part of each other’s story, you know? But now…” Hollander trails off.

He looks to Rozanov to pick up the thread; Rozanov shrugs. Most of their conversations pass between them unspoken—a side effect of nearly four months in captivity, Rozanov says when I raise an eyebrow.

“You make noise, you make trouble,” Rozanov says. “We learned to talk with no talking.”

“Communicate silently,” Hollander adds.

It wasn’t just silent communication that the NHL’s lauded rivals learned. They had to learn to communicate altogether.

“I mean, not—we’d spoken before,” Hollander says. “Obviously, we’ve had to talk before. But we had to learn how to trust each other.”

“Like each other,” Rozanov corrects, earning an eye roll from Hollander.

But now…?

They exchange a glance, an unthinking smile crossing Rozanov’s face, and a blush coloring Hollander’s.

“We’re friends,” Hollander says.

“Friends,” Rozanov agrees, but: “I’m still going to destroy him this year.”

Hollander laughs. “Oh, you are, are you?”

“Yes, you are still too weak. Very sad.”

“We’ll see who’s weak when I’m lifting the cup.”

“Over my dead body!”

“Yeah, ’cause I’m gonna kill you, you asshole.”

I would continue to transcribe, but this went on for some time, and devolved into an argument that—while accompanied by mirrored grins—seemed no less heated or whole-hearted. Hollander and Rozanov may be irrevocably changed by what they experienced, and by each other, but this is how they first met, how they survived, and how they will once again thrive: by challenging the other to his very best. ◆

—

Alexis Belenky, a staff writer, has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2011. Her first book, “Olympic Terror: Murder, Extortion, and Cooperation Under the Rings” (January 2015), is available for preorder.