Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

Gen, M/M

Fandom:

Heated Rivalry (TV)

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, David Hollander

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Daemons, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Due to Daemons lol, 2009 World Juniors | IIHF Ice Hockey World Junior Championship, Not Actually Rivals, Pining, Humor, Fluff, Ollie is a good boy

Language:

English

Series:

Part 7 of Set in Heated Rivalry-verse

Stats:

Published: 2026-10-01 Words: 6,444 Chapters: 1/1

Lisichka-sestrichka

Summary

“Jesus Christ,” Ollie whispers. “I’m going to pass out. Shane—look, she’s wearing a fur coat. A fur coat, Shane—”

Shane nods, every bit as shaky. The fox is, in fact, wearing a little capelet of real fur on top of her own already ridiculous red pelt: dark and glossy, sable probably, tied under her chest with a silk ribbon and fastened at the breastbone with a small gold clasp.

Or

Nobody is prepared for the way Ilya and Vasilisa Rozanov intend to play professional hockey, least of all Shane and Oliver Hollander.

Notes

God i forgot how relaxing it is to just sit and write something that isnt gonna spiral out into the abyss, that's just fucking fluff. No endless folders of notes and worldbuilding and psychology.

Russia’s practice runs long.

Shane knows because he stays for the whole thing, up in the cheap seats with his hood up, like a hood has ever made anybody invisible with a wolf sitting next to them. Team Canada skated at nine. He’s had lunch, done his media, iced his knee, and told Dad to pick him up at three, which left exactly an hour and a half to watch the Russians. Which is a perfectly normal thing for a captain to do. Scouting. That’s what this is.

Two rows down, a pair of rink staff keep glancing back at them. One of them has a Jack Russell daemon who hasn’t taken her eyes off Ollie since they sat down, and Ollie has spent the last forty minutes not looking at her. Not looking at anybody. He’s sitting the way he sits in public, the way Hockey Canada’s media people taught them both when Shane was fifteen: close, low, still. Chin level. Ears soft. Paws together. A hundred-plus pounds of grey wolf folded down as small as he’ll go, polite as a kitten.

Nobody ever had to teach Shane how to make himself smaller. He figured that one out on his own, a long time before Ollie settled. If anything, the press people have always tried to teach him the opposite: how to look bigger, how to own the room, or whatever the fuck those people call it.

On the ice, Ilya Rozanov does something stupid and quick with his hands, and the puck isn’t where the goalie thinks it is anymore. Behind the glass at that end, the goalie’s daemon—a tortoise roughly the size of an ottoman, parked in the heated box—doesn’t so much as blink.

On the Russian bench, a row of large, serious dogs sit at attention. And at the very end of the row, on a pillow—a gold pillow, an actual gold satin pillow that Rozanov must have carried through customs—a red fox lies with her chin on her paws, watching her human with lazy, heavy-lidded interest. Even from up here, gold glints in her ears.

“She’s on a pillow,” Ollie says, very quietly, for the fourth time.

“I see the pillow, bud.”

“It’s gold.”

“Sure fucking is.”

When the whistle goes, Shane gives it two minutes to be safe, then takes the back stairs down past the dressing rooms instead of the front concourse. The side door spits them out by the loading dock into a cold that freezes your nose hairs on the first breath. Minus twenty-three, according to the bank sign across the road. The parking lot’s just around the corner, where Dad will be idling the rental with the heat cranked, and Maggie curled up in the passenger footwell.

They make it to the corner when Ollie stops so hard that Shane walks straight into his hindquarters.

“Ollie, what—”

“Shh.” Ollie’s ears go flat, then straight back up, flicking anxiously. “Shane. Shane. Look at her.”

Shane leans around the corner of the building, past the snowbank somebody bulldozed up against the brick, and—oh. Okay.

“Jesus Christ,” Ollie whispers. “I’m going to pass out. Shane—look, she’s wearing a fur coat. A fur coat, Shane—”

Shane nods, every bit as shaky. The fox is, in fact, wearing a little capelet of real fur on top of her own already ridiculous red pelt: dark and glossy, sable probably, tied under her chest with a silk ribbon and fastened at the breastbone with a small gold clasp. Two tiny gold hoops in each ear. She can’t possibly need it—with a coat that thick she could flounce around somewhere a lot colder than Regina without a worry. But no. Ilya Rozanov’s fox is wearing the skin of another animal, and her reasons have nothing to do with the temperature.

“God, they’re cool,” Ollie says, pressing against his leg and nudging his hand until Shane obediently scratches behind his ears a few times. For courage. For solidarity. “Why can’t we ever be that cool?”

“I don’t know, bud. Maybe because yesterday you saw them in the lobby, tried to stop on a marble floor, and took me out at the knees in front of the elevators,” Shane mutters. “In front of half of Team Russia and a guy from TSN. Face it. Whatever they think of us, cool is not it.”

Which sucks, honestly. Plenty of people think Shane and Ollie are cool. Plenty of people are lining up to pay them crazy Monopoly money because they think they’re cool—the exceptional-status kid, the face on the Hockey News draft preview, etcetera. But not Ilya and Vasilisa Rozanov. Yesterday Rozanov had looked down at Shane, sprawled across the hotel lobby with a wolf on top of him, and said absolutely nothing. The fox, from his shoulder, had said something in Russian that made two of his teammates crack up.

So no. They know, accurately, that Shane and Ollie are fucking losers.

“Should we—talk to them?” Ollie asks, then huffs when Shane’s hand clenches without meaning to and tugs at the sensitive fur behind his ears. “Jesus. I was just making a suggestion.”

“And say what? Hey, remember us, the two idiots who wiped out at your feet yesterday? Besides—he looks busy.”

He does look busy. Ilya Rozanov is leaning against the brick by the players’ entrance with a cigarette—a cigarette, mid-tournament—talking rapid-fire Russian at his older brother, who is enormous. If the guy isn’t two metres tall, Shane will eat his skates. Vasilisa, meanwhile, is menacing the brother’s daemon, a huge black-and-tan shepherd. She has climbed him like a hill and is sitting on his head, while he whines pathetically at her to stop biting his nose. So the brother’s probably a soft touch. But still—

But nothing. Shane and Ollie have humiliated themselves enough this week. Walking up to stand next to Ilya Rozanov’s brother and barely reach his shoulder is one humiliation too many—

Too late. The fox, having bullied her victim flat onto his belly in the snow with both paws over his snout, lifts her head and spots them. Lurking.

They both freeze.

“She’s looking at us,” Ollie whispers. “Oh my God, Shane—”

“Calm down,” Shane hisses. “It’s not the prime minister, for fuck’s sake, they’re our age—”

“Who the fuck cares about the prime minister? The prime minister doesn’t have the meanest, coolest daemon in the world—”

“I know, Ollie—” Oh, shit. They’re all looking now. Even the dog is peeking out from behind a paw—and unlike the fox, who, true to form, doesn’t look scared of God or the devil, the dog is watching Ollie with—Well. With wariness. Predictable, polite, total wariness.

Shane’s heart sinks. This is so much worse. Being seen as a spaz sucks, but being seen as a threat—by Rozanov, by Rozanov’s family—

The fox breaks the tableau. She huffs, hops off the dog’s neck, and trots straight over to them, capelet and all. God, she’s cool. She somehow manages to look punk and posh at the same time: that impossible orange coat, legs black to the elbow like she was born in silk stockings, gold glinting in her ears. She looks like something out of a Ghibli movie.

“Hello,” she says, in a deeper voice than she has in TV clips. There’s more texture to it, a rasp, and of course the thick Russian burr. “I am Vasilisa. You may not call me Lisa just because I am fox. My human, over there, staring like ram at new gate—Ilya. And you are Oliver and Shane Hollander.”

Be cool. Be cool. So what if a daemon just walked right up to them, easy as anything. So what if that has never, not once, happened to them before, and Shane isn’t even sure it’s allowed, talking to the daemons of people you don’t know—

“Call me Ollie,” Ollie says. Shane can practically see the steam coming out of his ears. He lowers himself onto his elbows in the snow—maybe so he isn’t looming over such a small animal, but more likely because he would very much like her to step on his nose.

“Nice to meet you, Vasilisa,” Shane says, and swallows. “Great coat. Uh. Both of them.”

Good work, Hollander. Really. You’re on fire today.

The fox is quiet for a moment, looking him dead in the eye like a laser. Then she nods, apparently satisfied that whatever can be said about guys with wolf daemons in general, this one and his wolf are visibly idiots, and therefore harmless.

“Very good,” she says.

She turns to Ollie and—licks his nose. Just like that. Ollie lets out a startled yelp and goes rigid, eyes enormous, ears pricked, tail giving one cautious, disbelieving wag. The fox, living up to her reputation, licks his nose again—then bites it, and takes off. The capelet comes loose on the first bound and slides off into the snow. Ollie thunders after her, going from flat on the ground to full speed in about a stride and a half. Say what you want about wolves, they can accelerate.

Which leaves Shane alone to deal with her human, and her human’s terrifying older brother slash legal guardian, whose dog looked a lot more harmless whining in the snow than he does now, up on all four feet, perfectly still, watching his little brother’s fox get chased around a parking lot by a wolf.

“Shane Hollander,” Ilya Rozanov drawls, looking him up and down. Shane’s heart does a stupid skip. “Will you not come say hello?”

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

He takes a long breath, bends down, picks up the capelet, shakes the snow off it as carefully as he can, straightens, and marches to his doom.

Pull yourself together, man. You’re the best player in Canada. You’ve been in the OHL since you were fifteen. You’ve got the C on Team Canada, and you’re projected first overall in June. You’re a badass. You’re famous. You’re—

“Hello,” he says. His voice cracks. He stops, and genuinely wonders what is wrong with him. Is this a punishment? Who is punishing him, and for what? “Ahem. Hello, Rozanov. We wanted to—introduce ourselves yesterday, but. Things were busy.” God. “Here. This is hers.”

“Yes. We saw,” Rozanov says, taking the capelet and tucking it inside his jacket. He looks very amused. “And we know you. Wolf of Canada. Big name. Everybody talks, even at home.” His brother says something in Russian, low. Rozanov sighs like he’s been enormously inconvenienced. “This is my brother, Aleksei, and his Tisha. They are leaving.”

Would the brother leaving be better or worse? Shane honestly can’t tell. He tries very hard not to look over at Ollie, who is rolling around on his back in a patch of plowed snow while the fox bounces around him, biting his paws. Possibly Ollie is trying to squash her. More likely he’s trying very hard not to stick all four feet in the air and show his belly like the giant coward he is.

“Nice to meet you, sir,” Shane says, and sticks out his hand, already bracing for the handshake.

It’s like shaking hands with a bear—a huge, warm, calloused paw that swallows his whole hand—but the grip is surprisingly gentle. Shane manages to drag his eyes away from their usual safe spot—somewhere just over a man’s right shoulder—and—huh.

Aleksei Rozanov is smiling at him. Small, a little awkward, but not the way men with dog daemons usually smile at Shane when a kid half their size shows up with a wolf. Not that tight, measuring, too-many-teeth smile. Maybe guys with male daemons stick together. Is that a thing? Shane could seriously use some fucking solidarity right about now.

“Pleasure, Mister Hollander,” the man says, in English that is truly hard to understand. “Sorry. English bad. Good to meet. Ilyusha—” He breaks off into Russian, as fast as his brother’s but softer, quieter, and Rozanov rolls his eyes through the whole thing. Then Aleksei turns back to Shane. “Not late,” he says carefully. “Tomorrow, hockey game, yes? Not dark.”

Right. Shane blinks up at the two Russians, both of whom seem to be waiting for something from him. Off to the side, Ollie yelps, then whines like a puppy. Shane closes his eyes, takes a bracing breath, and looks. Yep. Ollie’s flat on his back with all four legs in the air after all, and the fox is sitting primly between his front paws, having evidently bitten both his ears.

“Where’s your hotel?” Shane says—the first thing that comes to mind—and immediately wants to walk into traffic. They’re in the same hotel. They’ve been in the same hotel since yesterday. That’s the whole point of yesterday. “Uh, I mean—are you staying with Rozanov? With—your brother? Ilya Rozanov?”

You would have saved it, you fucking imbecile. You had the save. It was a good save. And then you fucked it.

“Yes. I am in hotel with Ilya,” Aleksei says, not unkindly. “Thank you. Good to meet, Shane Hollander and Oliver.”

His dog walks over, rears up on his hind legs—and Jesus, standing like that he’s practically eye to eye with Ilya—and whuffs straight into Ilya’s face, pointedly, like a parent. Ilya says something in Russian. The dog drops back down, gives Shane a small, polite nod and Ollie a much wider, warier one, barks once at the fox, and pads off after Aleksei through the players’ entrance. The door bangs shut.

“Come,” Rozanov says, after a pause that could have lasted ten seconds or ten minutes. Shane is a little removed from the normal passage of time right now. “There is place close. I want show you.”

Shane blinks. “Place? What place?”

“Heroin and hookers.” Rozanov watches his face and grins. “Burgers, Hollander. Food. I am hungry. Come.”

“Uh—” Shane hesitates, then panics. Don’t fuck this up. Do not fuck this up. “Sure. Yeah. But—my dad’s waiting for me in the car. Could you—I should tell him—”

Rozanov raises his eyebrows, but the smirk eases a little. He looks—maybe a little pleased? Underneath all the Bratva thuggery?

“We wait—”

That’s as far as he gets before a red blur shoots past them toward the parking lot, followed by Ollie’s much less elegant, considerably larger body. Rozanov watches them go.

“We not wait,” he amends, amused. “We go save your father from curious fox.”

From around the corner comes a deep, hollow thunk—the exact sound you’d expect when a large animal doesn’t slow down in time and plants himself into the side of a parked car.

Shane’s life is so embarrassing.

Dad’s rental is a silver Impala with Ontario plates, idling at the edge of the lot with a fresh, wolf-shaped dent in the rear passenger door. Ollie is sitting next to it with snow on his face, looking like he would very much like the ground to open up and swallow him. Vasilisa is up on the hood, peering through the windshield into the passenger footwell, where Maggie peers back with mild interest.

And there, of course, between the car and the arena doors, is a family.

A dad, a mom, two little boys in Team Canada jerseys that come down to their knees, and the dad’s daemon, a big grey goose who has drawn herself up very tall and gone very quiet. The smaller boy points.

“That’s him. That’s the wolf. Dad, it’s the wolf—”

Shane feels his face do the thing. It’s easy by now. It doesn’t even feel like anything.

Ollie, who ten seconds ago was doing forty through a parking lot after a fox—gets up, shakes the snow off his face, and walks over to take his place at Shane’s left knee. Heel. Ears neutral. Tail low and quiet. He sits when Shane stops. He doesn’t look at the goose. In about three seconds flat, he becomes exactly the wolf from the Hockey Canada brochure: calm, steady, well-mannered, a credit to the program. Nothing to worry about here. Good boy.

“Hey, guys,” Shane says, smiling. “You come out for practice?”

They did. Of course they did. He signs two jerseys and a mitten with the Sharpie the dad has, unbelievably, brought along in his coat pocket. Yes, ma’am, it sure is cold. Yes, sir, big game tomorrow. Thanks so much for coming out; it really means a lot. The smaller boy, half hidden behind his mother’s leg, whispers, “Can I pet him?” and his little unsettled daemon, a kitten presently, scrambles up into his hood like it’s on fire.

“Sorry, bud,” Shane says gently. “He’s my daemon. You know.”

“Oh. Sorry—”

“That’s okay.” And Ollie, slowly, carefully, lies down on the frozen asphalt, front paws stretched out, chin on top of them, so that he’s lower than the kid. The kitten peeks out of the hood. Ollie doesn’t move a whisker. After a long moment, the kitten turns into a fat little puppy and wags at him from inside the hood; both boys shriek, the mom laughs, and the goose relaxes a fraction. Only, ever, a fraction.

When they’ve gone, Shane breathes out. He turns around, and Rozanov is leaning against the Impala’s dented door with Vasilisa back on his shoulder, watching him with a strange, narrow look.

“You are different,” Rozanov says.

“What?”

“Before.” He flaps a hand vaguely back toward the arena. “With me, you are—like puppy. Real. Now you are like—” He looks down at Ollie, now sitting on the asphalt, perfectly, painfully correct. “Like police dog.”

Shane’s face goes hot, minus twenty-three or not. “It’s just—people get nervous. If he moves too fast.”

“He moved fast before,” Rozanov points out. “Into car.”

Ollie’s ears go flat.

“Is okay,” Vasilisa says from Rozanov’s shoulder, whapping her human across the nose with her tail. “Car is fine. Is ugly car anyway.”

The driver’s door opens, and Dad climbs out, beaming, and Maggie comes waddling around the front bumper behind him, as dignified as a large brown beaver can possibly look picking her way through slush.

“Well,” Dad says cheerfully, looking at the door. “That’s coming out of your allowance, Ollie.”

“Dad,” Shane says. “This is Ilya Rozanov and Vasilisa. Ilya, this is my dad. And Maggie.”

“Pleasure,” Dad says, shaking Rozanov’s hand. “Hell of a shot you’ve got, son.”

“I know,” says Rozanov.

Dad laughs out loud. Vasilisa leans so far off Rozanov’s shoulder to get a look at Maggie that he has to catch her by the hind end.

“You are—” She breaks off, visibly frustrated. “Bobr—Ilyusha, what is word—”

“A beaver,” Maggie says. “Presumably.”

“Beaver,” Vasilisa breathes, delighted, like she’s just been handed a present. “I never see beaver before. Not ever.”

“Ilya wanted to get burgers,” Shane tells his dad. Then, because he can’t help it, because it’s a reflex at this point: “I just have to let the team know where I am first. Team meeting’s at seven.”

He’s already got his phone out, texting the team manager—with my dad, getting food, back by 6—when he feels Rozanov looking at him again.

“You ask permission,” Rozanov says slowly. “For burger.”

“I tell people where I am,” Shane says. “It’s—that’s just what you do.”

“Hm.” Rozanov considers this. “My coach thinks I am with my brother.”

“Your brother just left.”

“My brother is adult. Your father is adult.” He turns a truly beautiful smile on Dad. “Is the same. Better. Alyosha is barely adult at all.”

Dad, the traitor, says, “Can’t argue with that,” and unlocks the doors.

There isn’t, strictly speaking, room for everybody. Maggie gets the front footwell. Ollie gets the seat behind Dad, all of him folded into the back of a mid-size sedan, knees everywhere—which leaves the middle for Shane, because there is no universe in which Shane lets his daemon sit pressed up against Ilya Rozanov for twenty minutes of Regina potholes. One bad bump and Ollie’s whole flank would be up against him. Shane would have to move to Indonesia. Shane would have to die.

So Shane takes the middle, thigh to thigh with Rozanov, which is its own kind of problem, and tries very hard not to think about it.

Vasilisa solves the rest herself. She goes over the top: up onto the back of the seat, along the parcel shelf behind their heads, light as anything, and drops down onto Ollie from above without so much as a whisker brushing Shane on the way. Then she curls up between Ollie’s shoulder blades like she’s been doing it her whole life.

Ollie stares straight ahead for the entire drive. He doesn’t breathe very much. Shane, with Rozanov’s knee pressed against his and a fox napping on his daemon, isn’t doing much better.

The burger place turns out to be a little diner on Albert Street with cracked vinyl booths, a counter, steamed-up windows, and a waitress whose hen daemon takes one look at Ollie and goes to sit behind the cash register.

Shane says, “Thank you, ma’am,” when she brings the menus, and smiles at her, the good one, and sits up straight in the booth. Ollie lies under the table with his chin on his paws, in the spot where he’ll take up the least room and bother the fewest people. The couple at the next table quietly picks up their coffees and moves over to the window. A few minutes later, the table on the other side empties too. That’s normal. He’s used to it. Ollie’s used to it. It doesn’t mean anything.

Rozanov slouches across from them with one arm stretched along the back of the booth and his feet more or less in Shane’s half of the space under the table, and Vasilisa—

Vasilisa has integrated Ollie into her array of climbing surfaces. She hops off the seat onto his back, then down to the floor, then up into Rozanov’s lap, then over to inspect Maggie, then back onto Ollie, then up again. She doesn’t stay put for more than thirty seconds at a time.

Rozanov brushed the snow and grit out of her fur in the car with a little silver brush from his jacket pocket, and somewhere along the way he took out her earrings and didn’t put the capelet back on. Without all that, she’s a lot less conspicuous than Shane’s used to from photos and clips. She could almost pass for an ordinary, run-of-the-mill red fox daemon.

Almost. Not really.

Shane is staring. He can’t help it. He knows Dad, next to him in the booth with Maggie on the seat beside him, is enormously entertained by all of this, and that Shane will never hear the end of it. It’s just—they’re eating burgers with Ilya Rozanov, in fucking Regina. Yeah, there are empty tables all around them, but Shane can’t make himself care about that at all, because Ilya Rozanov is sitting across from him with Vasilisa in his lap, listening to one of Dad’s stories about the cottage, and how the hell is Shane supposed to handle that?

He’d hoped—Well, okay, he’d hoped he would introduce himself, and that Rozanov and Vasilisa would be hugely impressed by him and Ollie, and that they’d immediately decide they were funny and want to be friends and play hockey together. But that kind of thing never happens. What he’d actually expected was that Rozanov, like most hockey guys, and especially most Russian hockey guys, would feel threatened right away and start trying to prove that he was bigger and stronger and had a bigger dick and was better at everything, so it didn’t matter that Hollander had the wolf. Etcetera, etcetera. The kind of thing that always happens.

“—get to swim a lot?” Vasilisa is asking.

“When we can,” Maggie says. If she’s bothered by the fox being so close, she isn’t showing it. “We have a little cottage out in the Rideau Lakes. Hisashi and I have made a very fine den there.”

“You built dam? On lake? You can do that?”

“I don’t need to dam a lake, actually. If the water’s already still and deep, all the better for me. I dug my den straight into the bank. If anything, the only problem is that Hisashi keeps insisting we can make it big enough for him to fit inside if we try hard enough.”

“Hisashi’s my mom’s daemon,” Shane supplies. Maggie always forgets that not everybody in the world knows Hisashi. “He’s a crane.”

“Very cool,” Vasilisa says, visibly impressed. “Beaver and crane. Water and fish. Can you make traps for fish, for him? Like Ilya makes mouse traps for me?”

“You know,” Maggie says thoughtfully, “I’ve never tried—”

It’s barely half past four when Rozanov’s phone goes off, but the windows have already gone a deep, cold blue, the streetlights flickering on one by one down Albert Street—December in Saskatchewan.

Shane jolts in his seat.

“Oh my God, Dad, we’re late!”

Dad looks at him, completely confused. “Don’t worry, bud, I already texted your mom—”

Well, duh. So did Shane, or she’d already be here, setting them both on fire for making her worry.

“No, I mean—Mr. Rozanov said we shouldn’t stay out after dark, and I didn’t even think—I’m so sorry for keeping you, Ilya, Vasilisa—”

Rozanov is giving him a funny look over the top of his phone.

“No worry,” he says slowly. “Is not late. And Alyosha is big idiot, not Mister anything. Besides, we are in Regina. Not Moscow. Is safe.” He waggles the phone. “He only asks if I have cash for taxi.”

Oh. Good. That’s good. Shane breathes out.

“Don’t even worry about a taxi,” Dad says, already reaching for his wallet. “We’ll drop you off. Same hotel, isn’t it?”

Under the table, Ollie’s tail thumps once against the floor—then goes very still. Across the booth, Rozanov’s mouth does something slow and crooked.

“Yes,” he says. “Same hotel.”

“Wow,” Ollie says, later, once they’ve made it up to his parents’ suite and Shane has gone straight to the second bedroom so he won’t have to listen to Mom and Dad gossiping about him. “Wow.”

“I know,” Shane says. He throws himself on the floor, flops over Ollie, and buries his face in his ruff. “Why are they even playing hockey? They should be in—Hollywood, I don’t know. Being movie stars—”

“They play hockey because they love hockey,” Ollie says.

Which—yeah. Is true. And so is the rest of it.

“Nicer than I expected,” Shane says finally, pathetically.

“So nice,” Ollie moans. “She never even—her teeth are tiny, Shane, but sharp, sharp like little knives, and she never even broke the skin.”

Probably because she’d have had to dig through about four inches of fur first, but Shane takes the point. It’s not like Ollie wouldn’t let her, wouldn’t lie there like a lump and let her part his fur in peace, so she’d have easier access.

“His brother too,” Shane says, because it’s true. “And Trisha.” Which is a funny name for a male dog, but what the fuck does Shane know? Maybe it’s a Russian thing. Maybe they name them for the gender they should have had, or something. Nothing would surprise him at this point. “They look mean, but—”

“He was afraid of me,” Ollie says quietly. “Not angry. Just—worried about his sister.”

Well. Shane can’t really blame him.

“He didn’t know you,” he says instead. “Didn’t know us. And they didn’t say anything—and they could have, when you started chasing after her like a lunatic, oh my God, Ollie—”

“What? She wanted me to—”

Shane gets an arm around his neck. Ollie gets a shoulder under his ribs. It turns into a proper scuffle pretty quickly, which is, of course, when Hisashi pokes his long, red-capped head around the door. Which is a shame, because Shane doesn’t often get the upper hand, but he’s been growing. Any day now he’s going to pin that dumb poodle—

“Boys,” Hisashi says. “Enough. We will get a noise complaint.”

“Sorry, Shishi,” says Shane.

“Sorry, Dad,” says Ollie.

Hisashi’s head withdraws. Shane lies there on the carpet with his face in Ollie’s ruff, listening to Mom laugh in the other room.

“How the fuck are we supposed to play Russia tomorrow?” he says into the fur. “I’m supposed to—hate him.”

Ollie huffs and whaps him with a paw. Fair enough. That kind of immature shit is beneath them. Players on different teams can be friends. Players on different teams are friends all the time. And besides, maybe whoever drafts Rozanov drafts Shane too. Could happen. Doubtful—if Shane goes first, Rozanov goes second, and nobody ever ends up holding both picks. But. Maybe—

“Do you think she’ll do the thing?” Ollie says dreamily. “When Rozanov scores. Do you think she’ll do the scream?”

“God, I fucking hope so—”

The rink is sold out by warm-up. Six thousand people in red and white, and in the third row behind the Russian bench, some guy is holding up a sign that says WOLF > FOX in letters a foot high.

Shane doesn’t look at it. He has a pre-game routine, and the routine doesn’t include dumbshit signs.

It does include the TV in the corner of the dressing room, which nobody ever turns off. The TSN panel is doing Rozanov. Elite release. Mature, two-way game, never in the box. Plays like a pro already. And then the voice shifts, the way it always does, and the screen cuts to a fox on a gold pillow, and somebody says, but you do have to ask some questions about the room.

Fucking assholes. Like any room Ilya Rozanov walks into isn’t fucking blessed by it. These Neanderthals would go to a Queen concert and come home with thoughts about Freddie’s outfit—

Routine, Hollander. Focus on your routine.

In the five minutes before they go out, Shane sits on the floor of the equipment room with his back against the wall and Ollie’s head in his lap, and neither of them says anything. Ollie breathes. Shane breathes. Then Ollie gets up, shakes himself from nose to tail, and walks out to the bench like a soldier.

He takes the end nearest the gate, where he can see the whole sheet. The rest of the Canadian daemons—a lab, two retrievers, a Canada goose, a gull who never shuts up—leave a careful space around him, the way they always do. Down at the far end, in the heated box behind the glass, the goalie’s snapping turtle settles in for sixty minutes of not moving.

Across the ice, Vasilisa is in full kit, lounging on a different, fancier pillow—a darker, more serious gold, somehow—and managing to look like she’s sneering and laughing at everyone in the building at once. When the daemon cam finds her, the Jumbotron puts her twenty feet tall over centre ice and the whole building boos. She yawns at them. The camera stays on her a beat too long, because of course it does.

Shane takes the opening faceoff against Rozanov, wins the draw, and very maturely does not shout his triumph to the heavens.

Rozanov doesn’t showboat, which is the part everybody knows, but somehow nobody ever mentions. He takes the shortest route to the net every time and makes the right pass instead of the pretty one, wasting nothing, not a stride or a touch, like he’s already seen the replay and knows how it ends. It’s ruthless, brilliant hockey, and he plays all of it with a stone face, no laughing, no celebrating, just his head down, proving shift after shift why he’s the best player on the ice. Why he gets to do whatever the fuck he wants with his daemon, and stop between periods to brush her fur with a different little brush, the gold one he saves for games. Because he can also do this.

Six minutes in, he takes a pass at the top of the circle and buries it before the Canadian goalie has finished moving, and then he—turns. Skates back to centre with the same expression he’d use to read a menu, while, behind him, on the Russian bench, Vasilisa stands up on her gold pillow and screams.

It isn’t loud, exactly. It just goes straight through you. The whole rink goes quiet at once. Every dog daemon on both benches flinches. The Canada goose hisses. On the Russian side, a coach’s Caucasian shepherd puts his ears flat and looks at the ceiling like he’s praying for strength.

Ollie doesn’t flinch; Ollie perks up. Shane feels it all the way out at the blue line, through the bond, before he even looks: ears shooting up, something in his chest going bright and fizzy and thrilled. For one long, horrible moment, Shane is sure he’s going to howl. He doesn’t, thank God—but the delighted, open-mouthed grin, which the daemon cam absolutely catches, is already so inappropriate that Shane nearly loses his man coming back.

The pull is worse tonight. It always is in big games. When Shane’s down on the far boards, thirty metres from the bench, it’s a hook behind his breastbone, steady, insistent. He’s been playing through it since he was fifteen. He plays through it now.

He ties it late in the first, off a rebound, an ugly goal that he’ll take every day of the week. The rink comes apart. Ollie stands up on the bench, tail sweeping once, side to side—and sits back down. He’s already made the daemon cam once tonight.

Across the ice, Vasilisa watches the replay on the Jumbotron, head tilted, like she’s grading it.

Halfway through the second, MacAuley lines Rozanov up after the whistle.

It’s late. It’s dirty. It’s exactly the kind of hit MacAuley gets sent out to throw, and his bulldog is up on her hind legs on the bench, barking like it’s a personal triumph. Rozanov goes down hard into the boards. Every dog on the Russian bench is on its feet. The ref’s arm stays down.

Rozanov gets up. Adjusts his helmet. Looks at MacAuley and smiles—a perfectly pleasant smile, the kind you’d give a server—and skates to the bench without a word. Doesn’t touch him, doesn’t chirp, doesn’t so much as bump him on the way past.

Fucking hell, that’s rough. Even Shane, who has a whole team of professionals managing his reputation, would have been allowed to take a swing at that. Would have been expected to. Take a hit like that, you gotta retaliate, even if you don’t want to. But Rozanov—the rules are different for Rozanov.

On the gold pillow, Vasilisa has gone flat and silent, ears pinned back. Rozanov leans down over the boards and says something to her, short, in Russian, and she settles. Slowly. Back onto the pillow, chin on her paws, eyes on MacAuley like a sniper’s scope.

It’s been that way since they started making a name for themselves—since Rozanov started doing press with Vasilisa on his shoulder, letting her answer half the questions, since she got her fucking ears pierced. Once you’ve done all that, you don’t get to hit back. Retaliate when somebody runs you, and the headline won’t be Rozanov takes dumb penalty. It’ll be: It’s the fox. It’ll be questions about the room and a wild canine in a room full of dogs, and, further down the food chain, Clearly unwell, the pair of them. What kind of daemon is that? Is he some kind of rentboy?

So he doesn’t hit back. He takes the hit, smiles, and makes them pay for it on the scoreboard.

Shane knows a little something about being watched for the wrong thing, but he’s known since the first clip he ever saw of them that his version is nothing, nothing at all, compared to theirs. Rozanov and his fox decided to play hockey, and to do it their way. They could have gone anywhere else—film, music, a fucking porn set, any of a dozen worlds where a man like that with a daemon like that would be the hottest act in town. They chose hockey instead. And they’re the best there is.

On the next shift, Rozanov sets up the go-ahead goal with a pass so clean it’s almost rude.

Canada’s third line ties it 2–2 early in the third, off a scramble nobody could describe afterwards, and after that it’s a slog: everybody tired, the pull a constant ache, nobody giving an inch. Then, with 1:14 on the clock, Rozanov gets the puck at the Canadian blue line.

Shane is the one who has to stop him.

He doesn’t. He’d really fucking like to, does his even best, but Rozanov goes around him like he’s a pylon, cuts across the top of the crease, and parks it under the bar on the far side, a shot so precise it looks like a diagram. Then he turns and skates back to centre, and his face doesn’t change at all.

On the gold pillow, Vasilisa screams.

The rink goes dead silent, except for a little knot of Russian fans in the corner going absolutely insane. And in the silence, from the end of the Canadian bench, comes a sound Shane would know anywhere. Thump. Thump. Ollie’s tail, hitting the boards once, twice, before he can stop it.

The Canadian trainer turns and stares at him. Ollie freezes and looks at the ceiling like he’s never seen it before. Shane, head down on the bench, presses his face into his gloves so nobody can see it. He’s just lost to Russia. In Canada. In front of everybody. He should feel sick. He should feel that cold, narrow bite of inadequacy. He doesn’t.

It ends 3–2.

In the handshake line, Rozanov is near the end. His grip is firm and dry and brief, and his face is perfectly neutral for the cameras, and then he leans in, just slightly, as he passes.

“Good game, Hollander,” he says. And then, lower: “Sila says to tell Oliver he must not wag on bench. Very bad for your image.”

Shane laughs.

Out loud. In a handshake line. After losing to Russia, in Regina, in front of six thousand people and TSN. Half his team turns to stare at him. He doesn’t even care.