Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Category:

M/M

Fandoms:

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

Relationship:

Shane Hollander/Ilya Rozanov

Characters:

Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov, Cliff Marlow | Cliff Marleau, Connors (Heated Rivalry), Victor St. Simon, Ryan Carmichael, Minor Characters, Alexei Rozanov | Andrei Rozanov, Grigori Rozanov, Dallas Kent, Troy Barrett

Additional Tags:

Alternate Universe - Creatures & Monsters, Alternate Universe, Hockey Player Ilya Rozanov, Alternate Universe - College/University, Boston College Eagles Men's Hockey Team, Shane Hollander Loves Ilya Rozanov, Ilya Rozanov Loves Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Walks Ilya Rozanov Like A Dog, Shane Hollander is Obsessed With Ilya Rozanov, Demon/Human Relationships, Blood and Violence, Protective Shane Hollander, Shane Hollander Can Fight, Eldritch Horror, College | University Student Ilya Rozanov, Dark Romance, Slow Burn, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Mainly as I figure out what tags are needed for a weird eldritch horror sexy hollanov idk this is my first one please bear with me, Minor Character Death, Lovecraftian, Lovecraftian Monster(s), Lovecraftian Erotica, Lovecraftian Horror Genre, Lovecraftian Themes (Cthulhu Mythos), Lovecraft hates to see me coming, Dark Shane Hollander, Tentacle Sex, Dreams and Nightmares, Sub Top Ilya Rozanov, Soft Dom Shane Hollander, Dom Bottom Shane Hollander, Top/Bottom Versatile | Switch Ilya Rozanov, Top/Bottom Versatile | Switch Shane Hollander, Ilya Rozanov is Trying His Best, Body Horror, Possession, Short Story: The Hounds of Tindalos, Slurs / Homophobia, But those are all bad people and bad things will happen to them

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2026-06-12 Updated: 2026-08-25 Words: 11,540 Chapters: 5/?

Devil in Disguise

Summary

Ilya Rozanov is a 23-year old grad student playing hockey at Boston College, comfortably bisexual, and definitely human. Shane Hollander is none of those things.

Chapter 1: Walking Home in the Dark

Chapter Summary

Ilya meets a stranger late at night.

Chapter Notes

Ilya Rozanov, who moved through life with the confidence of a 6 foot tall white man, never worried about walking home alone at night. He stepped off the bus with the strap of his heavy gear bag hanging from one shoulder, immediately sliding his retro-style headphones on – pushing his dark blond curls back from his forehead – and pressed play on his phone. They were a warm brown leather with silver metal accents, looking every bit like something he’d have plugged into a giant speaker system in the 1960s, but Bluetooth connected. He’d bought them a year ago because they made him feel like a model in that old advertisement where the guy in the chair is getting his world rocked by music so loud it has a physical presence. Or one those 80s roller skaters in California, bopping along to their cassette players in short shorts and tank tops. Someone enveloped by sound, disconnected from the world, but still unmistakably cool.

The city bus that ran direct from campus at this time of night could only let him off fifteen blocks from his apartment, which normally wouldn’t have been a problem, but so late on a Sunday night that it was almost Monday, the streets were eerily empty. The low voice humming in his ears helped, adding depth to his surroundings that made Ilya feel less alone. This song wasn’t on any of his usual playlists though. He checked his phone; Spotify had been running for hours while Ilya studied for next week’s test in his Sports Analytics course, so it’d run out of songs and started recommending new ones without Ilya realizing. This was from a singer called Jonah Kagen. He’d never heard of the guy but the song had a pop rock meets Appalachia kind of vibe, something about being in love with someone he didn’t have, who he needed the way God needs -

Fuck!

Ilya realized as it was happening that his sneaker caught on an uneven piece of the sidewalk. Gravity reached up and pulled, making him stumble, throwing his arms out as he tried to keep his balance. His bag slipped off his shoulder and popped open when it hit the ground, throwing the contents everywhere. Ilya swore under his breath, kneeling to grab the tape rolling away before it could disappear under a car. Thankfully, he was completely alone on the street, in the middle of the night, so no one would witness his mistake. He shook his head and looked around for the next thing he’d dropped.

Something touched his shoulder. “D'yavol!” Ilya shouted as he flinched away from it, losing his balance and ending up on his ass on the cold concrete of the sidewalk. He pushed the headphones down until they hung around his neck, and pressed pause on his phone.

“Sorry, sorry,” a man’s voice said. “Was just trying to help.”

Ilya saw his shoes first: beautiful leather brogues in a dark oxbow red, a color that almost looked like dried blood in this light. They were hand-tooled, with a subtle dot pattern that crossed over the toe cap. Ilya’s version of being a shoe guy was mostly admiring his friend Cliff’s latest sneaker haul, but these shoes reminded him of his grandfather, gone and buried back in Russia. He saw the tailored black slacks that stopped just short of the shoes, went up a man’s legs in a straight line that left them looser around the calf but wrapped tight around thick thighs. A matching suit coat that fit perfectly around the flat waist and strong shoulders of a man built like some of the guys on Ilya’s team. A pressed white shirt and a black tie that looked like silk sat below the man’s neck. He had light brown skin, and, oh his face was beautiful.

He was younger than Ilya expected when his gaze had been traveling up the man’s body. He’d assumed a suit that nice had to belong to one of those mid-forties businessmen who crowded his gym in the mornings. The kind who kept their wedding rings on while they made a point of checking him out in the gym mirrors, as if his well-worn running shoes meant he could be had at a price they could afford. The man in front of him looked to be the same age as Ilya – another student perhaps? Or maybe a recent grad with a good job in the Financial District, coming home to his starter apartment from a wine bar where he’d been celebrating his quarterly results with a bunch of other finance bros. He had a square jaw and perfect pink lips, short black hair, and worst of all, freckles scattered across his cheekbones and sharp nose.

Ilya hated finance bros, guys who thought they could out drink him because they were frat boys, outperform him as an athlete because they played ultimate Frisbee on the weekend, and out think him as numbers guys, despite the fact that Ilya was balancing being captain of the hockey team at Boston College with carrying a 3.9 GPA in his Sports Administration program (which required classes in management, law, and analytics). But as this man squatted easily in front of him, the fabric of his pants stretching even more across those thighs, Ilya suddenly wanted them wrapped around his head.

He reached for Ilya, who noticed the man’s hands were even larger than his own. “Can I help you up?”

Ilya put his hand out before he could stop himself. The man pulled him up in one smooth movement, as if Ilya weren’t almost 200 pounds of muscle. Standing that close to each other, it was clear they were the same height. “Catch your breath for a second,” the guy said before he went back down to gather up the scattered items from Ilya’s bag. A more few rolls of white stick tape, his textbooks, and a handful of pens went in, tucked around Ilya’s skates. Bent over to reach everything, the man’s muscular ass was on full display.

“Sorry, I wasn’t…” Ilya took a breath, willing his heart to stop racing. “Did not mean to call you names. Was surprised.”

“Been a while since someone’s called me a devil,” the man said over his shoulder, grabbing the last handful of papers that were threatening to blow away. He had a slight accent that Ilya couldn’t place. Some other kind of American probably. There were a million accents in this enormous country, so all he was sure of was that this guy didn’t grow up in Boston.

“You speak Russian?” Ilya asked, his eyebrows raised.

“Isn’t it the same word in English?” the man replied. “Close enough, anyway.” He handed over the bag, which Ilya immediately shouldered. Then the guy lifted his other hand. “This is a little dangerous,” he said, holding up on of Ilya’s extra skate blades. The steel blade was missing its plastic guard. Worse, the man was holding it backwards, the sharp u-channel at the bottom of the blade pressed against the pale skin of his palm.

“Hold still!” Ilya said quickly, looking around for the guard. He spotted it a few feet away and kneeled to grab it. “Okay, careful, you’re gonna cut yourself,” he said without getting off his knees as he put one of his hands under the man’s to keep him from moving. He put the plastic guard between his teeth, and gently used his now-free hand to pick up the blade. He cradled the hand in his own, twisting it a little in the low light from the nearby streetlamp, trying to see if there was any damage.

The other man’s skin was soft and warm.

“That’s a good look for you,” the man said softly.

Ilya looked up as he took the guard out of his mouth and carefully placed it on the skate blade. “With my mouth full or holding 12 inches of razor-sharp steel?”

The side of the man’s mouth twitched upward. “I’ll tell you next time,” he said, taking his hand back. “I should walk you home.”

“My neighborhood is safe,” Ilya said, standing back up.

“Don’t you know the devil is out tonight?” the man asked, a teasing lilt in his voice. “And you never know who’s walking around with knives in their bags. Or skate blades, anyway.”

“I’ll be fine,” Ilya said before he could stop himself. Didn’t he want the man to come home with him? He did, right?

The man smiled. “A pretty boy like you shouldn’t be alone,” he said, as if it were settled. As if it didn’t do something to Ilya’s stomach for a man who looked like that to say pretty boy so easily, without a hint of the shame or disgust he usually heard when finance bros found Ilya in a dark corner of a club. He waved a hand in the direction of Ilya’s apartment. “Shall we?”

“How do I know you aren’t the devil?” Ilya asked as they walked.

“The devil, specifically?” the man asked. “Like, the big one?” His shoes made a sharp clicking sound as he walked. “I’m not him.”

“How many devils are there? I thought there was only the one.”

“Oh, no, there’s thousands and thousands,” the man said, as if he were answering an everyday question that made perfect sense. “Abrahamic religions, the big three, have variations on Satan or Lucifer, but almost every tradition has major or minor devils.”

“Him, Satan, that’s the big one,” Ilya said. “Throne in Hell, horns, that guy.”

“You think the Devil has horns?” the man said, smiling. “Lucifer was an angel, originally. Until his God made a choice between him and humans, and he got pissy about it. He’s mostly in administration now.”

Ilya laughed at that, imagining a huge red beast with leather wings and horns like a steer, bent over a desk piled high with paperwork. “I wonder what his degree is in,” he said. “Is there a graduate program for this, or was it on the job training?”

The other man stopped.

Ilya realized a moment later and stopped too, turning around. “What?” he asked.

The man shook his head. “Sorry. I wasn’t expecting you to be funny.”

“Because I am Russian?” Ilya asked, crossing his arms over his chest.

“Because you look like that,” the man said. “It’s not fair for you to be clever, too.” He walked forward again, leaving Ilya to catch up a moment later.

“We didn’t really meet,” Ilya said. “I’m -”

“Stop,” the man interrupted. “Don’t give me your name.”

“Oh, I…” Ilya shut his mouth. What did I think? That we were flirting? Maybe he’s hoping for a one and done, come back to my apartment and never get my number? Which, okay, Ilya had certainly done before. He didn’t know why the idea of it bothered him now.

The man sighed, but didn’t look at Ilya. “I saw your name,” he said quietly. “It was on your homework.”

“But I can’t say it?” Ilya ran a hand through his curls. “You are strange man.”

“You have no idea,” the other guy muttered. Louder, he said, “Your whole name is a gift. Don’t just give it away to strangers in the dark.”

“That’s weird,” Ilya said. “Last name is okay?”

“Yeah, Rozanov,” the man said softly, pronouncing it perfectly. “That’s okay.”

If Ilya had to guess, he sounded a little sad, but if that was true Ilya didn’t know the cause. “And you are?” he asked when it had been long enough to realize the man wasn’t offering.

The man, still a step ahead of Ilya, turned left at the corner and kept going. Ilya followed, moving quicker to catch up so they could walk side by side. “Hollander,” he said after another half a block.

Hollander. Ilya turned it over in his mouth, feeling the shape of the word. Wondered how it would sound in his bedroom with the lights off. A minute later they crossed the street in silence, nearing Ilya’s apartment building. They reached it, both stopping in the space illuminated by the light from the lobby, not speaking but neither of them in a rush to leave.

“So… this is me,” Ilya said. He stood quietly for another moment, wondering if he should extend an invitation or wait for Hollander to ask if he could come up.

“You should take your headphones off when you walk,” Hollander said. “It’s not safe out here at night.”

“Am I safe with you?” Ilya asked quietly.

Hollander smiled then, soft pink lips and too many white teeth. “No,” he said, “but I hope that won’t stop you from inviting me in next time.” He tilted his head slightly, something Ilya would have missed if he wasn’t staring at the man’s face. A small movement, as if he were calculating a decision, or cataloging a sound Ilya couldn’t hear. “Be sure to lock up when you get inside,” he added.

Ilya swallowed. “Uh, sure. Thanks…. You know. You didn’t have to.”

Hollander laughed suddenly, a bright sound, and shook his head. “Goodnight, Rozanov,” he said, turning to walk away.

The sound of his fancy shoes hitting the sidewalk faded before Ilya realized he couldn’t remember the color of the man’s eyes. “Too tired,” he mumbled to himself as he went inside his building, letting the door fall shut behind him.

The thing which had been watching Ilya from the shadows for the last three weeks took note of all of it: the time he arrived home, the man in the suit who walked with him tonight, the heavy gear bag that weighed him down, and the way the building’s door didn’t automatically lock when it drifted to a close.

Chapter End Notes

Inspired by Devil in Disguise by Marino

I'll add tags as the story progresses. It will eventually earn an explicit rating for sex, even though we're not there yet, so I've marked it that way up front. It's going to have graphic violence too, though I promise no main character deaths. It's also gonna be weird. Did you know I used to write Lovecraftian fiction for a living? It's been a while but I'm pretty sure I still remember which tentacles go where...

Chapter 2: Warning Signs

Chapter Summary

For two weeks, the name Hollander doesn't enter his mind. Ilya goes out with his friends to celebrate a win on the ice. Cliff spots someone checking Ilya out, but they don't connect. Connors' date-maybe-girlfriend disappears, then is found wearing someone else's blood.

It had been a good game. The Eagles won 3 to 2, close enough to make it feel like effort, not so close the guys were too tired to go out afterward. Cliff insisted on a crowded bar close to campus where the beer was bad but cheap, with enough women to go around. Vic brought his girlfriend, and Connors brought the girl he’d picked up a few weeks ago, probably hoping to turn it into something more. Cliff brought no one, because Cliff picked up more regularly than even Ilya did, and had no interest in learning anyone’s last name. But he was tall and smiled easily, he listened intensely for the hour it took a girl to feel comfortable going home with a stranger, and there were never the kind of rumors that swirled around later if a guy was pushy, or violent, or simply bad in bed.

The rumors about Ilya were different. He wasn’t just good in bed, he was outstanding. He went home with a woman slightly less often than Cliff did but still frequently enough that if he was out, and he wanted to fuck, he would. If he wasn’t in the mood – which happened rarely but happened, especially when he had a paper due or a test to study for – that was okay too. It didn’t mean there wouldn’t be someone else to fuck tomorrow. The biggest difference between them is that Cliff left women feeling like they’d had a good time with a good guy they might be happy to see around sometime. Ilya left women feeling exhausted and spent, with an amazing story to tell their friends, and a comparison against the future man they’d actually want a relationship with.

The rumors about Ilya with men circulated too. He wasn’t shy about going home with a man once in a while, though he was pickier about it. The idiots who called him faggot his freshman year walked away with black eyes; from Ilya’s fists at first, then Cliff’s, until mid-way through his sophomore year Ilya realized no one said it to his face anymore. The women who pressed themselves against his hip in a bar wanted to feel better than they had before they met him. Men who approached him often wanted to hurt. They wanted to hurt Ilya or they wanted him to hurt them. Men sometimes wanted Ilya to get on his knees while they shamed him for doing the very thing they were begging for. He was over that, now. He had to think more about his choices these days. So yes, he went home with men, it wasn’t a secret, but it didn’t happen nearly as often.

“The place is so dark,” Connors was saying. His date had gone to the bathroom fifteen minutes before, so his head was on a swivel, trying to find her while also trying to look as if he wasn’t worried.

“Fuck corners,” Vic and Carmichael said at the same time, loudly, talking over the background noise of a hundred other students in a small space. An inside joke, about Ilya but not at his expense.

“That happened one time!” Ilya objected. “And he was hot, so…” Ilya added with a shrug and half a smile on his face.

“Speaking of hot,” Cliff said. “Two o’clock. Guy at the bar. He’s been looking at you for a minute.” Cliff was straight, but not too straight to see attraction when it wasn’t pointed in his direction.

Ilya hummed but didn’t turn around. “Tell me about him.”

Cliff took a drink of his beer, eyes pointed the other way entirely, and spoke out of the side of his mouth. “Mid twenties, black hair, Asian I think.” He looked back, not at the bar but at Ilya. Subtle, or as subtle as Cliff ever got. “You want me to go over and get us another round?”

Ilya considered his options. He’d been busy with school the last few weeks. He’d only fucked two women, both nursing students who’d come to one of his games and offered him a threesome afterward. He did them both that night, came back the next night for a repeat with the blond who’d asked him to take her in the ass (which he did, happily) then made him promise not to tell her roommate. The idea that Ilya had to be a secret in any way had soured him on both of them, which was fine because he didn’t want to make a habit of anyone. So he’d focused on his Sports Analytics test, on his game, on the way his hand did a fine job of taking care of any lingering morning thoughts in the shower, and forgot about the nurses between then and now.

Sending Cliff to get a round had evolved over the years into a way he could get more information about a guy he’d potentially go to bed with, without having to put himself all the way out there. But going home with a man meant dealing with all of that. Women were cute and fun with pert asses and delicious skin. They were so much simpler.

Ilya was too warm, in this dark crowded bar, with his best friend offering to scout out a man for Ilya to fuck. He hadn’t been sleeping well, which was a separate problem. He couldn’t remember his recent dreams beyond waking up, gasping, somehow both frightened and completely hard at the same time. It wasn’t affecting his game or his GPA yet but felt like the kind of thing that might be a problem if it kept up. His voicemails were filling up with messages from his useless brother too, messages he hadn’t bothered playing yet but would have to deal with at some point soon, before Alexei showed up at the rink again, or worse, tracked him down outside of a lecture. And there was something itching at the back of his skull when he walked home alone at night lately. He looked, every time, standing under streetlights trying to make out shapes in the dark, but saw nothing. It just itched at him, whatever this was. Probably nothing. Probably just mid-term stress.

Tonight was supposed give Ilya a few hours not to think about any of this. If it wasn't working, maybe simpler wasn’t what he needed right now.

He nodded at Cliff, who clapped him on the shoulder with one of his big hands before he casually strolled toward the bar.

A petite woman slid into the empty space where Cliff had been a moment before. “You’re that hockey guy, right?” she said, putting one hand on Ilya’s forearm. She had glossy pink lips that matched her manicure, and bright blond hair pulled up into a high pony. Ilya licked his upper lip and she smiled.

“Ah yes, hockey guy,” he purred as he leaned closer. “That is me.” 

“I’m Becky,” she said.

“I’m -” He stumbled for a moment, half remembering something he couldn’t quite hold on to. “Rozanov,” he said. “My friends call me Roz.”

“Hi, Roz,” she said, then giggled. Ilya wondered what flavor her lip gloss was. “You want to buy me a drink?” she asked.

“Do I need to?” He grinned at her then, letting his gaze slowly travel down from her eyes to the perky breasts under her tight BC tee, then back up again.

She smacked him playfully on the chest and blushed.

“Beers,” Cliff announced as he set half a dozen already-open bottles down on the table. He leaned over to talk into Ilya’s ear. “Also deets, but maybe you don’t need it now?”

Ilya nudged a beer over to Becky, then turned his head toward his friend. “Yeah?”

“I walk up, put in the order, then look at the guy and he says no thank you.”

Ilya’s eyes narrowed as he almost laughed. “What?”

“Yeah.” Cliff shrugged. “Dude’s looking straight at you, didn’t even shift in my direction, didn’t let me get a word out first, just no thank you before I opened my mouth.”

“He thought you were interested?” Ilya looked over Cliff’s shoulder now, toward the bar, but there were too many other people blocking the view.

“Could’ve been. So I tell him I have this friend, right? Who’s maybe caught his eye? And he says, Rozanov looks busy. Another night.” Cliff shook his head. “Never seen this dude in my life I swear, but he said your name like you’re old friends. Bartender comes back with the beers, I turn back and the guy’s gone. Poof.”

Ilya straightened himself to his full height, openly looking around the bar. “What does that mean, like we’re friends?” he asked, once he was sure he didn’t recognize anyone who fit Cliff’s description.

“He said your name right. You know, with the right accent or whatever. The way you’re always bitching at us to say it.”

Ilya snapped his head around to face Cliff. “He was Russian?” That was a different problem entirely.

Cliff shook his head. “No, that’s the other weird thing. He sounded totally normal, except for saying your name.” He grabbed a beer for himself, taking a long drink.

“Hmm.” Ilya grabbed a beer too. Behind him Becky was talking to Vic’s girl, a sociology major he’d been dating since last year. The idea of her was less interesting now, but the guy from the bar was no longer an option and Becky was here, which was more than nothing. He wondered if her apartment was pink too.

“I don’t think she’s coming back,” Connors said loudly. “Amanda,” he added, because Cliff and Ilya were staring at him, obviously confused. “She went to the bathroom half an hour ago.”

Cliff was starting to say what friends said when your date has ditched you in a bar after you won against Lowell. Ilya stopped listening when blue and red lights flashed in through the bar’s front windows. The murmuring of other people noticing rose around him like a wave. The ones closest to the front pressed against the glass, pointing.

“Some girl got attacked,” a man said to the crowd.

Connors was fast on the ice. He had to be – he was six inches shorter than Ilya and nine inches shorter than Cliff, probably the shortest guy on the team, built like a swimmer instead of a hockey player. He made up for it as one of the quickest wingers Ilya had even been on a line with, effortlessly pivoting around blockers, always ready to pick up an assist the moment Ilya knocked it in his direction. He was halfway to the door before Ilya realized his friend was moving.

Ilya was faster. He got to the exit just behind Connors, then outside before the door shut behind them both.

Two police cars in the street in front of the bar, engines off but lights flashing. A dozen people standing nearby, more spilling out of the bar behind Ilya now. A cop in uniform rolling out yellow crime scene tape, blocking off the space between the bar’s customers and the alley. More cops, and paramedics, moving out of the alley. An ambulance with its doors open, on the other side of it all. A brunette with tears running down her face, sitting on the bumper of the ambulance while a medic pointed a tiny flashlight in her eyes.

“Amanda!” Connors yelled. He shoved past the cop who was his way, pushing toward the ambulance, but was pulled back immediately.

“Connie!” she yelled back, standing up, brushing off the hands trying to force her back down. “That’s my boyfriend!”

The cop who’d grabbed Connors from behind, locking him into a painful-looking hold, released him. He bolted the rest of the way, landing in Amanda’s arms. Ilya raised his own arms as he turned sideways, watching the cop’s face carefully but following his friend.

“What happened, baby?” Connors asked. He’d stepped back just enough to really look at her now, keeping hold on to her hands. “Are you hurt?”

Ilya looked too. The woman, no, Amanda something, Connors’ date, was taller than him. She was thin, with long brown hair, and probably very pretty when she wasn’t crying. She was also covered in blood. It splattered the side of her face and neck. It had dripped down her arm and dried there. Her dress was dark reddish brown on the same side, but light green on the other side.

“It’s not mine,” she was saying. Over and over. It’s not mine. And Connors’ was shushing her while the paramedic woman was trying to get Amanda to sit back down so they could finish the exam, and a man in a boxy grey suit was asking questions about their relationship.

Ilya stood where he was, a few feet back and just outside of everything else that was happening.

It was too much blood. That’s what his brain kept going back to. It was too much blood for a person to survive losing. It wasn’t Amanda’s, but she was wearing it. She had gone to the bathroom inside the bar, and in the time it took for Ilya to send Cliff after a stranger, Connors’ girl had ended up outside covered in someone else’s blood.

Somewhere in the alley was probably the body all of the blood belonged to. There were cops and lights that way, a bustle of activity Ilya was only partly aware of. Curiosity should be pulling him in that direction, plain and simple. He should want to look there, to see for himself what caused all of this. To watch them cover up a dead body. Or, less likely but theoretically possible, see who was patching up a very big man who happened to leak his blood all over a college girl the way a hydrant sprayed cold water when it’s popped open on a street corner for wild summer kids to run through. Normal human curiosity said look in the alley.

Something else said look across the street.

Ilya looked. Away from the alley. Past the police cars. Across the street. He stared at the dark spot between two buildings, letting his eyes adjust. For a moment he thought he saw something, not with his eyes but with his brain, as if his eyes were sure there was nothing to see but his brain remembered already having seen it: a man his height with black hair, black shirt and dark pants. A flash of silver at his waist. Then it was gone.

“What the fuck?” Cliff said, suddenly appearing next to him.

Ilya turned. “The guy,” he said. “At the bar. What was he wearing?”

“You think he did this?”

Maybe, yes, Ilya thought, but he said, “No.”

Cliff pressed his lips together, thinking. “Black silk shirt, not shiny but expensive you know? Buttons. Jeans, the kind that are too dark to be anything but new.”

“Was he wearing a belt?” Ilya knew the answer but needed to be told by someone else, out loud, outside of his brain that was already filling in the pieces.

“Yeah, I think so. Silver buckle. Why?”

Ilya shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “You sure he was Asian?”

“Pretty sure.” Cliff looked at him then, really looked. “You do know him.”

“I don’t,” Ilya said, but the name he thought then, for the first time in two weeks, was Hollander.

Chapter 3: Shadows, Real and Imagined

Chapter Summary

Ilya thinks about the incident outside the bar, leaving him with more questions than answers. Later, he walks home in the dark, not at all certain he's alone. He has a nightmare, and wakes with Hollander's name on his lips.

Chapter Notes

Please note the updated tags.

The thing Ilya kept coming back to about that night was that when the paramedics brought the body out of the alley, they did it twice. A second ambulance had arrived while Amanda was still answering questions and Connors hovered a few inches away; with everything happening at once no one seemed to notice that Ilya was still there. So he half listened to what the girl was saying while also watching the police and medics do their job. The crew from the new ambulance dragged and empty gurney into the alley and ten minutes later, pulled it back out with something heavy on top of it, covered with a pale blue sheet. The body, obviously – the one that used to be a person, that used to hold all of the blood Amanda was wearing that wasn’t her own.

That seemed normal. Ilya had only ever seen a dead body removed once before, back in Russia when he was a kid, but the memories that came to him in pieces when he was dreaming included something like this. A body, under a sheet, taken out of the house. A body that used to be a person.

Where it got weird was when a medic gently moved Amanda out of the way so they could get to the gurney in the ambulance she rested against. All of them – including Connors and Ilya – were moved nearer the police cars in a smooth motion like a hand pushing aside papers on a desk. While the detective in the grey suit asked Amanda even more questions, Connors argued with a beat cop trying to get Vic and Cliff allowed past the barricades. Out of the corner of his eye, Ilya saw the medics from the first ambulance come out of the alley with something on their gurney, covered by another blue sheet.

He knew enough about human anatomy to realize that what they’d recovered wasn’t an entire person.

The first time he asked, his voice was too low for anyone to hear. He coughed, clearing his throat, and tried again. “What happened to the guy?”

This time, the detective heard him. “What guy?”

Ilya pointed at the gurney being loaded onto the ambulance. “Alley guy.”

“Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out here.” The detective was middle-aged, with silver at his temples.

“He got ripped in half,” Ilya said, taking a step forward. “What does that?”

The detective checked his notes. “Mr. Rozanov, right?” When Ilya nodded, the man continued. “What makes you think he was ‘ripped in half’?” The awkward air quotes the man made with his fingers made him look tired. His face too, the way he didn’t put energy into his expressions. If it were the middle of the day Ilya would have assumed the man was merely bored but past midnight, it looked like exhaustion.

He bit down on the sarcasm that came easily when he felt disrespected, answering honestly instead. “Two ambulances,” Ilya said, pointing. “He came out in two pieces.”

The detective grunted something Ilya couldn’t hear, and wrote something in his notebook. He took everyone’s ID cards, sliding them through a machine to pull up their records. Amanda went in the back of an unmarked car to get her cleaned up and to give a fuller statement downtown; Connors followed in his car so he could be there for her, and give her a ride home after. The rest of them were told the crime show standards: call if you think of anything new, don’t leave town, we’ll be in touch.

Ilya was fine the first night. He went home alone, showered until his hot water gave out (which never took long anyway), and went to bed without giving Hollander another thought. Classes went fine today too; two lectures, a lab, a study group over lunch, then several hours writing a paper in the library, where the internet was consistent and he didn’t have to worry that having the heat on all evening would affect his electric bill. There were whispers all day, rumors circulating around campus like migrating butterflies, swirling in the air and occasionally landing nearby. A few people asked if Ilya had really been there at the bar, if he’d seen anything worth talking about.

“Ah, no, wasn’t me,” he said with a smile and a shake of his head, every time. “Sorry.”

Walking home in the dark was the problem. The air felt thicker, or darker, which didn’t even make sense but Ilya didn’t have another way to explain it. He pulled the strap of his backpack higher up on his shoulder, leaving one hand there to keep it in place, as if the shadows between buildings were going to reach out and take it from him. He moved as quickly as he could, from the bus stop, past the little restaurant that was already closed for the night, past the tiny park only partially lit by the nearest streetlight. His headphones were still in his bag; for once it didn’t feel safe to wear them.

Ilya wondered, the whole way home, when he would start to hear footsteps behind him. He wondered, paused in front of his building, looking into the shadows across the street but seeing nothing, if he wanted to hear those footsteps because it meant that the danger sneaking up on him had a physical form he could fight against… or if he wanted to hear footsteps because they might belong to the man who walked him home a few weeks ago.

Was it better or worse that the same man might have been outside the bar where Amanda was attacked?

He didn’t have an answer for that, but the sense that there were unseen eyes in the dark looking back at him made the skin on the back of his neck prickle with goosebumps. Ilya went inside, letting the door fall shut behind him. He took another hot then warm then quickly too-cold shower, then – naked but unashamed – he considered and abandoned the meager contents of his ancient refrigerator. He dressed in a shirt and boxers from the top of the pile of clean laundry he’d dumped onto an empty armchair a few days before.

Sprawled out on top of his blankets, Ilya tried jerking off to help his brain settle. He slid one hand under the waistband of his loose, thin boxers, finding himself. He flipped through a catalog of mental images as he stroked himself into being half-hard for several minutes. It felt wrong though, in a way he couldn't have explained. Wrong pictures in his head. Wrong hand on his skin. He couldn't make it work, couldn't find his orgasm the way he had a thousand times before. He could feel a tingle, distantly, in his hips, but it never built into anything he could use.

"Fuck it," he said to himself as he gave up, too tired to follow through. He rolled over instead, pressing his face deeper into his well-worn pillow, and let sleep take him.

the beast was running now, darting through shadows as it made its way across the city, toward the scent of something it craved

it bent sideways through a series of shadows at odd angles, cutting through the edge of a door that wasn’t quite shut, through the dark corner of a ceiling in an unlit room

running, all six eight three six feet on the ground, the number it needed changing as it ran, limbs existing only to find a foothold across surfaces in more than one dimension

under a parked car, through an empty building, out a broken window

the scent was closer now, not a smell but a knowing, a knowledge, a presence it could taste on its many tongues

it found the building but there were too many, too many lights, too much noise, it couldn’t get closer in its current form

the scent was inside and outside at the same time, pieces of it broken off and spread around, confusing the beast

it jumped into a wet, meaty form, howling as it went, the shape of the body sheering off the beast’s shadow appendages and shattering its teeth against the bone and sinew of its physical being

the scent-marked body in the alley saw the lumbering meat sack moving forward and made a shrill noise, loud, piercing, a sound the beast heard like screaming under water, distorted by the blood and brain and tongue in its newfound skull

it moved the meat forward, stumbling toward the sound and the scent, pushed by the need to devour the very heat of the fear in front of it

something else, suddenly

something old

something reached out with too many limbs taking hold of the meat and bone body, flicking it apart with a splatter of blood and organs, rendering it useless

the beast inside took one look at the old thing, blinded by the vastness of it, then stepped-jerked-fell sideways into another dimension and

Ilya woke up in his own bed with sweat plastering his shirt to his chest and said one word before he was fully aware of where he was: Hollander. His eyes never opened. He was asleep again before the word left his lips, laid back gently against his rumpled sheets. In the morning, with his sweat-soaked shirt still clinging to his body, Ilya would remember the shape of the nightmare but not the details. He wouldn’t remember the name he said in the dark.

But he was sure someone else had been inside his apartment while he slept.

Chapter End Notes

This will eventually (soon?) start alternating POVs between Shane and Ilya, but Shane's POV is spoilery so we need to give the story a minute to percolate before we let Shane fully in the door.

Chapter 4: The Strangest First Date

Chapter Summary

Ilya runs into Hollander. New things are revealed in the daylight. They have breakfast together, before a phone call from his brother interrupts them. Hollander offers his body but Ilya might be losing his mind.

Ilya stumbled out of the cafe and walked directly into someone solid. “Oof,” he grunted, checking his hand to make sure the lid on his to-go coffee was still securely fastened. The last thing he fucking needed right now was to burn his hand or lose any of his precious caffeine.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” a warm voice purred as two hands came up to grab Ilya on both sides of his hips. To stop him for going any further into the man’s chest, probably. Definitely not to hold him still long enough for Ilya’s gaze to wander up the other man’s body, far too slowly to be dismissed as a mistake. He did it anyway.

Ilya looked up into dark eyes. Hollander, his brain said. His lips parted slightly as his breath caught, but nothing came out.

“Oh you don’t look good,” Hollander said. He gently but firmly pulled Ilya forward as he pivoted so they were side by side, guiding him to the nearest empty table. Ilya sat in the chair Hollander pulled out for him. “You stay here,” the other man said, then disappeared back into the cafe.

Ilya told his legs to move. He had to get to class. He couldn’t miss this lecture. He also might have just run into some kind of murderer and also he could not be at a place called Bite and Swallow right now. On a normal day it was the perfect spot to take a lunch date who was about to be an afternoon hookup. It was altogether too much fucking entendre when he was about to be sitting across from a man who looked like Hollander at 9 in the morning. There was a white shirt with buttons that failed to do their job halfway up his chest, and the vague memory of grey slacks pulled tight against those goddamn thighs. Ilya’s legs got the message, twitched slightly, and gave up trying to go anywhere at all.

He popped the lid off his coffee, blew on it a few times, then brought it to his lips. It was still too hot, so Ilya pushed his tongue forward to help limit how much of the liquid made it into his mouth. A new thought slammed into his brain like a car crash -

warm and solid, pushing against his lips, forcing his mouth open, while wet heat traveled up through the bottom of his boxers to wrap around his

- Fuck! What the hell was that? Ilya set the cup down heavily so he could slip one hand under the table to adjust the sudden erection pushing against his zipper. The memory had come out of nowhere, and his heart was racing with it. His face was flushed now, he could feel it. Hollander would think he was some kind of weirdo pervert. He took a deep breath, willing himself to calm down.

By the time the other man returned with a two plates of food, Ilya was almost breathing normally again. His dick has softened half way, enough that his situation might not be painfully obvious to anyone who looked past his waist. He had almost convinced his legs to move again too, but the traitors gave up as soon as Hollander’s shadow drifted over the table. One white plate was slid in front of him, restaurant standard ceramic, loaded with an assortment of breakfast food. Two waffles took up most of the plate, with both sausage and bacon piled on top of the melting butter that dripped down the side of the waffles. There was a soft country-style biscuit next to a sealed packet of strawberry jam, an unpeeled orange, and a little bowl of what looked like cooked oatmeal, under a handful of blueberries.

“What the fuck, Hollander?”

“I didn’t know what you liked,” the dark haired man said. “Eat.”

“I can’t,” Ilya argued. “I don’t have time.”

“You do,” Hollander replied, leaning back in his chair. He folded his arms behind his head, which made his chest look even wider. His biceps strained the fabric of his white shirt. In the sunlight, his tanned skin looked golden. Worse, Ilya realized the blush scattered across Hollander’s cheeks was actually freckles. They stood out against his face, a constellation of dark stars against a flawless sky.

“I have a class,” Ilya said. He was staring and he knew it, but he couldn’t stop. He swallowed hard, his mouth dry.

“You’re going to skip it,” Hollander said, as if it were simple. Already decided. A fact Ilya just hadn’t learned yet.

“I really can’t.”

Hollander let his arms come down to rest on the table as he leaned forward. His pupils were pools of black at the center of pristine white. In this position he was looking up at Ilya through his long black lashes. “You are going to eat because your body needs it, and because I said so. If you are very good and eat until you are no longer hungry, I will let you walk me back to your apartment and fuck me,” Hollander said.

The blood rushed back to Ilya’s cock before he could take the fork Hollander was holding out to him now.

“This is not how I usually do things,” Ilya managed to stutter out before he snatched the fork.

“I am sure that everything we do together will be new,” Hollander said with a small smile.

Ilya speared a piece of sausage and shoved it into his mouth before he could say anything he might regret. Hollander chuckled quietly before picking up his own lox-laden bagel. For a few minutes, they didn’t speak. Ilya managed to get through a third of his plate before curiosity overtook him. “You don’t eat meat?” he asked. “Or just not today?”

Hollander chewed for a moment, then swallowed. Ilya watched the muscles of his neck move in a way that would have been embarrassing if he hadn’t already passed that feeling the moment Hollander said if you are very good and fuck me in the same sentence. “When I eat, it’s mostly vegetables and fish. Shrimp, squid, and octopus too. All the aquatic animals, really. But not mammals or birds.”

“So you are not vegetarian, you are what is it… pescatarian?” Ilya said, snapping his fingers. He grinned. “What did the fishies ever do to you, heh?”

Hollander’s face stilled. “They know what they did,” he said solemnly, before taking another bite of his bagel.

“You are a strange man,” Ilya said. There was a little smear of white cream cheese across Hollander’s top lip. Ilya very much wanted to lick it off.

Hollander’s tongue escaped his mouth for a moment, gliding across his lips until the cheese was gone. No, Ilya had been wrong, seeing that pink tongue was even better than licking Hollander himself. He wanted to see it again. He wanted to see it licking up his cock, before those gorgeous lips stretched around the head of it, before Hollander took him deep, swallowing around his thick -

“Fuck,” Ilya muttered. “What are you doing to me?”

Hollander didn’t seem surprised at the question. He tilted his head to the side, as if he were actually considering his answer. “You want me,” he finally said with a small shrug of his shoulders.

“And that’s enough for you? I want you, so we’re going to fuck? No,” Ilya said, narrowing his eyes. “You are too beautiful to go home with anyone who wants you.”

“I don’t,” Hollander said.

“So, what, it’s just me?”

“Yes.”

The word hung on the air between them.

Ilya’s phone rang, shrill and insistent, the ring tone he only used for his brother. He fumbled for his phone, found the red button, and sent Alexei to his voicemail. A moment later, it rang again. “Fuck, sorry, I must take this,” Ilya said. He squeezed the bridge of his nose, then answered.

“What is it?” he asked in Russian.

“Papa needs money,” Alexei said. His voice was distant through the phone, not all there.

“Papa needs money or your dealer needs money?”

“You useless faggot!” Alexei yelled. Ilya winced; it was loud enough that Hollander could surely hear the tone of it across the table, even if he didn’t understand the words. “You fuck off to school and play games while I spend every day with the old man. I am here taking care of him, not you.”

Ilya turned away so he couldn’t see Hollander’s face. Or so Hollander couldn’t see his. “I don’t have any money, Alexei. I am a student.”

His brother scoffed. “Only use you have is to pay for what he needs. I don’t care how you get it, I need it today.”

The phone left Ilya’s hand. He jerked up to see Hollander’s long fingers pulling the phone away and putting it up to his own ear.

“What will it take to end this conversation?” Hollander asked politely. Ilya heard noise from the phone but couldn’t make out the words. “I am your brother’s accountant,” Hollander said. “Future requests will have to go through me, I’m afraid.” He paused, listening intently. “And how much for you to not call him again for, say, a week?”

“You can’t do that,” Ilya said, holding his hand out for his phone.

Hollander ignored him. “If I give you the address of my office, can you pick it up?” he said to Alexei.

Ilya waved his hand in front of Hollander’s face. “You cannot promise him,” he said, frustrated. “Hollander, I do not have money for him.”

“I see,” Hollander said, “I am aware, yes.” Ilya wasn’t sure, but he thought the man was talking to Alexei still, not him. “That’s because your faggot brother pays me by letting me suck his cock,” Hollander said, in the same slightly bored tone he’d used for the rest of the conversation. “Do you still want the money? Great, write this down.” He gave Alexei an address in the financial district, in one of the new high rises. “I’ll let my assistant know you’re coming. Oh, and if you do anything other than treat my staff with respect, not only will they not give you anything, but I will find you and set you on fire. Got it?”

He widened his eyes slightly, as if he were genuinely surprised. “He hung up.” Hollander handed the phone back.

“Are you crazy?” Ilya asked.

“I don’t think so,” Hollander said. “You should finish eating. I have somewhere else to be before nightfall.”

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

“You had a problem, I solved it,” Hollander replied. “Money is easy for me. I have it, and if it means we can spend the next several hours together, I will give it to your brother. No problem.”

“Just like that?” Ilya asked. “I didn’t ask you to fix this for me, Hollander.”

“It was this or kill him. He was interfering with our day, Rozanov. I didn’t have a chance to ask which you preferred, so I started with the one I thought you’d agree to.” Hollander popped the last bite of his bagel into his mouth. When he was done chewing, he licked his fingers clean. “Did I pick the wrong one?”

“Do not kill him!” Ilya hissed. He looked around to see if anyone else heard them, but none of the other people eating nearby seemed to be paying attention. “Hollander, I cannot tell if you are joking or if you are insane.

“Everyone says I have a terrible sense of humor,” the other man said. He seemed sad about it; his mouth twisted into a frown. “I try, you know. I just don’t quite… grasp it.”

“This is the strangest first date I have ever been on,” Ilya admitted. He shook his head. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

“Do you still want to fuck me?” Hollander asked, his eyes widening hopefully.

“No, I do not think this is a good idea,” Ilya said as he pushed his plate away. “You have amazing body but I think you might eat me afterward, like the lady mantis.”

Hollander’s laughter was loud. He made a face as he laughed, like he was delighted and surprised at the same time. But as it faded, the smile left his lips. “I am not making a good impression, am I?” he asked hesitantly. “I’m sorry. I am impatient, now that I’ve found you.”

The most beautiful man he’d ever seen looked as if Ilya had broken his heart. It was too much – the lack of sleep, the dreams, his brother, and Hollander, who might be an angel or maybe a monster. Ilya wasn’t sure which. Worse, he wasn’t sure if it mattered. He felt drawn to the man but also like letting himself have this was walking into an abyss. The world spun around him, dizzying and nauseating.

“Thank you for breakfast,” he mumbled as he shot to his feet. “I have to go.”

He stumbled away before Hollander could call him back.

Chapter 5: Worse things than fire and falling

Chapter Summary

Alexei Rozanov visits Hollander's office.

Chapter Notes

The office itself was much as anyone would expect it to be, once they saw which building it was in: lux and imposing, too tall, too much white and glass, with a sharp corner too severe to be more useful. If you knew enough, you’d know the corner is an odd number of degrees, crafted as an ode to a fevered mind who swore he saw god in the designs of this tower. It wasn’t information you could do anything with, if you knew. To enter the building, you did need access, which usually meant signing in at the security desk on the main floor, unless you had a key card of your own. Then the cheap rubbery squelch or the more expensive clicking sound your shoes made as you walked across the polished granite floor. You scanned your card, or showed your visitor badge to the guard waiting patiently to admit you. The elevator took you up as far as you were allowed to go – for this visit, to go to this office, you pushed the pale white button with 24 engraved upon it. The elevator would let you out – only you, no one else is coming or going from this floor at the same time you are – onto a long hallway with one set of glass doors at the end. You could look both ways as you exited the elevator, just to be sure, but the whole of the floor would only lead you to one place. Walk toward the door, along the carpet which is an unfortunately pristine cream color. Unfortunate, because the dirt from your shoes left faint smudges behind as you walked, which you know because you can’t stop looking over your shoulder at… nothing. Nothing at all.

The hallway does go to the right, though you go to the left. It ends at a wall, the same warm wood paneling as the rest of the walls here, without anything to suggest a purpose. Maybe there used to be other offices on this floor, but the company rented all of them. Or maybe that space opens up into somewhere you would never leave. There’s no reason to worry about that. It isn’t even a fully formed thought. It’s an… impression. That’s all. You leave it behind as you walk a little faster.

The dirt you contaminate the carpet with would make a better man feel guilty, but you don’t have time for guilt, do you? No, because you have an appointment, or if not exactly that, an expectation. You are expected, here in this glossy monument to capitalism and your brother’s depravity. Somewhere at the end of the hall is an office and in the office is money and the source of the money is too stupid to realize you have the power to blackmail him for every fucking penny he has.

You might think, briefly, as you walk down the hallway no longer caring about the state of your shoes, that you could fleece the man you expect to find for so much that you could move into a place like this. Find an apartment in the sky. Look out at the world and finally feel free.

You are wrong but you don’t know that yet. That’s okay. You’ll learn in a moment.

The small gold letters on the door read Hollander & Associates. You are reminded of law offices, and for five seconds your blood cools in your veins. A lawyer could mean Ilya finally has something on you. A lawyer could mean restraining orders, or police – and fuck, you used to be police, you and the old man, back in the cold country, so you know exactly how awful that could be – so there’s a struggle between the smart part of you that wants to run, and the snarling animal part of you convinced you deserve better. You deserve the money you pull from your brother’s hands in bits and pieces. You deserve the girls you pick up at bars, or used to, before your belly expanded and your soft brown hair started to thin. You deserve the drugs you pick up now instead, deserve the way you finally feel warm, safe in a place where nothing can touch you, not the Colonel’s words and your brother’s success.

The certainty that you deserve this wins out over the part of you smart enough to run, so you push open the door.

─── ∞ ───

The thing that lived in Shane Hollander’s skin stared out the office window, 24 stories above South Station, looking down at the people leaving the 127 year old building. It was nothing. Nothing. Lives so short they were practically worthless, carved from the small, soft curves of time instead of the sharper angles where he entered the world. The difference between a human being walking out of a bus terminal and a spider sliding down a line of silk was so tiny it could barely be observed. A century was a drop in the bucket. The thing living inside Shane Hollander had the power to make it rain.

A century was still longer than most of the people below him would ever see, and yet, that mattered to him more than ever. Mattered more now than it did before he finally met Ilya Rozanov.

If he was very lucky, if he did nothing to extend the man’s existence except steer him away from the obvious accidents and illnesses, he had already missed ¼ of Rozanov’s life. The years between 25 and 50, and worse, the years between 50 and 100, would be gone before he could blink. It was foolish to care at all. They all got old. They aged, they argued, they forgot then remembered and begged again, screaming their desperation into the void. It didn’t matter. The void never looked back. Except once.

A knock and then Celeste was opening the glass door to his office. She was dressed perfectly for her job, which was to act as a distraction for the few people who came to Hollander’s floor. Her dyed red hair was piled in loose bun at the back of her head that suggested a casual messiness a man might think came from just rolling out of bed. It was meant to, because a man thinking of Celeste’s ‘first thing in the morning’ hair almost always thought of what came before it, and usually wondered if he could be a part of Celeste’s night before in the near future. If the hair didn’t do it, there was her pale, delicate features and ice blue eyes, suggesting she was young and possibly impressionable. Certainly easy to impress, which did something exciting in the bellies of men who hadn’t felt impressive for a long time. And if all else failed, their eyes would travel down to her large, firm breasts, her hourglass body with a small waist and wide, flat hips on top of long legs. The dark green dress covered exactly enough to be professional with draping that suggested everything else.

Celeste was made to be fuckable. She was perfect, for the job. Hollander couldn’t care less about her flesh other than that it kept her blood and squishy parts on the inside, but her function as his mouthpiece was exquisitely handled. Delivery men left feeling like the way she took what they offered then dismissed them was the highlight of their day. The few professional appointments Hollander took examined Celeste from her seat at the receptionist’s desk and saw her as a symbol of Hollander’s power; many offered her jobs with their companies, or asked her to dinner. She went, sometimes. Hollander wasn’t possessive. It was rarer these days though. The more time she spent around him, the less she wanted to leave. It always happened that way, with the women who worked for him. Over the years Hollander had more than once Celeste, but she was functional for now which mattered. The cracks were only just beginning to show.

“Mr. Rozanov is here for you,” she said. Her work voice was high and light, practiced of course. When she drank she laughed in a low, husky voice men couldn’t seem to resist. Once, over a business dinner with a man whose family company Hollander was about to acquire, the other man had said, “That girl has a voice like if a schoolteacher did porn,” and Hollander hadn’t understood the sentiment but he understood the intent. He bought the man’s company and sold it again a year later. He didn’t care about the man or the way he’d looked at Hollander’s employee. He barely cared about the money. It was a means to an end.

He did whisper the man’s name in the dark, his full name, once the contract was signed. There was always something listening who’d take care of it. That man was probably dead already, Hollander realized. He thought he might mention it to Celeste, as a gift.

“I’ll catch you on my way out,” this Mr. Rozanov was saying to her now. She smiled sweetly at him, then rolled her eyes when he had turned away. Hollander held his face still to keep from laughing.

He liked these women. That was new, but it warmed him, when he thought about it. It was too bad what always happened to them.

“Are you Hollander?” the other Mr. Rozanov asked.

Hollander didn’t hold out his hand. He pointed at a chair he’d carefully placed so it was parallel with the desk, in the Eastern corner of the room. “Please, have a seat,” he said.

“I don’t have time for games, Hollander,” the man said, but he sat anyway. Hollander had that effect on people. “You said you were my brother’s accountant.”

“I lied a little bit,” Hollander said as he came around the desk. He walked the long way, so he ended up leaning against on the side where the other Rozanov sat, only a little bit between the man and Hollander’s door. Just enough. “I’m not actually an accountant,” he added, in case it wasn’t clear.

“Lawyer, right?” the man said with a huff. He shook his head as if he had figured out a particularly disappointing puzzle. “Fucking Ilya,” he swore in Russian. “Useless cocksucking whore.”

“If you are going to talk about him like that, I’m going to have to escort you out of the building,” Hollander said in English. “But no, I’m not a lawyer either.”

“What are you then? Just maybe rich asshole who fucks my brother for money?”

Hollander took a deep breath he didn’t really need. It usually made people think he was controlling himself, biting back an angry response because he recognized they were bigger or scarier or more important than he was. “I want to help you, Mr. Rozanov. I just have a few rules.”

“You promised money.” The man was sweating a little, a sheen forming across his forehead.

“Yes, I did.” Hollander crossed his arms across his chest. His thick arms were built from hours in the gym. Built for men like this.

This Mr. Rozanov looked at Hollander, at the powerful muscles under the tailored shirt. The other Rozanov, Hollander’s Rozanov, looked at him like this and saw a man he wanted to take to bed. This Rozanov looked at Hollander like an ATM who could possibly cost him a few teeth. Hollander could see the calculations changing inside of his head.

“We have maybe got off on wrong foot. My little brother makes me, how do you say, ahhh crazy?” He grinned as he shook his hands in the air. “Always leaving me to take care of everything, you know? Always taking care of him when he was small, taking care of family, now our father. He is in care, you know? Very expensive. Ilya does nothing to help.”

“Well he is in grad school,” Hollander said. “That takes a lot of time and dedication.”

“Bah, he is lazy,” this Rozanov said, waving his hand in dismissal. “He only signed up for school to play hockey, but he does not even go to MLH! He turned down money we needed for Papa, because it was too hard. He would have failed there.”

“I see,” Hollander said, though that didn’t at all sound like the Rozanov he knew. “Does it help when you call him at all hours demanding money?”

“He is family, he should want to help!” this Rozanov said, raising his voice. He took his own deep breath then, patting at his clothes as if he was straightening them out. “You have family, do you not?”

“Yes,” Hollander said, because it was true enough. Shane Hollander did have family.

The other man’s eyes narrowed a bit, and half a grin jerked up one corner of his mouth. “Do you think they would care very much, if they knew you were sucking my brother’s cock?”

Hollander sighed. “You’re very interested in your brother’s sex life, Mr. Rozanov. Is there something wrong with your own?”

Before the wrong Rozanov could fully jump up from the chair, curses forming on his lips, Hollander was there, standing in front of him, so close he could reach behind the man and touch the office window, if he wanted to.

“He told me not to set you on fire,” Hollander said calmly, as if he were relaying a fact about the weather or the view. “I won’t, because your brother told me not to. You understand, don’t you, that’s the only reason?”

“I can ruin you,” the other man sputtered. “Men like you, you think money buys you safety, but I can tell everyone about you and my brother.”

“The problem with that,” Hollander said softly, “is that I lied.”

“Why would you do that?” He was squirming now, the wrong Rozanov, ever since he realized that Hollander was slowly getting closer, so close they could feel each other’s breaths.

“In Boston it’s illegal to have windows that open more than four inches above a certain height. It’s a falling hazard, you see.” Hollander reached over, found the automatic mechanism that opened this particular window. “Mine are illegal, but like you said, I have money.”

The window started to open, slowly, as the wind rushed in.

“We’re 85 meters from the ground, Mr. Rozanov,” Hollander said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. “Your brother didn’t say I couldn’t drop you.”

“What do you want?” the other man screamed.

The wind screamed back, swallowing up sound as it forced its way into the office. The window was all of the way open, eight feet wide, illegal and impossible to ignore.

“I want you to stop calling your brother,” Hollander said into the worse Rozanov’s ear.

The man nodded furiously. “Okay, okay, anything!” he screamed. He tried to force his way past Hollander the way the wind had, but Hollander had a hold of the man’s shirt now.

“Don’t you even want to see the view?” Hollander asked. “It’s very nice, for Boston.”

“Fuck you, you crazy bastard! Close the goddamn window!”

Hollander tapped the button again. “All right,” he said as the window closed, quicker than it had opened. He’d paid good money for the hydraulics involved. “Are you ready to sign?” he asked as he let go of the other man’s shirt ran one hand through his own hair, fixing it easily.

“Sign what?” the other man panted. “I don’t… what?”

Hollander strode over to the desk. The contract was simple enough, one page, single sided. He’d had it weighted down under a heavy-bottomed brass banker’s lamp. “You agree not to contact your brother again for any reason, and to respond politely when he contacts you. You will contact my office if you have any information you need to pass on to him. In exchange, I will cover the costs of your father’s care home, and give you a weekly allowance. Do you have direct deposit?” he asked as he picked up a pen. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted cash because you didn’t have access to a bank, but now that I see you, I suspect your dealer doesn’t take Venmo.”

“Fuck you.”

“Sorry, I’m taken,” Hollander said. “You have another minute to think about this but then I need to get to my next meeting.”

“What do you get out of this?”

Hollander held out the pen. “That’s none of your business.”

The man brushed his hair out of his eyes, ran his hands down his clothes. It didn’t make him look any less rumpled, but he’d come into the office that way. Still, Hollander appreciated the effort. “What happens if I break your rules, then? You tell Ilya on me?”

“There are worse things than fire and falling, Mr. Rozanov.” Hollander smiled, the wide one with too many teeth.

The man stood, grabbed the pen from Hollander’s hand, then bent over to read the document. “I still get cash today?”

“That’s right.” Hollander opened a desk drawer, pulling out a regular white mailing envelope, stuffed with American dollars. “All you have to do is sign. Ah,” he added, when he saw this Rozanov’s eyes flit between the envelope and the contract, “full name please. It isn’t a contract without it.”

Alexei Grigoryevich Rozanov signed the contract, snatched the envelope from Hollander’s fingers, and stomped out of the office.

Chapter End Notes

Have you guys seen this? Dominique Den Daas created this fan art for Devil in Disguise! I love it so much <3 <3