Chapter Text
The knife was still vibrating in the mahogany when Shane let himself smile.
The man on the other end of the blade was screaming, or trying to, the sound caught somewhere between a howl and a sob as blood pooled around his pinned hand and dripped onto the floor in thick, lazy drops. His associates had gone very still, the way when they realize they've miscalculated badly and there's no easy way to walk it back. The conference room smelled like expensive cologne and iron now, and Shane tilted his head, studying his work with the casual appreciation of someone examining a painting they weren't sure they liked.
"You know," Shane said, and his voice was light, "I came here in good faith. Sat down at your table, drank your very mediocre tequila." He tapped the handle of the knife with one finger, and the man screamed again. "And this is how you repay me? By reaching for a gun under the table like I wouldn't notice?"
The man—his name was Reyes, one of the cartel's mid-level operators who had apparently decided today was a good day to die—tried to speak, but all that came out was a wet gargle. Shane waited, patient, still smiling.
"I'm going to pull this out now," Shane said. "And you're going to sit there and think about your choices. Next time—" He wrapped his fingers around the handle. "I won't be so nice. It won't be your hand." He pull the blade free in one clean motion, and Reyes collapsed forward onto the table, cradling his ruined palm against his chest.
Shane wiped the knife on the tablecloth, a smear of red against white linen, and slid it back into the sheath at his hip. He looked around the room, making eye contact with each man in turn, letting them see exactly how little their lives meant to him in this moment. "I expect full cooperation on the next shipment. No delays, no excuses, no more stupidity." He smiled again, brighter this time. "Gentlemen."
He turned and walked toward the door. Behind him, Ilya fell into step without a word, a large and silent shadow that had not moved a single muscle during the entire exchange. He hadn't needed to. He knew that Shane could handle himself. It was one of the first things they'd understood about each other.
Two years earlier, Shane had stood in this same room and watched Ilya Rozanov walk through the door for the first time.
The Bratva had sent him as a gift, which was a polite way of saying they were offering up their best sniper for a three-year contract to seal a fragile truce between organizations that didn't trust each other. Shane had heard about Ilya before he saw him—the best in the business, a ghost with a rifle, someone who could pick a target off a balcony at a thousand meters and be gone before the body hit the ground. The rumors painted him as a machine, something cold and precise and barely human.
The man who walked in was better than the rumors. He was big in a way that made Shane's security look like they needed to hit the gym—broad shoulders, hands that could probably crush a skull without much effort, a jaw that looked carved from stone. But it was his eyes that caught Shane's attention. Pale blue, almost gray, and completely unreadable. He moved like someone who knew exactly how much space his body occupied and exactly how lethal every inch of it was. Beside him walked a woman with red hair pulled back in beautiful curls, her face arranged in an expression of professional boredom that Shane recognized from his own mirror.
"Mr. Hollander." Ilya's voice was deeper than Shane expected, the Russian accent wrapping around the syllables like smoke. "I am Ilya Rozanov. This is Svetlana Pretova."
Shane leaned back in his chair and studied them both. The woman was clearly more than just a companion; she stood with the particular stillness of someone who had killed before and would again without hesitation. Interesting, that the Bratva had sent two instead of one.
"I was told to expect a sniper," Shane said. "The best, they said."
"I am the best." No arrogance in it. Just a statement of fact.
"And her?"
Svetlana spoke before Ilya could. Her English was cleaner, her tone clipped and businesslike. "Where he goes, I go. That is the condition of his service. You get us both or you get neither."
Shane felt his eyebrows rise. It wasn't often someone walked into his territory and made demands. He should have been annoyed—part of him was—but there was something else, too, something that felt almost like respect. He looked at Ilya, who hadn't flinched, hadn't looked away, hadn't done any of the nervous things people usually did when they were standing in front of the man most dangerous of Vancouver.
"You're fine with this?" Shane asked. "Her speaking for you?"
"She speaks for herself," Ilya said. "But she is not wrong. We are a package."
Shane tapped one finger against the arm of his chair, considering. He could refuse. He could send them back to Russia and tell the Bratva to try again with someone less complicated. But he'd read the files Rose had pulled together, and the files on Ilya Rozanov were impressive enough that Shane had actually read them twice. Sixty-three confirmed kills. Zero failed missions. A reputation that made hardened criminals cross themselves when his name was mentioned.
And then there was the other thing Shane noticed but didn't let himself dwell on. The man was beautiful. Not in the way that Shane usually went for, all cheekbones and waifish models who looked good on his arm at galas. Ilya was beautiful like a thunderstorm, like something that you couldn't help but watch. Shane filed that observation away in the part of his brain marked not relevant and made his decision.
"Fine," he said. "You're both hired. Rose will handle your paperwork and show you where you'll be staying." He stood, and even though Ilya had a good four inches on him, Shane had spent years learning how to make people feel small. He looked up at the sniper and smiled, all teeth. "Don't make me regret it."
Ilya held his gaze. "I won't."
And the thing was, he didn't. Not once in two years.
The memory faded as the car pulled away from the curb, the city lights of Vancouver sliding past the tinted windows in streaks of gold and neon. Shane sat in the back seat with his head tipped against the leather, the adrenaline from the meeting slowly draining out of him and leaving behind that familiar hollow tiredness. Beside him, Ilya was a wall of warmth and stillness, his presence so constant now that Shane had trouble remembering what it felt like to ride alone.
The driver glanced in the mirror. "I'll drop Mr. Hollander at the penthouse first, then take Mr. Rozanov to his apartment."
Shane's eyes opened. He turned his head to look at Ilya, confusion pulling at his brow. "What's he talking about?"
Ilya didn't meet his eyes. "I have an apartment. I should sleep there."
"You have an apartment," Shane repeated, like the words didn't make sense strung together in that order. "Since when?"
"Since always. It came with the contract."
Shane stared at him. In two years, Ilya had slept at that apartment maybe a handful of times, always with some excuse about needing to check on something or pick up mail. The rest of the time he was in the guest room of Shane's penthouse, close enough that Shane could hear him moving around at night, could pad into the kitchen in the morning and find him already there with coffee brewing. The guest room had stopped being the guest room somewhere along the way. It was just Ilya's room now.
"I don't want you to go," Shane said, and he didn't bother to make it sound like anything other than what it was. He was too tired for pretense. "I want you at the penthouse. With me."
"Shane—"
"You always stay at the penthouse." Shane shifted in his seat, turning his body toward Ilya, and let his voice go softer, the way he only ever did with him. "Come on. I'll be all alone in that big empty place. Who's going to make sure I eat dinner?"
"You are perfectly capable of feeding yourself."
"I am absolutely not and you know it." Shane tipped his head, letting it rest against Ilya's shoulder, the fabric of his jacket cool against Shane's cheek. "Stay. Please. I sleep better when you're there."
There was a pause. Shane felt the rise and fall of Ilya's breath, the way his body held still for a moment longer than necessary before he exhaled.
"You are spoiled," Ilya said, but his voice had lost its resistance.
"Your fault." Shane closed his eyes, settling more firmly against Ilya's shoulder. "You're the one who keeps saying yes to me."
The car kept moving through the night, and Shane didn't lift his head again until they reached the penthouse. The elevator ride up was silent in a comfortable way, Shane leaned against the back wall of the elevator, watching the numbers climb, and Ilya stood beside him with his hands in his pockets, looking like he could stay on his feet for another twelve hours without complaint.
The doors opened directly into the penthouse, and Shane stepped inside and immediately started moving through a routine Ilya had watched him perform a hundred times. Shoes off first, placed exactly side by side on the rack by the door. His jacket came next, hung on the wooden hanger he always used, the third one from the left. The knife sheath came off his hip and went onto the small table by the entrance, positioned at the same angle every time. Shane did all of this without appearing to think about it, his hands moving through the motions while his attention was already somewhere else, and Ilya followed him inside and closed the door behind them.
"I'm starving," Shane announced, turning around to face Ilya with an expression that was about sixty percent genuine hunger and forty percent theatrics. "Like, actually dying."
Ilya gave him a look. "You ate this morning."
"That was this morning. That was practically a different lifetime." Shane tugged at the collar of his shirt, grimacing at the dried blood that had splattered there—not his own, but still, blood was blood, and it was starting to stiffen the fabric in a way that made his skin crawl. "Ilya, look at me. I need the pasta."
"What pasta?"
"The pasta, you know the one with the cheese and the bacon, the one you made last month when I had that terrible day. I thought about it for like a week afterward. I've been thinking about it all day." Shane took a step closer, making the expression that usually got him what he wanted—eyes a little wider, mouth soft. It worked on almost every single time with Ilya.
"Cooking is not in my job description," Ilya said.
"Okay, but what if I help? What if we make it together? I'll be your sous chef. Your assistant. Your very attractive kitchen helper."
Ilya actually laughed at that, a low sound that came from somewhere deep in his chest. "I have no plans to die of food poisoning tonight."
"That was one time, Ilya. And the fire was very small. The fire department said it was basically nothing." Shane was grinning now, the tiredness from the meeting temporarily pushed aside. "Come on. Please. I'll do whatever you tell me to do."
Ilya shook his head, but he was already moving toward the kitchen. "Go take a shower. You have blood on your shirt."
Shane looked down at himself and made a face, that particular scrunch of displeasure that Ilya had come to recognize over the years. Shane didn't like mess. He didn't like things out of place. When they'd first started working together, Ilya had assumed it was just the way of someone who'd grown up with money and power and expected the world to be clean for him, but it wasn't that. It was something deeper, something wired into the way Shane moved through the world. Everything had a place. Everything had a system. Ilya had learned that without ever being told.
"I hate blood," Shane muttered, already pulling the shirt over his head. "I hate the way it feels when it dries. It's disgusting."
"So, go shower."
"I'm going." Shane balled up the ruined shirt and dropped it into the laundry bin by the bathroom door and paused with his hand on the doorframe. "You'll start the pasta?"
"Go."
Shane went, and Ilya turned to the kitchen and began pulling ingredients from the refrigerator and the cabinets. This wasn't in his job description, it was true, but his job description had blurred so completely in the past two years that he wasn't sure where the official duties ended and everything else began. He was Shane's bodyguard, he was also, apparently, his personal chef, his Russian tutor, his late-night conversation partner, and the only person Shane allowed to see him when he was too tired or too drunk or too something to keep the Wolf of Vancouver mask in place.
By the time the water was boiling and the bacon was sizzling in the pan, the bathroom door opened and a cloud of steam drifted into the hallway. Ilya heard the soft pad of bare feet on the floor, and then a pair of arms wrapped around his waist from behind.
"That smells so good," Shane said, his voice warm against Ilya's back. "I love your cooking. I would literally commit crimes for your cooking."
"You already commit crimes."
"More crimes, then. Extra crimes. Whatever it takes." Shane squeezed once and then let go, and Ilya felt the loss of contact like the sun going behind a cloud. He kept his hands moving in the pan, kept his breathing steady, didn't let himself lean back into the warmth that was no longer there.
"You used my soap," Ilya said. He'd caught the scent immediately, that particular combination of cedar and something else, something that smelled different on Shane's skin than it did on his own. Sweeter, maybe. Or maybe that was just Shane.
"Mine ran out." Shane had moved to the other side of the kitchen island and was hoisting himself up onto the counter, settling onto the marble with his bare legs dangling. "Yours smells better anyway. It's not fair. Why does your soap smell better than mine? You should tell me where you get it."
"I get it from the drugstore. Like a normal person."
"Then you have better taste in drugstore soap." Shane was wearing one of Ilya's shirts, Ilya noticed. It was too big for him, Shane was leaner than Ilya, narrower in the shoulders, shorter by a solid few inches and the collar had slipped to expose the jut of one collarbone. The hem fell to his thighs, and beneath it he was wearing a pair of black lace underwear that Ilya could see when Shane shifted his weight on the counter. He looked away. He always looked away. That wasn't for him to notice.
"Your boyfriend won't like this," before Ilya couldn't help himself.
Shane's expression flickered, something passing across his face that was gone before Ilya could catch. "Daniel's not coming over tonight. He has some work thing." Shane shrugged, a little too casually. "Besides, Daniel doesn't get to have opinions about what I wear in my own house."
"Come here," Shane said, leaning forward on the counter. "Let me try the sauce. I need to make sure it's up to standard."
"You need to make sure I put enough cheese in it."
"That too. Come on." Shane opened his mouth, expectant, and Ilya had the brief, unhinged thought that this was what his life had become: standing in a penthouse kitchen at eleven o'clock at night, feeding a mouthful of pasta to the most dangerous man in Vancouver, who happened to be wearing his shirt and sitting on the counter like a cat who had found the warmest spot in the house and decided to stay there forever.
Ilya lifted the spoon from the pan, blew on it carefully, and held it to Shane's lips. Shane closed his eyes as he tasted it, and the sound he made—a little hum of satisfaction—was entirely too distracting.
"Oh my god," Shane said. "That's the one. That's exactly it. I'm never letting you leave."
Ilya pulled the spoon back and turned to the stove, his face warm. "You don't pay me enough."
"I'd pay you in pasta. You'd be fine." Shane settled back on the counter, crossing his ankles and watching Ilya move around the kitchen with an expression that was almost fond. "I'm serious, now you could go to your apartment if you wanted."
The idea of his apartmenr, made Ilya's chest tight in a strange way.
"The pasta isn't finished," he said.
"Right. Obviously you have to stay until the pasta's done." Shane was smiling, a real one, not the kind he used in meetings or with people he needed to intimidate. "And then after the pasta, I have that thing in the morning, the call with the Tokyo office, and you should be here for that. And after that—"
"I'll stay."
Shane closed his mouth, his smile softening into something smaller and victorious. "Okay," he said. "Good."
Ilya turned back to the stove and didn't let himself think about the way Shane said good, like it actually mattered to him whether Ilya was there or not. He stirred the pasta and let the familiar motions of cooking settle his thoughts into something manageable.
Behind him, Shane hummed something tuneless under his breath, and Ilya let that sound fill the kitchen and didn't let himself want anything more than what was already in front of him.
Shane always got what he wanted from Ilya. This was a fact as unchangeable as the tides, as predictable as the sun coming up in the morning, and Ilya had stopped being surprised by it somewhere around the six-month mark. He'd stopped being annoyed by it around the one-year. Now, somewhere deep into year two, he'd settled into a kind of resigned acceptance. Shane wanted Ilya to cook for him, so Ilya cooked. Shane wanted Ilya to stay at the penthouse instead of going to his own apartment, so Ilya stayed. Shane wanted to watch a movie even though his eyes were already drooping and his sentences had started getting shorter and his head kept doing that thing where it would tilt toward his shoulder before he caught himself and straightened up again, so Ilya found himself on the couch with a bowl of popcorn neither of them was eating and a movie neither of them would finish.
Ilya picked something from the streaming queue without really looking at the title, something with explosions and car chases that Shane had mentioned wanting to see a few weeks ago. It didn't matter what it was. Shane made it through the opening credits and about seven minutes of the first action sequence before his body gave up the fight. His head found Ilya's shoulder, a familiar weight that Ilya had learned to brace for without thinking. His breathing slowed, and the tension that usually lived in his jaw and his shoulders melted away until he looked younger than he was, less like the head of a criminal empire and more like a man who'd been tired for a very long time and had finally found somewhere safe enough to rest.
Ilya let the movie play for another ten minutes, just to be sure. Shane didn't move. He was completely gone, his mouth slightly open, one hand curled loosely against Ilya's thigh. The television flickered blue and gold across his sleeping face, and Ilya let himself look for longer than he usually allowed. There was no one awake to see it. No one to raise an eyebrow or make a pointed comment. Just Ilya and the quiet hum of the penthouse and Shane breathing soft and steady against his shoulder.
He could have woken him. He probably should have. Shane was particular about his routines, and sleeping on the couch was not part of the system. But Shane also didn't sleep well most nights, Ilya had heard him pacing at three in the morning enough times to know that, so when he actually went down and stayed down, it felt almost criminal to disturb it.
Ilya eased himself off the couch with the practiced care of someone who'd done this before. He slid one arm under Shane's knees and the other behind his back and lifted, and Shane didn't wake up, just turned his face into Ilya's chest and mumbled something that might have been a word and might have been just a sound. He wasn't heavy. Ilya had carried grown men out of burning buildings, had dragged wounded men through hostile territory while bullets cracked the air around them, and Shane weighed considerably less than any of them. Carrying him to bed was just another thing that had somehow become part of Ilya's job, or maybe part of this weird relationship they had.
The bedroom was dark, the curtains still open to the city lights below. Ilya laid Shane down on the bed with as much gentleness as his hands knew how to give, which was more than most people would have guessed from looking at him. Shane sprawled onto his back and immediately turned onto his side, curling toward the empty half of the mattress like his body was looking for something that wasn't there. Ilya pulled the blanket up over his shoulders and stood there for a moment, watching the slow rise and fall of his breathing, the way his fingers twitched once and then stilled.
The room smelled like cedar soap. Shane's hair was a mess against the pillow, still wet at the ends from his shower, and he was wearing Ilya's shirt to bed without apparently having considered changing into something of his own. Ilya didn't let himself think about that. He'd gotten very good at not thinking about things that didn't belong in his head.
He turned and walked out of the room, pulling the door mostly closed behind him but not all the way, Shane hated waking up to a fully closed door, something about feeling trapped, he'd mentioned it once and Ilya had never forgotten. The guest room was on the other side of the penthouse, far enough away that Ilya could have pretended he wasn't sleeping twenty seconds from Shane's door, but close enough that he'd hear if anything went wrong. He'd hear if Shane called for him.
He pulled off his shirt and hung it in the closet because Shane's tidiness had rubbed off on him over the years, or maybe he'd just learned that Shane noticed things like that, noticed when the world around him was orderly and when it wasn't. He lay down on the bed that had stopped feeling like a guest bed a long time ago and stared at the ceiling, the glow of the city painting faint rectangles of light across the walls.
Shane had gotten what he wanted. Ilya was still here, in the penthouse, in the room that had become his, and not in the apartment that sat empty and cold on the other side of the city. One more night. One more day of this thing that Ilya didn't have a name for but also didn't know how to live without.
The phone rang while Ilya was still staring at the ceiling, and he already knew who it was before he picked up. There were only two people who called him at this hour, and one of them was asleep twenty seconds down the hallway. He fumbled for the phone on the nightstand and brought it to his ear without bothering to check the screen.
"You're not at your apartment." Svetlana's voice was the way it always got when she was gearing up to deliver a lecture he didn't want to hear. She was speaking Russian, and Ilya answered her in the same language, the familiar syllables filling his mouth like muscle memory.
"No," he said. "I'm not."
A pause. He could picture her standing in the middle of his empty living room, her phone pressed to her ear, her free hand probably already pinching the bridge of her nose the way it did when she was counting to ten in her head. "Ilya. You promised."
"I know what I promised."
"Do you? Because I came all the way across town to talk to you, and you're not here. You're at the penthouse. Again." She said penthouse the way someone else might say crime scene, or disaster zone. "You've been there every night for two weeks, you spent maybe four nights at your own place in the entire month. The lease on this apartment is a waste of money, you know that? You're never here."
Ilya sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, his feet flat on the floor, his free hand rubbing at the back of his neck. "It's late, Sveta."
She was one of the deadliest people Ilya had ever met, capable of killing a man with her bare hands and not losing a minute of sleep over it, but when it came to him she had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. "You promised, Ilyusha. You said you would start pulling back. You said you would create some distance, make it easier when the contract ends."
Ilya didn't answer right away. He couldn't, because she was right. He had promised. He'd stood in this very room and told her that he understood the situation, that he knew his father wasn't going to let him extend the contract or stay in Canada once the three years were up. His father had plans for him. Plans that involved a Bratva princess from a well-connected family and a wedding that would solidify alliances and push his father's position even higher in the organization. Ilya had known this since he was old enough to understand what it meant to be a son in a world where sons were currency.
"You think I don't know that?" Ilya's voice came out rougher than he intended. "You think I haven't been thinking about it every single day for two years?"
"Then why aren't you doing something about it?"
"What would you have me do, Sveta?" He stood up and walked to the window, his reflection a dark shape against the city lights. "Tell me. What's the plan? I say no to my father and he sends someone to drag me back. I run, and he takes it out on you. I stay, and I start a war between the Bratva and the Yakuza because I couldn't keep my feelings in check. There is no good option here. There is no way out."
Svetlana was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was gentler, the way she used to talk to him when they were kids and he'd woken up from nightmares about his mother. "You're in love with him."
It wasn't a question. She'd known for a long time, probably before he'd admitted it to himself. Ilya rested his forehead against the cool glass of the window and closed his eyes.
"Completely," he said, and the word felt too small for what he actually meant. "Irrevocably. Like an idiot."
"Oh, Ilya."
"I didn't plan this. I didn't want this. I came here to do a job and go home, and instead I—" He stopped, swallowed, started again. "He smiles at me and I forget why I'm supposed to be keeping my distance. He falls asleep on my shoulder and I can't move. He wears my clothes and I can't breathe. What am I supposed to do with that?"
Svetlana sighed, a long exhale that crackled through the phone speaker. "You're supposed to protect yourself. That's what you're supposed to do. Because when this contract ends, and your father comes calling, it's going to break your heart. And I can't fix that. I can kill a lot of people, Ilya, but I can't fix a broken heart."
"I know."
"Do you? Because you keep going back there, and every time you do, you're just making it harder for yourself when the day comes."
Ilya turned away from the window and sat back down on the edge of the bed. The penthouse was silent around him. Somewhere down the hall, Shane was asleep in a bed smelling and wrapped in a shirt that belonged to Ilya, and the thought of not being here for that, for the sleepy complaints and the way Shane's whole face changed when he smiled felt like a small death.
"I can't say no to him," Ilya said quietly. "I've tried. I can't."
"Then you're in trouble."
"I've been in trouble since the day I walked through his door."
Another pause. Then Svetlana made a sound that was almost a laugh, humorless and tired. "You're hopeless. I don't know why I bother."
"Because you love me."
"Unfortunately." She was quiet for a moment, and then her voice turned serious again. "We'll figure something out. There's still time. Maybe your father will drop dead of a heart attack."
"Sveta."
"I'm not wishing for it. I'm just saying, it would be convenient." She sighed again. "Go to sleep, Ilyusha. We'll talk tomorrow. Try not to do anything stupider than you've already done."
"I make no promises."
"I know you don't. That's the problem."
The line went dead, and Ilya sat in the darkness of his borrowed room, listening to the silence of the penthouse and thinking about a year from now, about Moscow, about a future that had been decided for him before he was old enough to understand what he was losing. He thought about Shane's head on his shoulder. He thought about the way Shane ask him to stay, like Ilya staying meant something real. He thought about the fact that he would have to leave eventually, and the thought sat in his chest like a stone.