Chapter Text
Ilya was having a good night.
A very good night.
The Boston Bears had absolutely destroyed Montreal on home ice, and after a victory like that, there was no chance anyone was going straight home. The entire team had gone out to celebrate, moving from one bar to another until the night blurred into laughter, loud music, and far too many drinks. It was the kind of night where he could completely forget the crushing weight of expectations, forget the pressure, and just let loose.
It was the kind of night where he was supposed to have fun.
And then he saw her.
She was walking out of a nightclub with a small group of friends, heading toward another bar down the street like everyone else in Boston seemed to be doing that night. She immediately stood out from the crowd, mostly because she looked like she did not belong in the booze-soaked chaos surrounding her. She was around his age, with long, straight black hair that fell softly down her back. She had warm brown eyes, a shy little smile, and the most adorable freckles scattered across her face.
She was beautiful.
But not in the way Ilya usually went for. Normally, he gravitated toward girls who matched the chaotic, loud energy of the night. The confident ones who wanted to dance, drink, and have fun without asking too many questions. Those girls were easy; they didn't expect anything from him, and he didn't have to give anything of himself in return.
But this girl was completely different.
When he spotted her inside the next bar, she was sitting safely away from the worst of the chaos, nursing a ginger ale while watching everyone around her with an amused but slightly overwhelmed expression. She looked just as out of place as he felt beneath his cocky exterior.
So, naturally, he approached her.
At first, Ilya assumed she would be like most people who recognized him in this city. She would know he was a hockey player, maybe know the basics, maybe ask some superficial question about the Bears, and then the conversation would move somewhere predictable. Except she completely surprised him.
She knew hockey. Not just the surface-level stuff, either. She knew the players, the deep-cut strategies, and the ancient original-six rivalries. She truly understood the game.
And somehow, before he even realized what was happening, they were talking. Then talking more. Then talking even more. Hours passed without him noticing the clock ticking away. It had been a long, long time since he had enjoyed a conversation like that with someone who wasn't Svetlana—someone who actually wanted to discuss the sport itself, not just his fame, his paycheck, or his bad-boy reputation.
By the time the bar started becoming suffocatingly loud and crowded, Ilya found himself entirely unwilling to let the conversation end. So, acting on pure impulse, he invited her back to his penthouse.
And that was exactly when he started panicking.
Because this did not feel like a standard hookup. That was the problem. He had invited her over because he genuinely wanted to keep talking to her. He wanted to hear more of her thoughts, because spending more time with a stranger felt infinitely better than going home to an empty apartment after a night of celebration.
And that was dangerous. Ilya knew how these things worked. People left. People always left, and he didn't like the pain that came after getting attached.
So, as his key turned in the lock and he opened the door to his dark, expansive penthouse, he decided he needed to fix this before it became something it shouldn't. He would turn on the classic charm and remind himself that this was just another anonymous night. He would get her into his bed, get her out of his system, and everything would go back to normal.
Except nothing about Jane seems to be normal.
He had barely finished showing her into the living room when she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks.
"Oh my God."
Ilya turned around, startled by the sudden shift in her voice. "What?"
Jane was staring intently at one of the few photographs displayed on the wall. Ilya's own eyes widened as a cold splash of adrenaline washed over him, because he knew exactly which one she was looking at. It was an old, fragile picture of him and his mama. He was maybe eight years old, standing proudly beside Irina Rozanova with the biggest, toothiest smile on his face, completely unaware of how much that single moment would mean to him years later.
He opened his mouth to offer a quick, deflecting explanation, but Jane spoke first.
"Oh my God," she repeated, turning toward him with her breath caught in her throat. "You are the son of Irina Volkova?"
Ilya blinked, his carefully constructed playboy facade shattering instantly. "...What?"
"The golden wolf."
He stared at her, entirely lost. "The golden what?" For a second, he genuinely wondered if his English had suddenly stopped working altogether.
Jane looked at him like he was the strange one in the room. "Irina Volkova, the Russian ballerina?"
Recognition slowly crossed his face, replacing the confusion with a deep, stunning shock. "My mama? A ballerina?"
"Yes! She never told you about it?!" Jane's eyes widened with pure, unfiltered excitement. "She never went professional after the academy, but she used to dance ballet with my mom back in Saint Petersburg!"
And for the first time that night, the notoriously loud, smooth-talking Ilya Rozanov was left completely speechless. He had expected a lot of things when he brought Jane home to his penthouse.
This was absolutely not one of them.
Jane seemed completely oblivious to just how out of his depth Ilya suddenly felt. Instead of noticing his stunned, frozen silence, she lit up with excitement, her face practically glowing under the soft living room lights.
"Oh! Wait!"
She hurriedly pulled out her phone from her coat pocket, her thumbs flying across the glass screen as she began to scroll rapidly through what looked like years' worth of digital photos.
"I know I have it somewhere..." she murmured, biting her lip. Another quick swipe of her thumb. Another. Then, her face brightened in a burst of pure triumph. "Aha!"
She turned the glowing phone toward him.
Ilya crossed the distance between them in a single, urgent stride. He barely realized what he was doing before he had all but snatched the phone right out of her hands, his grip tight, his heart hammering against his ribs.
Because there she was.
His mama.
In the picture, she looked barely older than Jane was right now. Her blonde hair was tied back tightly in a dancer's bun, and she was laughing deeply, genuinely, at whoever had been standing behind the camera.
Beside her stood another young woman. She looked so remarkably like Jane that there was absolutely no mistaking who she was. She possessed the exact same warm brown eyes and the very same gentle smile, only her face was smooth, lacking Jane's distinct, adorable scattering of freckles.
The two young girls had their arms thrown carelessly over each other's shoulders, grinning widely as though they hadn't a single worry in the entire world.
Ilya could only stare at the screen, as his breathing turned shallow.
He had seen photographs of his mother before, of course. He treasured every single grainy image he owned, keeping them tucked away like sacred relics. But he had never... he had never seen her smile like this. Not the tense, practiced smile she gave to strangers. Not the gentle, heartbreakingly tired smile she had always worn when he was growing up, the one she used when she was trying to convince her little boy that everything would be alright.
This smile was entirely carefree and unburdened.
It was the radiant smile of a teenager whose biggest concern in life was simply dancing better than everyone else in the studio the next morning. It was the smile of someone who still fully believed, with all her heart, that life would be kind to her.
"I..." Jane began, her voice soft as she kept smiling, completely unaware of the sudden emotional storm brewing violently inside him. "My mom was actually born in Kyoto."
The unexpected detail finally pulled Ilya's hyper-focused attention away from the photograph. He blinked, looking up. "Kyoto?"
Jane nodded, her straight black hair shifting over her shoulder. "Yeah. But there really weren't ballet academies in Japan that could compare to the Russian ones back then. At least, not for what she wanted to achieve. She earned a prestigious scholarship and moved all the way to Saint Petersburg for her high school years just to train there." Jane let out a fond laugh. "That's where she met your mom."
Ilya looked right back down at the picture, his thumb lightly brushing the edge of the phone. "They trained together?"
"Mhm." Jane leaned over slightly beside him, her shoulder brushing his arm as she pointed toward the screen. "My mom always said your mother was her biggest rival."
A tiny, unbidden smile finally found its way onto Ilya's lips. "My mama having a rival, I cannot believe that. She was always too gentle and kind for rivarly."
"Oh, they were both ridiculously, fiercely competitive," Jane shared, laughing warmly. "My mom usually got the lead roles, though." She paused for a moment, her expression softening into something incredibly tender. "But whenever she told me those old stories, she'd always say the same exact thing."
Ilya looked up, his chest tightening. "What?"
"She'd say, 'I might have danced the lead, but Irina was the one I couldn't stop watching.'"
He blinked, a lump forming in his throat.
Jane's eyes sparkled as she recounted the memory. "She always said your mom danced with so much raw passion. That whenever she stepped onto a stage, it was completely impossible to look anywhere else. I lost count of the times I heard her say that Irina lit up the entire theater."
The words struck him harder than any brutal, bone-crushing body check ever had on the ice.
Jane continued talking, entirely unaware that every sweet sentence leaving her lips was carefully, meticulously stitching back together the pieces of a woman Ilya had thought were lost to the past forever.
"When I was little, she'd show me old recordings from those years," Jane smiled, her gaze distant and fond. "I absolutely loved watching them." A breathless laugh escaped her. "And honestly? I agreed with her." She looked up, meeting his eyes with complete, unwavering sincerity. "Your mom was just... fun."
Ilya's vision suddenly blurred, the edges of the room turning hazy.
Fun.
His mama had been fun.
Not weak. Not pitiful. Not utterly broken by the world. Those were the heavy, tragic words everyone back in Russia seemed to use when they remembered her. The exhausted and fragile woman abandoned by life. The one the neighbors whispered about with suffocating pity.
But that wasn't the vibrant woman sitting in front of him on this tiny phone screen. Nor was she the brilliant woman Jane's mother had carried in her memories for decades. They remembered the girl who laughed until her sides ached. The dancer who loved the stage with a burning ferocity and who danced because she loved the music. The rival who made every single performance brighter simply by entering the stage.
And suddenly, without warning, Ilya was eight years old again. He was standing in their cramped, warm kitchen, watching his mama twirl effortlessly around the linoleum floor while a pot of soup simmered on the stove. He could hear her laughing as she grabbed his small hands, pulling him into clumsy, stumbling little waltzes that she playfully insisted were professional ballet.
Fun. That was exactly who she had been.
A sharp, ragged sob caught painfully in his throat, threatening to break out. He looked away from the photograph and focused entirely on Jane, who was looking back at him with nothing but pure affection and warmth as she spoke about his mother.
Someone else in this massive, lonely world remembered her that way. Someone else had known and loved the exact same Irina he had loved. For reasons he couldn't even begin to explain it meant the entire world to him.
Jane remained blissfully unaware of the storm raging violently inside him. Or perhaps, Ilya thought bitterly as he forced his features into a rigid mask, he had simply become a much better actor than he ever realized.
When she gently reached out to take her phone back from his hands, his first, desperate instinct was to pull away and hold onto it. He wanted the photograph of the smiling, radiant version of his mama. He wanted irrefutable proof that she had once been so carefree, so completely unburdened by the weight of the world.
Instead, Jane beamed, her face splitting into a bright, excited grin.
"I have to tell my mom," she laughed, her thumbs already tapping rapidly on her contacts list. "She is never going to believe this."
The video call rang twice before someone finally answered on the other end. Because Jane held the phone angled tightly toward herself, Ilya could only hear the voice drifting through the speaker.
"Jane?" a warm, slightly sleepy female voice asked. "Are you alright, sweetheart? Why are you calling so late? And how are you settling into Boston?"
"I'm fine, Mom," Jane said quickly, her voice practically vibrating with barely contained excitement. "But you're never going to believe who I just met."
Without another word, she turned the phone around, aiming the camera directly at him.
For a single, tense heartbeat, Ilya braced himself. He expected the usual routine. Oh, gosh, you are Ilya Rozanov! The Boston Bear’s captain! It is an honor to meet you!
Instead, the woman on the screen gasped so loudly that both Ilya and Jane jumped.
"No way..." The woman’s eyes instantly filled with tears, her hand flying to her mouth. "You're... you're Irina's son?"
Ilya blinked, completely caught off guard. "...Yes?"
"My goodness." The woman covered her face for a second, laughing through her pure, unadulterated disbelief. "You met my daughter in Boston? What a small, beautiful world." Then, she leaned closer to the camera, her tear-filled eyes scanning his face with a look of profound recognition. "Oh, Kami-sama... you even have her moles."
Without thinking, Ilya's fingers rose slowly to brush some of the moles on his face. It was a trait his mama had shared. In all his years, through all the media profiles and hockey interviews, no one had ever pointed it out before. No one had ever looked close enough to see her.
Jane looked between them in triumphant confusion before smiling widely. “Isn’t this wicked?”
"I can't believe this," her mother whispered, shaking her head. Then, she suddenly looked over her shoulder, her voice rising as she called out into her house. "David! David, come here right now! You are never going to believe who Jane met in Boston!"
A muffled, deep voice answered from somewhere deeper in the home. "What is it?"
"It's Irina's son!"
Heavy, hurried footsteps immediately sounded down the hallway on the other end.
And somehow... somehow, the next thing Ilya knew, he was standing beside Jane in his own expansive kitchen while she started preparing a late-night dinner as though this were the most natural thing in the entire world.
He found himself standing at the island, quietly chopping vegetables while the phone rested securely against a ceramic fruit bowl, balanced perfectly so everyone could see each other. The conversation never once stopped.
Yuna—because she insisted, with absolute warmth, that he call her Yuna—talked and laughed as memory after memory poured out of her like a dam breaking. She told him all about Saint Petersburg. About arriving from Kyoto as a terrified, homesick teenager who could barely speak a single word of Russian. About meeting Irina on the very first day at the ballet academy.
"She absolutely terrified me," Yuna admitted, laughing fondly at the memory. "She was just that good."
Jane laughed, tossing a handful of noodles into a boiling pot. "So, you finally admit she was better than you?"
"Oh, absolutely not," Yuna scoffed dramatically, waving a dismissive hand at the camera. "She simply had the terrible, infuriating habit of making everyone else look bad whenever she danced."
Ilya smiled despite himself, the tight knot in his chest loosening just a fraction as Yuna continued telling her stories. She spoke of how Irina would sneak pastries into the dark dormitory after brutal rehearsals. How she would convince half the academy to dance in the forbidden corridors after curfew. How she would laugh so hard at the simplest things that she would entirely forget what the conversation had been about.
"She was sunlight," Yuna said softly, her eyes turning deeply tender. "Even when we were completely exhausted, when our feet were bleeding and we wanted to quit, she would somehow convince us to smile."
Ilya listened in absolute silence, the knife stalling against the cutting board.
Then, Yuna's bright smile faltered ever so slightly on the screen. "After graduation..." She sighed, a touch of sadness slipping into her tone. "She disappeared. I always wondered what happened to her. We all did. I tried writing to her old address for a while, but eventually... life simply carried us in entirely different directions."
She smiled again, though this one held a heavy note of melancholy. "I joined the Montreal Ballet Company. I met David, got married, and then Jane came along." She looked fondly toward her daughter on the screen. "So, I suppose life simply... happened."
Ilya lowered his eyes, focusing intensely on the vegetables he was cutting.
He knew exactly what had happened. Irina hadn't simply disappeared into thin air. She had married his father.
The bright, laughing, independent girl Yuna remembered so vividly had become the quiet, faded woman Ilya had grown up with. The woman whose shoulders always seemed tired, bent under the weight of an invisible sorrow. The woman who smiled only because she desperately wanted her little boy to worry less, not because she herself possessed an ounce of happiness.
His father had taken someone who had once been pure, radiant sunlight... and little by little, day by day, he had systematically extinguished that light.
For most of his life, Ilya had feared his father. He had resented him for his cruelty. He had wanted nothing more than to run as far away from him as his legs could carry him. But hatred... hatred had always felt like too strong of a word.
Until now.
Until he had finally seen, through the eyes of a long-lost friend, exactly who his mama had been before Grigori Rozanov entered her life and broke her spirit. For the very first time in his entire life... Ilya truly, deeply hated his father.
The following morning, Ilya woke with a stiff, throbbing neck and a soft blanket tucked neatly over his broad shoulders.
He blinked blearily at the sight for a long, disoriented moment, staring up at the high ceiling of his penthouse as he tried to piece together exactly how he had ended up sleeping on his own sofa instead of his massive, empty bed.
Fragments of the previous night slowly came rushing back to him in vivid, striking colors: the raucous victory over Montreal, the bar, the shy half-Japanese girl with the dark hair and freckles, the photograph of his mama, Yuna's delighted gasp through the small phone screen, and stories that had stretched well past midnight over a dinner that had somehow turned into hours of shared laughter.
At some point, sheer emotional and physical exhaustion had won the battle, and apparently, he had simply passed out right where he sat. He pushed himself upright with a low groan, rubbing the stubborn sleep from his eyes as he looked around the expansive, modern room.
"Jane?" he called out instinctively, his voice rough and gravelly.
Nothing. There was no answer. The penthouse was dead silent.
Part of him genuinely wondered whether he had imagined the entire evening in one of his typical, liquor-fueled stupors. It all felt far too impossible, far too much like a desperate fairytale his own subconscious would invent after one drink too many. A girl who remembered his mama not as the shattered, hollow woman everyone in Russia seemed to recall, but as someone vibrant. Someone joyful who lit up a theater stage simply because she loved the music and ballet.
It felt entirely too good to be true.
Even Svetlana, who had absolutely adored his mama, always remembered her through a heavy lens of exhaustion and enduring suffering. Svetlana loved Irina because she had been Ilya's mama and because she possessed a rare, gentle kindness, but the image that always remained in her mind was of a woman systematically worn down by the cruelty of life.
Jane had known a completely different Irina. Not the woman crushed beneath the suffocating shadow of Grigori Rozanov. Not the frightened, defensive mother desperately trying to shield her young son from a monster. She had known the young, ambitious ballerina whose brilliant smile easily reached her eyes, whose raw passion had completely captivated audiences, and whose joy had been so fiercely infectious that another dancer still remembered it fondly decades later.
For one single evening, Ilya had almost been able to meet that version of his mama. It had honestly felt like she was alive again. His chest tightened with a sharp ache.
Then, something caught his eye. The blanket.
He frowned, looking down at the fabric. He was almost certain it hadn't been lying on the sofa the night before, and even if it had, there was absolutely no chance that a drunken, emotionally drained Ilya would have possessed the presence of mind to neatly cover himself before passing out.
His gaze drifted from the blanket to the low coffee table. A neatly arranged, carefully covered breakfast waited for him right beside a precisely folded note. His heart skipped a heavy beat, as he reached out, picked up the paper, and unfolded it with slightly trembling fingers.
Sorry! I had to leave early because of work. Thank you for last night—it was really nice talking with you.
—Jane
P.S. Here's my number in case you'd like to call me sometime.
A phone number was written neatly beneath the message in the same tidy, elegant handwriting.
Ilya stared at the note for a long, quiet moment before a breathless laugh escaped his lips. That... that was surprisingly bold for the cute, incredibly shy girl he had met at the bar last night. Then again, maybe she wasn't quite as shy as he had first assumed. Or maybe she had simply been nervous around the loud, overwhelming atmosphere of a crowded city nightlife.
Either way, he carefully folded the paper back up, slipped it safely into the deepest slot of his wallet, and sat down to eat the breakfast she had left behind for him.
He told himself he wasn't going to call her. He had enough complications, pressure, and dark history in his life already. He certainly wasn't about to start chasing after a complete stranger simply because her mother had known his.
A full week passed.
Every single morning, Ilya found himself opening his wallet, his eyes tracing the folded note tucked securely inside. Every single evening, he told himself he should just throw it in the trash and move on.
But he never did.
Finally, after seven long days of losing the exact same exhausting argument with himself, he unlocked his phone and typed the digits into his contacts. He stared at the empty, white message box for nearly five minutes, his large fingers hovering uselessly above the glass screen.
What the hell is wrong with me?
He had never once struggled to text anyone in his entire life. Normally, it was entirely effortless—a quick joke, followed by a smooth, flirtatious line, and a late-night invitation that both parties fully understood would end the exact same way. Instead, his thumbs completely betrayed him, typing out a message that felt agonizingly stiff.
Ilya: Hi, I'm Ilya.
He hit send. "...For fuck's sake," he muttered aloud, burying his face in one hand as the text bubble turned blue.
Where had all his usual charm and game gone? He felt like an awkward, bumbling teenager who had never spoken to a woman before in his life. Groaning at his own stupidity, he hurriedly typed out another message before his brain could overthink it any further.
Ilya: Want to meet?
He tossed the phone onto the cushions beside him as though the device had personally offended him. Not even thirty seconds later, the phone buzzed, vibrating against the fabric.
Ilya snatched it back so violently he nearly dropped it onto the floor.
Jane: Hi, Ilya. I'm doing well. I hope you've had a good week. 😊 I'm working right now, but I'll be finished in about three hours. If you'd like, you can pick me up at this address, and we could have dinner afterward.
He read the text message twice. Then a third time.
It was so... perfectly normal. Polite and warm, with complete sentences, proper punctuation, and she had even included a little smiley face. He found himself smiling right back at the glowing screen before he even realized what he was doing.
God, she was absolutely adorable.
His fingers moved with far more confidence this time, the familiar swagger of his personality finally locking back into place.
Ilya: Sounds good. I know a great Russian restaurant.
He hit send, leaned his head back against the blue cushions, and laughed quietly to himself. He, Ilya Rozanov—the infamous, smooth-talking athlete who could charm absolute strangers in packed, chaotic nightclubs without thinking twice—had spent an entire week psyching himself up just to send two painfully awkward text messages to a shy girl he had met exactly once.
And somehow... he couldn't wait to see her again.
Ilya grabbed his car keys from the kitchen counter and paused for a brief moment before heading for the door.
Please don't let this be a mistake.
He wasn't entirely sure who he was praying to. God had never seemed particularly interested in answering his prayers, but he sent the thought into the universe anyway before slipping out of his penthouse.