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The first time Shane notices it as something unusual, he’s out to dinner with Ilya and his mom at a Turkish spot in downtown Ottawa, and she’s pitching a new sponsorship deal.
“They’re willing to pay big bucks for it,” she says, glasses on and tipped low on her nose so she can read the details off her phone. “No exact figures yet, but I’d say it’d be comparable to your Speedo deal, which is higher than we’d expect, given that it’s only been a year since you got married. Obviously, the fact that Roots is a Canadian brand makes it of limited international value, but it matches your homegrown image—“
“I don’t want any new sponsorships right now,” Shane interrupts, because if he doesn’t it seems like she’ll keep going for another five minutes, and the waitress is already eyeing them from the corner like she’s trying to remember where she knows them from.
Yuna frowns, setting down her phone and lifting her glasses up to prop on her head. It’s her serious face, her I’m going to give you a lecture about all the reasons I think you’re wrong face. Normally, Shane caves in to it. Today, something about it, that expression, sparks something in his chest. Why did he ask for final say on these things if he never fights her? If he lets her decide everything?
“You know, there are a lot of kids that look up to you—“
It’s the refrain of Shane’s life. Everything circles back to this: a lot of kids looking up to you. That’s why you need to spend your summers doing ad campaigns. That’s why you need to let a social media manager handle your every interaction online. That’s why we need to sit here after family dinner with flash cards rehearsing the different ways you’ll answer reporters’ questions after you face Boston next week, and, oh, when we’re done, let’s do some French vocabulary flashcards, too, because it’s important to the Francophone fans that you’re thinking about them. There are lots of Asian Francophones in Quebec, Shane. Almost 13% of primary schoolers are of Asian descent, compared to less than 4% of hockey players. Isn’t that pathetic?
As if Shane doesn’t know that it’s pathetic. As if Shane doesn’t know what he fought through to get here.
Abruptly, Shane is furious.
“Mom,” Shane snaps. “I don’t want to talk about being a role model anymore.”
Yuna blinks at him. This is a deviation from the normal rules of their conversation; Shane doesn’t blame her for being surprised. He does love rules. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, I spent over a decade being terrified of coming out because I was worried it would upset some random Korean kid in Saskatchewan,” Shane says, and is rewarded by the way his mother flinches. “I don’t want to think about that kid anymore. I don’t want to think about any of the kids. I just want to play hockey.”
Yuna stares at him for a moment longer before she turns her gaze to Ilya. There’s a clear bafflement there, a clear plea for help. Shane digs his nails into his thigh and tells himself that if Ilya sides with his mother on this, Shane is going to walk out of this restaurant. He is going to walk out of this restaurant and leave Ilya to find his own way home.
Instead, Ilya reaches out with one hand and settles it on top of Shane’s on his leg. He doesn’t say anything.
Shane’s shoulders relax just the slightest bit.
Yuna must realize she’s not getting any help from Ilya, because she fumbles out a, “Well, I just—I didn’t know you felt that way, honey.”
“Yeah, well, you never asked,” Shane says. Ilya’s silent support has alleviated some of the rage in his chest, and Shane is aware, even if he doesn’t feel it now, he’ll be guilty about this later. “Look, I don’t want to get into a big fight about this, okay? I’d just—prefer if we don’t talk about things in those terms, that’s all. And I don’t want to do the Roots sponsorship.”
Their food shows up around then, and it provides enough of a distraction that the conversation is dropped. Shane is strangely, ravenously hungry, and he polishes off his salmon kebab plate so easily that he actually orders another one. Ilya looks thrilled, because he stresses about Shane’s diet, now, the same way that Shane stresses about Ilya’s sleeping habits. When Ilya’s own second round arrives, Shane steals a cube of beef off his plate and pops it in his mouth, just for the way it makes Ilya smile.
“Do you want to talk about that?” Ilya asks later, Shane backing out of their parking space.
“Not really,” Shane says. So Ilya drops it, and Shane pushes it to the back of his mind.
—
But the anger flares up again a few weeks later, when Shane spends his one day off driving up to Montreal to see the Pikes, and when Hayden answers the door—frowning, Amber in one arm—he immediately says, “Did you bring the asshole with you?”
Shane has a terrible, childish urge to shove him.
He doesn’t, because of Amber, but when Hayden automatically moves to pass her to Shane—she’s snoozing, her mouth slack with sleep, but starting to mumble and rouse—Shane waves him off. He brushes past Hayden into the house, automatically putting his shoes on the rack and his coat on the hook by the door. The familiar movements calm him down a little bit. “Ilya has some work to do in Ottawa,” he says. “Where are the rest of the kids?”
“Arthur’s upstairs reading, and the girls are in the backyard killing each other with their field hockey sticks,” Hayden says. “What work is so important Rozanov can’t come see the kids?”
And just like that, Shane is grinding his teeth together again. “Foundation work,” he says tersely.
Hayden either doesn’t catch his tone or doesn’t care. “He couldn’t do that during the week?”
“For fuck’s sake, can you just shut the fuck up about my husband for once in your life?” Shane demands. Hayden’s eyes have gone very, very wide, and Amber is definitely waking up now, and Shane doesn’t care. This foreign anger is a raging fire in his chest that can’t be sated by reason.
“You are always such a fucking dick about Ilya,” Shane says. “Would it kill you to not assume the worst for once? Literally one fucking time, that’s all I fucking ask.”
Hayden blinks at him for several long moments, clearly waiting for him to say more. Finally, he says, “Swear jar. Like, five times.”
“Six,” someone says from behind Shane, and he whirls to find Jackie leaning against the doorframe, her arms crossed and eyebrows raised.
“Shit,” Shane says. “I mean—shoot. I’m—“
Jackie shakes her head, waving a hand in the air, before he can finish. “No, it’s okay. I figure this was kind of overdue. And Amber was sleeping, at least.”
“Mama!” Amber coos from Hayden’s arms, making grabby hands at her mother.
“Okay, mostly sleeping,” Jackie amends, crossing the room to take Amber.
Shane swallows hard. “I’m sorry,” he says, only half meaning it. “I didn’t mean to—lose it, like that.”
“It’s okay,” Hayden says. “I was just—I was just teasing, man.”
Shane nods, jerkily. “I know,” he says, instead of what he wants to say, which is that he doesn’t really care that it’s a joke. The joke gets stale. The joke got stale years ago. Shane is sick of the fucking joke.
But now doesn’t really seem like the time.
They get through the rest of day without any more conflict—sandwiches thrown together for lunch with Bluey on in the background; kickball in the backyard with the kids, who haven’t noticed anything is wrong; a long conversation with Jackie over cups of iced green tea about J.J.’s new girlfriend, who’s fucking up the carefully balanced social hierarchy of the Metro WAGs chat, and tricks about making whole grains not taste disgusting.
It’s not until Shane’s in his car, window rolled down to give final goodbyes to the girls—they’re doing a very acrobatic dance in the front yard as a final send-off—when Hayden finally says, “Are you feeling okay, man?”
Shane raises an eyebrow at him, a wordless question. Arthur is making a similar face at Jade and Ruby, standing on the front porch and watching their dance with his arms crossed over his chest.
“You just seem a little—tense,” Hayden says. “It’s not like you.”
And there it is again, that bubbling anger. Shane takes a deep breath, willing the feeling to dissipate. “I’m fine,” he says. “I gotta get going. I’ll text you next time I can come see the kids, okay?”
Hayden looks like he wants to argue, but instead, he steps back from the car. “Okay,” he says, patting the hood of Shane’s SUV with one hand. “Let us know if you need anything, yeah? I’ll see you at the game next week.”
Shane nods, tersely, and waits until he’s sure Hayden is clear of the car to back it up. He forces a smile for the kids, waves at them as he drives away. As soon as he’s out of sight, the smile falls away. He clenches the steering wheel too-hard the whole way home.
—
The thing is, of course Shane has felt anger before. He’s in his thirties, he’s a professional hockey player, if he didn’t get pissed off sometimes on the ice then he never would have survived past pee-wee level play.
But that anger has always been a tool: measured, controlled, doled out at deliberate moments to achieve a desired end. There are rules in hockey about when you’re allowed to get angry, and when you’re allowed to act on that anger, and Shane has always followed them to a tee, even when sometimes he would have preferred not to. Even when sometimes it would maybe have been better if he hadn’t.
Early on in his career, he was a frequent target for illicit hits, and there were many reasons for that, of course—his race, his talent, the polite way he spoke to reporters which the most bigoted guys in the league read as queer—but at least one of them was the way he never fought back. Shane wasn’t an enforcer, and he wasn’t particularly skilled in a fight, and it was always better, in his mind, to avoid a fight if he could. Don’t risk injury, don’t risk penalties: unless something was particularly egregious, take the anger and swallow it down.
Eventually, the other Metros learned to anticipate Shane’s unwillingness to fight, and they stepped up to fill the gaps. Shane was still a target of more violence than a lot of other guys in the league—though certainly not more than Ilya, who drew penalties like a milkmaid drew cream from a cow—but any frustration was excised easily enough through yoga and meditation, a white woman with dreadlocks speaking in low tones in his ear about freeing his center chakra from the pain of the world.
But now—now even the smallest angers bubble up into a fury that Shane can hardly contain. A paparazzi trails Shane to his doctor’s office and Shane has to fight the urge to take his camera and throw it across the parking lot. A rookie says something stupid to Shane about pegging, and he has to nudge Ilya to respond so Shane doesn’t yell at them for being a homophobe. When one of Shane’s sponsors makes him go to a photoshoot the day before Irina’s birthday—it’s contractual, sorry, the PR contact says in her email, not sounding sorry at all—Shane almost refuses to work with them again.
He doesn’t know what’s going on with him. He doesn’t know what’s changed in the past year, since his marriage. Has happiness broken him? Has facing his greatest fears drained him so much that now he can’t handle even the smallest bit of conflict.
Clearly, something in his body or his brain has broken. But what is he supposed to do about it? He meditates, he does yoga, he goes for long walks with Anya panting happily beside of him, and nothing touches the anger, nothing alleviates it the slightest bit.
So he does what he always does. He swallows it down.
—
A week after Shane visits Hayden in Montreal, the Metros come to Ottawa to play the Centaurs. Shane’s blood is boiling before they even get on the ice; boiling even before Ilya stands up on a bench in the locker room, claps his hands together, and starts his pre-game pep talk by saying, “Listen up, fuckwads. We are going to fucking destroy these bigoted assholes.”
It’s a rousing speech. A good one. Everyone is hooting and hollering and full of adrenaline, and then Shane gets on the ice and Comeau attaches himself to Shane’s hip like a fucking conjoined twin. “You happy, now?” Comeau asks him under his breath. “Sucking Russian cock every day?”
So Shane decks him.
It’s only three minutes into the game; it’s way too early to get a penalty. But Shane really doesn’t give a fuck. He might not be a great fighter, but he’s powered by righteous anger and he’s got the element of surprise on his side. Comeau is down flat on his back and Shane has gotten at least three solid shots across his face before the referees show up to pull them apart.
In the box, Shane chews his mouthguard and keeps his face carefully blank. He’s been told before that his blank face looks robotic. It’s still probably better than his angry face, which Ilya tells him makes him look like a kitten.
Back on the bench, he gets backslaps and applause and comments on how, “It’s about time you showed them what’s what, Hollzy!”
Only Ilya seems concerned. He slaps Shane on the back, too, but his hand lingers, slips down to his waist. “Nice one,” he says, simply. “You’re not hurt?”
They’ve got a game to play and Shane is full of adrenaline. Someone offers him a vial of smelling salts and he waves it off. “No,” he says. “I’m not hurt.”
—
The more he pays attention to it, the more he realizes that the anger is always there, just under his skin. He goes for his morning run and has a hard time keeping to his designated heart-rate zones, because the fury wants him to sprint as hard as possible. Making himself an omelette for breakfast, he has the random, inexplicable urge to chuck the frying pan across the room like a Frisbee. When he discovers Ilya has failed to take the trash out for the fortieth time in a row, he bites his lip so he doesn’t scream.
One day, Shane passes by the master bathroom while Ilya is showering and catches the tail end of a Childish Gambino song at full volume. For the first time, Shane hears it and doesn’t automatically flinch away. He’s always thought of rap as an assault to the senses, and it still is, but now it feels like a nice assault. Like the way pinching yourself can feel good if there’s another, worse pain you’re trying to ignore. A sort of counter-pressure.
Of course, he can’t just come out and tell Ilya he likes rap now, because Ilya will want to know what happened, and Shane doesn’t know what happened. Shane just knows there’s something new living inside of him that he hasn’t had living there before.
So he doesn’t tell Ilya. He quietly starts playing music in his headphones when he’s working out or walking Anya or reading his hockey books, and the couple times Ilya asks him what it is he’s listening to, he lies and says it’s a podcast or an ASMR video. “My little nerd,” Ilya says fondly, kissing his cheek. Shane nods his head to Kid Cudi’s beat and smiles.
—
“That was some fight last week,” David comments, peeling the outer layer off an onion. “Your knuckles okay?”
Shane can recognize the gambit for what it is, but he refuses to engage with it. “They’re fine,” he says. The bruises are mostly faded by now, no doubt helped along by the religious icing regime that Shane stuck to, mostly because of Ilya. He loves any excuse to fret over Shane, and no doubt that’s why Shane’s here, tonight, a plan to keep Shane busy while Ilya is downtown with Svetlana pretending to be twenty-two again.
“What did Comeau say to you?” David says, moving on to the next onion. “It must have been pretty bad for you to react like that.”
Shane sighs. “Hockey players get into fights all the time, Dad.”
“Of course they do,” David agrees. “It’s just a little out of character for you, that’s all. We just wanted to check everything’s okay.”
Shane works his jaw. “We?”
“Me and your mom.”
“You know, I’m thirty-two years old.”
David smiles. “That doesn’t mean we’re not going to worry about you anymore.”
“Well, maybe it should.”
David sighs. A long-suffering sigh, a patronizing sigh, and David is literally Shane’s dad, but.
“Look, buddy, I don’t want to be difficult about this. But the fight—you have to admit it was unusual. And then your mom told me what happened at dinner the other day, the things you said about being a role model, and—“
“I don’t want to talk about this,” Shane interrupts. He pulls a knife from the block and starts chopping up the onions. They’re sloppy, uneven pieces; they won’t cook right. It makes Shane angrier, even though he has no one but himself to blame.
“I would prefer it if we did,” David says.
“Oh, you would prefer that, would you?” Shane snaps. He slams the knife down on the cutting board, curls his hands into fists. He used to do this as a kid, make fists so hard that his fingernails would cut into his palms. From ages seven to nine he had little moon-shaped scars on his skin. Eventually something had changed, though Shane can’t remember what now. The habit stopped; the scars faded.
“Shane—"
“Because it’s funny,” Shane says. “We spent all these years never talking about it. I bring it up, or Mom brings it up, and you sit there and say nothing. Not even, oh, that sucks, Shane, I’m sorry. Not even any sympathy. So you can see why I would find it odd that you want to talk to me about this, all of the sudden.”
David looks like Shane’s slapped him. Shane feels bad about it, for a split second—he’s a good dad, some part of his brain that sounds annoyingly like Ilya says; he did his best for you, he was kind to you, so many people don’t get that. How many times has Shane told himself that over the years?
“Shane—I don’t know what to say,” David says, finally.
Shane huffs. “Of course you don’t,” he says. “You never do, right? Tell Mom I’m sorry I missed dinner, but I have to go.”
“Shane—“
“I’ll see you guys later,” Shane says.
It’s very satisfying, slamming the door behind him on his way out. It’s very dramatic, like something out of a movie, and yet for just a second it calms something in his chest. Something hissing and yowling, itching for a fight. He wonders, as he climbs into his car, if he damaged the door—a lock, the doorframe; he’s a professional hockey player, he’s pretty fucking strong—but the thought that he did isn’t unpleasant. It makes him feel good, really, to think that there is some physical evidence of his anger. That the universe wronged him, and in exchange, Shane got to break something. Bust it to smithereens.
—
The trash is overflowing.
Again.
Shane takes a beat and tells himself to breathe. Communication is key, all the online marriage blogs told him, back when he and Ilya were freshly married and moving in together and Shane was panicking in the middle of the night about compatible chore preferences. Have you tried simply telling your husband when there’s something around the house that needs to be done?
“The trash needs to be taken out,” Shane calls.
Ilya, in the living room playing Xbox, makes a noncommittal sound. “I will do it later,” he calls back. “After dinner.”
Irritation flares in Shane’s chest. “You can’t take it out now?”
“I’m in the middle of a game,” Ilya whines.
Shane breathes out carefully through his nose. In for four beats, out for eight. In for four—
“Come play with me,” Ilya demands, his socked feet wiggling in the air.
“I’m going to do some yoga,” Shane decides, and then, before Ilya can try to turn it into some perverted peep show thing, “Alone.”
At first it’s nice, in the yoga room: quiet, lights dimmed, a stick of incense lit that erases any trace of the overripe garbage smell from Shane’s nose. But no matter how long he sits, meditating, he can’t get in the right headspace to do an actual yoga flow. His mind is too busy, and there’s something buzzing in his chest, something burning and petty, something he can’t quite seem to exhale with everything else.
“Are you mad at me?” Ilya asks that night after dinner. Teriyaki salmon, sautéed vegetables, a heaping mound of brown rice—they were meant to cook it together, but even after his yoga, Shane still felt annoyed every time he looked at Ilya, and so he had banished him from the kitchen to do everything himself. The salmon had ended up overcooked, the vegetables slightly underdone. The half-raw stalks of broccoli grated on his molars.
“Why would I be mad at you?” Shane asks, not looking at him. He rinses his plate and sticks it into the dishwasher, then contemplates the blackened bottom of the saucepan. He should really scrub it now, so he doesn’t have to deal with it in the morning, but the thought makes him feel strangely exhausted.
“I don’t know,” Ilya says. “You tell me. Is this about the garbage?”
Shane clenches his jaw, hard. “Do you think it’s about the garbage?”
“Okay, what is with the questions, just tell me what you’re mad at me for!”
Shane slaps down his sponge and whirls around. “Okay, yes, it is about the garbage! It’s about the fact that when we moved in together you said, no problem, Shane, I can take out the garbage, Shane, I don’t mind it, Shane, except it’s been eight months and I don’t think you’ve taken it out once! I always do it! Just like I’m always the one to vacuum the living room carpet when you get Cheetos all over it, and I’m always the one to put your dishes in the dishwasher when you leave them in the sink—“
“Hey, I do the laundry,” Ilya interrupts.
Shane throws his hands in the air. “Wow, what an accomplishment! An entire house worth of chores and you do one fucking thing. Call the fucking Nobel offices, you deserve a fucking prize.”
He expects Ilya to snap back immediately, but instead, Ilya just looks at him. Brow furrowed, arms crossed over his chest, considering. It’s the way Ilya looks at rookies when they’re drilling in front of him on the ice, the way he always looks at the one Saskatchewan reporter in the news room. Figuring him out.
Shane has a sudden, stupid urge to hide himself behind a dish towel, but that’s dumb. This is his husband. Anyway, Shane is in the right, here. He lifts his chin, squares his jaw.
“Come with me,” Ilya says finally.
He’s gone before Shane can protest. Shane has half a mind to ignore him, but the curiosity has gotten him, now. He turns on the tap just long enough to fill the saucepan with water to soak, then follows Ilya to the hallway, down the stairs, into their basement gym.
Ilya finally comes to a stop in front of the punching bag. “Here,” he says, beckoning until Shane offers him one of his hands. Ilya’s gotten a wrap from somewhere, and he quickly and easily tucks it around Shane’s knuckles, his palm. Then he’s pulling out another one, and without asking, Shane offers him his other hand.
“Okay,” Ilya says finally, stepping back. He nods towards the punching bag. “Hit it.”
Shane eyes it skeptically. “I don’t box,” he says.
Ilya rolls his eyes. “Can you not learn new skills? Hit it.”
“I know how to box, I just don’t do it,” Shane huffs. Ilya just waits, one eyebrow raised. “Fine.”
Shane squares himself off in front of the punching bag. It feels a little silly, approaching an inanimate leather bag like it’s an opponent. That’s why he never really took up boxing seriously as a training tool, even though he knows a lot of guys from the MLH like it. That and the risk of injury—if Shane broke a knuckle, or a finger, that’d do serious damage to his stick-handling abilities, and for what? Shane didn’t get into fights; he didn’t have to be prepared for them. Ilya, of course, was a different story, though privately Shane suspects he’d practice boxing even if he didn’t have a reputation for causing skirmishes.
“Any day now, Hollander,” Ilya drawls, and Shane huffs and hits it.
His stance is a bit wrong; his knuckles graze the bag just a bit too lightly. He readjusts and punches again. It’s a good hit this time, firm, dead-center. Shane does it again. And again. There’s something tightening in his chest, now, or maybe it’s loosening—he can’t quite tell. Like a spool, winching and unwinching, it makes the same terrible grind that rumbles through his lungs like thunder. He hits again. He hits again.
“Come on, is that all you got?” Ilya taunts. “Amber Pike can hit harder than that. Put your weight behind it.”
Shane grits his teeth. He imagines the punching bag is Crowell. He imagines the punching bag is Theriault. He imagines the punching bag is Comeau, and Drapeau, and every Metro who stood in the locker room silently and watched their teammates curse Shane out. He imagines the punching bag is a faceless hockey podcaster, he imagines the punching bag is an ESPN pundit, he imagines the punching bag is his his mother as she tells him remember what this means, he imagines the punching bag is his father looking oblivious as a fan makes subtly racist comments to Shane’s face, he imagines the punching bag is Ilya refusing to take the garbage out, he imagines the punching bag is his own stupid self.
The last one sticks.
“I—spent—so—long—being—good,” Shane grunts, hammering the bag between each word. “For—no—fucking—reason.”
“What was that?” Ilya prods. “I couldn’t hear that.”
“It—was—fucking—pointless,” Shane hisses. He’s really heaving now, his breath coming hard and fast in his chest. “For—nothing.”
“There you go,” Ilya says. “That’s it."
“I was—so afraid—for so—long.” Shane gives the bag three hard punches in a row, takes a step back, and then right hooks it. An expression close to surprise flickers onto Ilya’s face before it’s locked down again. Shane glares at the punching bag. His past—he can’t go back and change it. Maybe he doesn’t even want to. But he does wish he could make it hurt.
“Fuck you,” he says, and that’s the last thing he says for a while.
Eventually, his arms start to get sore, and his legs start to feel tight. His knuckles are numb in a way that probably means they’re going to be very sore tomorrow, and Shane is drenched all over in sweat. But when he steps back from the punching bag, bending over to brace his hands on his knees, he feels lighter than he has in a very long time.
“Thanks,” he says, finally, still looking at the floor. From above him, Ilya huffs. He grabs Shane around one bicep and tugs him down until they’re both lying flat on their backs on the mat, staring up at the nice wood-paneled ceiling that Shane had insisted on having installed when Ilya first bought the place. It hides the noise-cancellation tiles, he had said, and Ilya’s eyebrows had shot up in delight.
We are getting noise-cancellation tiles for the gym? he had said. What are we going to be doing down there?
You are going to playing rap music, and I am not going to be listening to it, Shane had said primly, brushing Ilya off.
Now, Shane takes slow, deep breaths. In for four, out for eight; it comes easier, now.
“The punching bag is nice,” Shane says finally.
Ilya laughs and rolls over on top of him. Shane puts his hands on Ilya’s hips and Ilya straddles his waist, even though he’s dripping sweat all over and he’s probably leaving a damp imprint of his ass on Shane’s gym shorts.
“You are very sexy when you’re angry,” Ilya says, and Shane rolls his eyes.
“I should have known this was all just a way to indulge your kinks,” he says.
Ilya smiles. “Mmm, yes. It is my Shane kink, and it is very simple. I like when my husband can be himself.”
He ducks down, mouthing at Shane’s chest through his sweaty t-shirt. “That’s gross,” Shane says, half-heartedly, as he gropes Ilya’s ass with one hand.
“’s okay,” Ilya manages around Shane’s pec. “I like your sweat.”
That’s probably grosser, but Shane doesn’t bother to keep protesting. “So does this mean you’re going to start taking the garbage out?”
Ilya huffs out a laugh against Shane’s abs. Shane’s not sure what’s so funny, but he’s glad Ilya is happy. “Yes, love,” Ilya says. “I will start taking the garbage out.”
“I mean it,” Shane says, because they’ve definitely had this conversation before and it’s never led to Ilya taking out the garbage. “I’m fucking sick of doing it.”
Ilya slaps Shane’s hip, lightly. “Yes, yes, I get it. For real, I will do it.”
“Okay.” Shane probably gives in too quickly, but what can he do? This is his husband. “Can you suck my cock?”
“So polite,” Ilya laughs. “What happened to the angry kitten?” But he’s already sliding down. When he looks up at Shane—through his eyelashes, sweaty hair stuck to his forehead in serpentine twists—he’s grinning. Shane grips Ilya’s hair in one hand and tugs. In one swift move, Ilya swallows Shane down.