Chapter Text
The first time he sees Ilya Rozanov face to face, it’s in the bathroom of a club in Las Vegas. The music is pulsing through the walls, rattling Shane’s molars, vibrating into his bones. He’s spent a lot of time in clubs like these, though not for the same reasons most men his age have.
The mark is out there, at a booth behind the DJ, sitting with an assortment of beautiful and ethnically ambiguous models who are flirting with him like it was their jobs. Which—Shane snorts to himself—it actually probably was.
Shane wasn’t going to kill him, not here, because that would be indiscreet and messy, the two things that a job should never be. He’s just here to observe, to lean against the sleek, neon-lit bar on the left side of the room and watch the mark. To notice how he moves, how his security details moves. The threats they are aware of, the threats they aren’t.
And then later, much later, maybe even tomorrow, or the day after—Shane will kill him. Neatly, quietly, somewhere private and shrouded, where Shane can fire a bullet or slide a blade just above the mark’s prominent Adam’s apple and leave him to bleed out over his 500 thread count Egyptian cotton. By the time they find the body, Shane will be a continent away. Australia, he thinks, or maybe Thailand. He needs to check with his mom.
It’s a difficult line of work, but Shane has learned not to mind it. He’s good at it—maybe the best.
Maybe the best. And the only other person in the world who gives uncertainty to that statement is next to him now, at a line of shiny chrome sinks in this pulsating bathroom in the middle of a desert. Ilya Rozanov.
Shane flips the faucet on, sharp column of hot water pouring out and into the basin. He shoves his hands under it, washing them clean even though he didn’t even piss. Just came in here to follow one of the mark’s guys and see what his weapons load out might be.
“Hello, Shane Hollander.” Rozanov says, meeting his eyes in the mirror. Shane stiffens and holds, his hands stalling under the faucet. His heart begins to—not pound, really, but increase in blood flow. Was Rozanov one of the mark’s guys? No, no, Shane reassures himself. He would’ve known, he would’ve gotten that intel before the job started. No one else from the top circuit was on the mark’s detail—he had been assured of that.
“Hello.” Shane responds, flipping off the water and moving towards the line of hand dryers on the opposite wall. Rozanov follows him, taking the dryer right next to him. What the fuck was this guy’s problem?
There’s a brief, numb moment of fear--that someone sent Rozanov after him, that Rozanov was going to do it right here, in the middle of this public bathroom, and kill all the civilians who didn’t have the good sense to run. It was a Rozanov thing to do, in stereotype. But he wouldn’t. Shane knows this, somehow, deep down. Rozanov’s not stupid, obviously, but he’s also not reckless, despite what their colleagues might say.
“What brings you to Vegas?” Rozanov asks, talking a bit louder to be heard over the crash of the dryer air. Shane stares straight ahead, watching his fingers as they splay and turn under the heat.
“Work.”
Rozanov smirks, shaking his hands like a dog shedding water. Droplets go flying, some landing on Shane’s sleeve, darkening against the light blue fabric.
“Me too.” Rozanov tells him, turning to face him now. Shane looks around, waiting for someone to bark at them to keep it moving, but they’re probably the only two sober people in this bathroom right now, and the other men just adjust around them, taking their places at the other dryers around them.
“It is nice, Las Vegas.” Rozanov continues, tilting his head this way and that. Shane’s only seen photos of him, up until this very point in time. He is, somehow, better looking in person. “Lots of work for us here, in this place.”
Shane gives him a tight lipped smile, turning to leave the bathroom. He doesn’t know what Rozanov’s fucking game is, and that’s just what he needs right now, on the job. To be looking over his shoulder for a hulking Russian to come crashing in at just the wrong moment.
Rozanov follows him, and Shane braces as they leave the ambient lighting of the restroom and dive back into the crush of bodies in the dark. He feels the heat of Rozanov at his side, the Russian’s face coming in close to his and he flinches back, hand moving to his hip for his holdout pistol, but Rozanov just laughs.
“Relax, Hollander, relax.” Rozanov soothes condescendingly. “Was just saying hello. I am on….a different project. For a different client. We have only crossed paths. Happens, sometimes, yes? In...our work.”
They’re standing right outside the corridor into the restroom area, and people bully past, jostling them, and they are very, very close. A strobe begins to flash and Rozanov’s sharp eyes blink in and out of Shane’s vision.
Relief, then. Vegas was a place for that. Multiple jobs at a time, running in parallel. Here, New York, London, Hong Kong, Dubai. There was work for days in these places, if you knew where to look.
“Yours is the one behind the DJ, yes?” Rozanov asks, his perception shocking, and Shane nods. “Heh. Should be easy, no? Mine is about to leave, with prostitute. So I must go.”
Before he goes, leaving to disappear into the mob, Rozanov leans in close, his breath in Shane’s ear. “Good luck tonight.”
The hair on the back of Shane’s neck stands up, his dick twitching, but he blames it on the heat, the insistent press of bodies. “I don’t need it.”
“No,” Rozanov’s smirk lights up in the dark. “I suppose you don’t. But just in case.”
-
It’s a difficult line of work, this, but at least Shane’s good at it.
He came into it through his mother’s side, his childhood filled with lectures on espionage and geopolitics, karate and jiu jujitsu and boxing. Then onto gun ranges, fencing, hand to hand. At his father’s insistence, he went to normal school through grade eight before being homeschooled, to the shock and amusement of many of his mother’s colleagues. His father, the son of a weapons manufacturer, wasn’t quite wholly civilian, but he had lived something approximating a normal existence, until Shane’s mother had brought him into the life, body and soul.
To be so good so young, to be praised for his ability to be small and quick, to disappear into the dark, to kill neatly and quietly, to leave no trace. It was addictive, it was heady, it felt important. Or, rather, it made him feel important. And he was.
He killed his first mark when he was seventeen. He felt it, then, the severing of his soul from his body, and he knew from that moment on that he would not be going to heaven, or whatever existed there, beyond the ether.
He didn’t mind. That was a tomorrow problem. A next year problem, if he was lucky. The now was all that mattered. The now and the guts and the money and the look on his mother’s face when she read over his appraisals from his employer, so proud.
Rozanov was a different story. A late addition—it was a shock, that the Bear would bring on someone so old. Nineteen by the time he started training, what a waste, people whispered. What can you get out of someone at that age?
But the Bear had an answer for them. He got out a lot.
No one knew for sure, but the consistent rumor was that Rozanov had been a hockey player. Poor as shit, scratching out a living with his brother and drug addled father in a Moscow slum. He had been an excellent skater who transformed into an excellent hockey player who transformed into an excellent assassin. There was talk, even, that the Bear had found him after Ilya killed one of his guys in a bar fight.
Some clueless nineteen year old kid, holding his own—no, winning—one on one with one of the Bear’s men.
If that was true, Shane thinks, then it made perfect sense, why the Bear agreed to take him in, to invest the eye watering amount of time and money to train him up, to make him an asset. There was simply no other option.
-
Shane completes the job. Figures out that there’s a 4 minute gap around 5 AM where the mark’s hotel door will be unguarded during an unfortunate lack of coordination between one guard’s smoke break and a shift change.
Lights off, pillow over the mark’s head—double insurance even with the silencer—and just like that, Shane turns the mark from someone who was alive into someone who is dead.
He slips out and down a staff stairwell. He is back at the Continental before sunrise.
Finishing a job makes him feel restless and lonely and on edge. He was taught this from birth, how to stifle the adrenaline, how to make it your ally and how to banish it back into your nervous system the second it was no longer useful. But he is still only human, despite it all. The lure of a hotel lobby sounds good, if only to be around other people, to remind himself he still lived in the real world, or at least something parallel to it.
The Vegas Continental is just off the strip, disguised as a sleek boutique hotel exclusively for high-rollers. Marquez, the operator, smiles kindly at the reception desk, and they go through the clean ritual of the check in. A porter in a neat uniform takes Shane’s bags as Marquez drops a gold key with a room number tag dangling off the end on a shiny circle of metal.
“Enjoy your stay, Mr. Hollander.”
Shane doesn’t bother going up to his room—he trusts the porter to get everything situated there without supervision—and instead he sits on one of the lush velvet bar stools and stares blankly into a rapidly flattening glass of ginger ale.
The camaraderie of the Continental, the normalcy of it, never failed to both comfort him and turn his stomach. Even at this hour, his colleagues float in and out of the lobby, saying hello, kissing each others’ cheeks and shaking hands. Many people recognize him, but few approach. A man who Shane knows only as the Hunter, who tried to run him over with an armored trunk in Riga not six months ago, stops by to chat with him and ask after his parents.
But the Hunter goes, and no one takes his place for a long while, until--
Until the bar stool to Shane’s left sinks a bit and—just like the club earlier that night (earlier that morning, maybe? It’s difficult to remember)—Ilya Rozanov is at his side.
“Hello, Shane Hollander.” Rozanov says, the same as before. His thick accent, the clipped consonants that rolled out of his mouth, almost like a chant. In the light of the Continental, Rozanov looks closer to mortality. His hair is stuck to his forehead with sweat, and there’s a long razor scratch of blood going from his chin up his jawline to his ear.
“Hello, Rozanov.” Shane’s exhausted but not wound so tight anymore. He can do this, he can play nice. Make small talk, pretend he and Rozanov are anything like friends. “Work finish up alright?”
Rozanov snorts and gestures to his cheek, rolling his eyes. “You have seen. It was like this.”
The cut is shallow but long, blood already starting to crust delicately over the surface. A stiletto, or maybe a throwing star. Shane has some stupid, unnecessary thought about how it made Rozanov somehow even more handsome, and his stomach bottoms out.
His brain starts going, see, when he’s been up too long. He hasn’t slept longer than two or three hours at a time for at least four days.
“Could’ve been worse.” he offers, and Rozanov nods solemnly, tipping his hand towards the bartender, who nods and goes to the liquor shelf, bottles glistening along it like so many jewels.
“Yes. It can always be worse.”
The bartender brings Rozanov a short glass of clear liquor on ice—definitely vodka, Rozanov’s famed drink of choice—and they sit side by side for a long moment, sipping their drinks.
“And you?” Rozanov finally asks. Shane lifts one shoulder in a shrug, drops it.
“Fine. Clean. Not so complicated.”
The ice clicks in Rozanov’s glass as he raises it to his mouth. Shane trains his eyes forward, down towards the low, glass-front refrigerators on the other side of the bar, to avoid staring at the long line of Rozanov’s neck as he drinks.
“It is always like that for you, it seems.” Rozanov says once his glass is back on the bar. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Shane watches the vulnerable skin of his palms as they travel across his face. “Clean. Not so complicated. For me, it’s like that less.”
Shane blushes, not sure whether to take it as a compliment. This difference between them, that Shane has only heard expressed by other people who knew them both—Shane was an assassin. Rozanov was a killer.
Rozanov’s head turns slowly over his shoulder, prompting Shane to do the same. Through the light crowd passing through the lobby, Shane seems them. Two large men, all in black, sitting on chairs in the lobby atrium. One of them is reading a magazine. The other is starting right at Rozanov.
“Buddies of yours?” Shane asks.
“Of course. My very best friends. Just wanted to make sure they were still there.”
Rozanov turns back to his drink, but Shane lingers. Watches the man as he watches them back. He didn’t seem to be threatening or waiting to strike—to do so, under the Continental rules and risk ex communicado, would be a galactically stupid idea. He really just seemed to be watching them.
Hair on the back of his neck pricking, Shane turns back to the bar. To Rozanov and his damp curls and the beads of condensation dripping down the side of his glass and over his knuckles.
“C’mon.” Shane dares to nudge Rozanov’s shoulder with his own. Rare for him to dare, to do anything on impulse. “Who are they?”
Rozanov straightens up and looks at him properly. His eyes are deep and arresting. Shane wonders what it must’ve been like, for Rozanov’s marks. For those hazel eyes to be the last thing you saw before you died.
“They are my babysitters. Just to make sure I behave.”
Ah, Shane thinks, nodding slowly, unable to keep the surprise off his face. But it made sense. Rozanov represented a very, very expensive investment, and the Bear’s return would be high, one way or another.
“My boss is very worried I will run.” There’s a hint of anger there, of intense annoyance, that anyone would think that of Ilya Rozanov. “It’s shameful.”
Something in Shane, some odd, human part, is compelled to soothe, to reassure. “But you haven’t. Most people would.”
Rozanov blinks, tilts his head. Shane’s stomach tenses again; it almost feels like he’s going to be sick. It doesn’t ease when Rozanov’s face breaks into a teasing smile, his big hand coming to clap at Shane’s knee. Shane’s whole body jerks with it, the shock of such flat out contact without the threat of violence.
“You know how to make a girl feel special, Hollander.”
“Fuck off! I was trying to be nice.”
“You aren’t nice to many people.” Rozanov says it like it’s a fact, but how the fuck would he know? Anything said about Shane was just gossip and shit talking, jealousy and fear. That’s what his mom always told him. People only take shots at the best.
“That’s not true.”
“Is what everyone says. Not my opinion.”
Rozanov holds his hands out in an overly ingratiating have mercy gesture. Shane hates him, feels stupid with himself for falling into this. He had heard that, that Rozanov had this effect on people. What made him so dangerous was his ability to charm, to seduce. Shane didn’t have that, but it was okay, because he didn’t need it.
“I need to get to bed.” Shane says, standing up and throwing some cash on the bar top for his drink. The bartender eyes them from further down the length of it, keeping a safe distance. “I have a flight in a few hours.” Sydney, Bangkok, Moscow—he couldn’t remember. There and back again. It was all the same.
Ilya goes to stand up with him, and Shane jerks back, blinking in surprise and feeling dumb for it. World class assassin and this guy has him acting neurotic and jumpy from a few quips of trash talk.
“You do not want company?” Ilya asks, a bit teasing, a bit mean. This fucking asshole. “Me, I like company, after the work is done. It is strange feeling, sometimes, da? The work being done.”
What did—what did he mean by company? Shane’s mouth is suddenly very dry, and Rozanov is very close. He shakes his head mutely, and steps out from behind his bar stool, getting the chair in between them. Rozanov couldn’t—he was fucking with Shane, he couldn’t mean--
“Well, if you change your mind, I am in room 1221. For company.” Rozanov—that dick, that fucking maniac—winks at him. It all makes sense for Shane, in that moment. Rozanov’s fucking with him. Maybe his next job has Shane as the mark, or on the opposing team. Rozanov was good, Shane could give him that. Found a weakness, narrowed in. Got him on his back foot with a hand on his knee and a pretty smile.
“You shouldn’t be telling people your room number.” Shane spits, gathering his coat and his wallet with shaking hands. “Terrible security practice.”
“It’s okay, it’s just you. You are nice to me.” Rozanov insists, still with that fake earnestness that makes Shane want to punch him. But he won’t. Not here. But when they meet again, out on a job--Shane is going to destroy him.
-
He goes to bed. He does not think about going to room 1221. He does not think about it when he comes crashing up the flume of sleep from a nightmare a few hours in. He does not think about it when he showers, when he goes to the hotel doctor for a look-over, when he leaves that afternoon, his eyes scanning the hotel lobby as he checks out. Finding Rozanov or not finding him—Shane isn’t sure which one is worse.
He does not think about it at the airport, in his seat on the plane, watching the desert roll past underneath him as he leaves for Canberra, for Moscow, for Riga, for Ottawa. What does it matter. It’s all the same job, in the end.