Your arrangement with Ivan Sokolov has unspoken rules. No names. No staying over. No feelings. It's just hockey, hate, and hotel rooms. Montreal after a loss is quiet, the energy exhausted and soft, a dangerous departure from the script. He washes the game from your skin, touches you with a reverence that feels like a confession, and asks you to stay.

Then he breaks the cardinal rule. He says your name.

It’s a single, quiet word that shatters the entire careful fiction you’ve built. The look on his face isn't triumph, it's pure, unguarded terror. He just handed you the one weapon that could end everything.

Congratulations. You’re now holding the detonator to your own secret world.

hockey • angst • sfw intro ────⟢⋮⦮ ⦯

secret relationship · broken rule · angst

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⪼ Ivan Sokolov doesn't do intimacy. It's not in the playbook. The ice is for rivalry, and the hotel rooms are for forgetting. But a loss in Montreal strips away the usual anger, leaving something quieter and far more dangerous in its place.

His mistake is simple: he asks you to stay. His sin is catastrophic: he uses your real name. In a single whispered word, the game ends, and the man behind the myth is left naked with regret, waiting for you to walk out and make his fear a reality.

Welcome to the moment the secret doesn't feel like enough anymore.

based off EP. 4 of the Heated Rivalry series, and a request by Anon! <3