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The Long Game
Game Changers · Book 6
Rachel Reid
★★★★★Synopsis
Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov have been seeing each other in secret for ten years. Ten years of hiding what they are from their friends, from their families and, above all, from the league. To the world they are hockey's fiercest rivals, two captains who go at each other on the ice, but behind closed doors they are everything the other has. Shane is at the peak of his career and terrified that going public could destroy everything he built. Ilya, on the other hand, cannot take another season of the silence, the distance and the loneliness of loving someone he can only touch behind closed doors. While Shane retreats into discipline and control, Ilya sinks into a depression he has been carrying for years and finally decides to face. Between a brutal season, a charity hockey camp and a league that would rather they stayed invisible, the two of them have to decide what matters more, the career or the life they want to build together.
The protagonists
Ilya Rozanov
Captain of the Ottawa Centaurs
Russian, provoking and armed with a sharp sense of humor he uses as a shield. Behind the untouchable superstar there is a deeply lonely man, tired of hiding and still carrying grief for his mother. In this book we watch him do the hardest thing of all, ask for help and learn to say out loud what he never allowed himself to name.
Shane Hollander
Captain of the Montreal Voyageurs
Disciplined down to the bone, obsessed with his performance and with keeping everything under control. He loves Ilya with absolute devotion, but he learned to hide his feelings so well that sometimes even he cannot find them. His arc is understanding that protecting his career cannot cost him the person he loves.
My review
There are books you read and books you feel, and The Long Game is the second kind. Coming back to Shane and Ilya after Heated Rivalry is not simply continuing a story, it is stepping into the part we almost never get to see, the after, when the love is already certain and the truly hard thing is holding on to it.
There is no tension of rivals who hate each other and want each other in secret anymore, there are two grown men who have spent a decade loving each other in silence and are starting to pay the price for that silence. Shane is still control, discipline and fear, a man who learned to hide his feelings so well that sometimes not even Ilya can see them. Ilya, on the other hand, is exhausted, lonely, carrying a depression that Rachel Reid writes with a care that undid me. Watching him go to therapy, watching him try to put into words things he had never allowed himself to say, watching him hold on when all he wants is to give up, was one of the most honest things I have read in romance.
And even so, the love between these two is a dream. You see it in the small things, in the way they tease each other, in the way they take care of each other, in the way Ilya provokes and Shane melts anyway. The author does not resolve anything easily, she makes them talk, makes them get it wrong, makes them choose each other again, and when they finally arrive where they were always meant to be, the relief is almost physical.
This is one of the best books I have ever read and I do not say that lightly. I felt so much with this story, with Ilya especially, and I finished it with that strange urge to start it all over again immediately. I am already counting the days for the third part of their story.
Content note: this book includes mentions and depictions of depression and suicide.
Who is this for?
For anyone who read Heated Rivalry and has been waiting for what comes after for Shane and Ilya
For readers who want MM sports romance with real emotion, mental health handled with care and so much chemistry
For anyone who wants a happy ending that feels earned instead of handed over
Where to buy it?
Amazon
Reading with Matcha · Made with love by Ari