Ancient Greeks didn't have Instagram. Thanks to this unfortunate failing on their part, they didn't supply a wise saying to warn Volya against reading the comments when he woke up next morning. Even if Socrates himself left his grave and trooped into the room, wagging the judgy digit at him, Volya wouldn't have listened, because he was a fool.

After a few minutes of scrolling through a surprising number of reactions, Volya's ears burned. The toxic stuff about his singing and the whole shebang of slur about Liam's race, his ethnicity, what they were potentially doing together and even the stupid wolf, hit him like a bucket of slop to the face. His hands shook, because he wanted to reach through the screen and throttle the dickheads... and couldn't.

But it was the comments about his appearance that made him actually nauseous. The worst was some idiot gushing how his eyes were golden, followed by a dozen of other idiots who agreed.

Volya's eyes were muddy in color. Hazelnut, if one wanted to be complimentary. In some photographs, they sort of looked more yellow than brown. Probably a trick of light, like the red-eye glow with the flash or whatever. But there it was, a bunch of no-lifers making a big deal out of his worst feature.

Feeling like an even worse idiot and with even less life than the posters, he rolled out of bed and made a beeline for the bathroom mirror. There, he stared at his reflection for a hot minute. Then he flipped all the six lights on.

Well, he would be damned! The randos on the internet didn't lie. His eyes looked far more yellow today.

He pulled one eyelid down. Nope, he wasn't jaundiced, thank God, because immigration would hate that.

What happened was that the yellow specks in his irises bloomed overnight to overpower the murky stuff. The result was so intense, that the color basically flooded out his pupils, narrowing them to a slit. And his eyelashes... he looked like someone put eyeliner on his lower eyelid, as if they tried to emphasize the upturned corners and the angle of his cheekbones.

Well, crap. Three days ago, neon eyes would have bugged Volya. With everything else on his plate, he just heaved an exasperated sigh. Good thing this optometric nightmare didn't happen at the orphanage. Liam's fans were an excitable bunch, eager to drool over anything related to the singer, including his new sidekick's eyes. Back in the wild, they wouldn't have bothered with the comparisons to noble metals. They'd have called him piss-puddle or something.

Yeah, if his body decided to throw another curveball at him, now was the best time for it. Maybe it was a reaction to leaving Slobodinsk, like the air pollution in Moscow did this to him... or something.

Who knows, who cares, so long as it didn't mess with crossing the international borders.

Volya threw himself onto the bed and buried his face in the pillow.

It shouldn't mess him up, right? His paperwork said he had brown eyes. Yellow was close enough. Like, who would write yellow as his eye color, let alone golden? Nobody in Russia, that's for sure.

He stayed like that until it was seven a.m. Then the iPad came off the night-time mute function to ping a slew of messages.

"Toshka?" he yelled hopefully, sitting up. He could use something fun right now, that's for sure.

There indeed were emoticons and thumbs up galore from Toshka, but the smile melted off Volya's face when he saw a personal message in a cursive script.

Evening_Bells: Keep the secrets hidden, pup. Don't trust the American.

For better effect, a music file attached to the message started playing the sonorous Evening Bells choir--a song about missing one's innocent years in his homeland...

Holy crap! These guys weren't subtle.

He rolled off his bed, jumped into a pair of jeans and dashed down the hall in one rushed sequence. Panting, his heart going a million beats per minute, he skidded to a stop by Liam's door, then pounded on the beautifully polished wood until the singer called in a thick voice, "What? Who? And why?"

"I... Me." Volya replied in English, as blood drained from his cheeks. He became very conscious of the fact that he didn't bother with the t-shirt.

His curling chest hair, however, became the least of his concerns when Liam flung the door open. The popstar stood barefoot, disheveled, wrapped in a blanket, bleary-eyed and, yet, somehow, he was the most gorgeous man Volya had ever seen.

That wasn't the only thing that made Volya's heart plunge. A stale smell in the room hinted at someone else's presence.

"Alone?" Volya squeezed out in a reedy voice. "You are? I mean."

"Not any longer!" Liam thrust his finger at the middle of Volya's chest, right under the silver cross that dangled half-way down his sternum.

He glanced instinctively at his own chest to see if there was something wrong with the cross, while his nose was sniffing the air, his ears listened in for any odd noise...

And... nothing. Whoever stayed with Liam earlier, they were gone.

Liam reached for his phone, firing up the interpreter AI. "Is something wrong? Is your bed lumpy? Because mine is great."

Volya remembered the reason for his visit and upheld his iPad with the message on the screen.

"See this? That's the second. There were chocolates too. The Evening Bells."

Liam scratched the back of his head and yawned. The blanket slipped off his shoulders, so Volya's mind went hopping around like a puppy after a bumblebee.

He barely even realized that Liam had asked him a follow-up question.

"Chocolates?" Liam had asked, looking rightfully confused. "What chocolates?"

In hindsight, what Volya had just blurted out made no sense whatsoever even to him. He gritted his teeth and forced his gaze away from the slope of Liam's traps. It was far too easy to follow it as it descended from the wiry neck to the clavicle. Right there, at the bump of the shoulder, was a perfect spot for a kiss to land. That is, if someone wanted to kiss Liam. Or had kissed him last night. They, who were now gone...

"Someone..." Volya had to cough for a bit to clear his throat. "Ah... they left the same message on my pillow yesterday, with the chocolates. I thought it was a prank, but they put the chocolates back on my pillow last night. Now they're sending me weird messages."

Liam frowned. "What does the message say?"

It took about half-a-second for Volya's foggy brain to compute that he was showing English-speaking Liam the text in Russian. "Crap. Sorry. It said to keep some effing secrets hidden. Not effing. It didn't say effing. Just secrets."

"Gotcha."

"And to not trust the American," Volya added, blushing like a milkmaid at dawn.

"Me, I suppose." Liam summed it up and pulled the blanket back over his shoulders. "Hmm."

Volya stifled a sigh. "My thoughts exactly."

Once the app finished with his witticism, Liam sat down and started typing something, still frowning. "Looks like we've got us a stalker."

"Ouch!"

"Pretty fast for anyone in my inner circle. Maybe even a record."

"This is crazy," Volya muttered, trying to ignore the warm glow that spread through his chest. Seriously, what was there to be glowing about? Inner circle, pah. "Just frigging crazy."

Liam shrugged, like that's the cost of doing business, pal. "I'm bumping you up the security team's priority list. They'll quarantine your account, sort through anything you might have missed, and manage it from that point on, filtering out any potential threats."

"Thank you," Volya said. "Sorry I've panicked and barged in on you like this."

Liam lifted his head from the phone. "No, you did the right thing. I should have thought of that...'' He trailed off, his glance swiveling to Volya's cross again, then travelling up his neck. Finally, he gave himself a small shake. "I, ah... If you want, I can also get my social media guys to handle your fan mail. Less potential for you to get in trouble that way."

"Thanks," Volya repeated. "Honestly, I just want to keep in touch with Toshka, that's all."

"Of course."

He didn't have to bring Toshka up, but the shadowy presence in Liam's room... no, in Liam's life... it still tugged at his gut. He was in love with Toshka and he had a crush on Liam. Jealousy was a wrong multiplier on either side of this equation, and yet he fidgeted over the stranger in Liam's room.

"I better go get breakfast before Marina comes looking for me," Volya said hoarsely. "Or she would scold me for wolfing my food down, while glancing at her own watch every second."

Liam jumped up to walk him to the door of the suite. They made an odd couple, with Volya barefoot and bare-chested, and Liam wearing only a blanket in the same manner Roman senators wore their togas.

"Thank you for trusting me," Liam said softly, before closing the door behind Volya with a click.

***

Volya moved through the rest of his day like in a fog, gracing the immigration officials with ill-timed dreamy smiles, and driving Marina up the wall with his vague answers to very specific questions. She stuffed the truffles he handed over to her deep into her purse with an expression that made Volya suspect that she would dump them into the nearest trash can.

Around lunchtime, Liam texted him that his account was unlocked after the cleaning and the team was looking into this Evening_Bells dude.

Two hours later, Volya walked into his hotel room and stifled a groan.

The foil-wrapped chocolates sat in the middle of his pillow, pressing down a piece of paper ripped out of a school notebook.

The stalker didn't treat Volya to any clever plot twists. The message read, Keep the secrets hidden. Don't trust the American.

This time, Volya carefully folded the sheet of paper to hand it over to Liam's security along with the chocolates. Maybe they had more appreciation for fine chocolate than Marina.