The woman who created Heated Rivalry‘s Shane and Ilya had planned to give her next book to somebody else. The boys had other ideas.
Rachel Reid, who wrote the hockey romance novels the hit show is based on, was working on a book about Luca Haas, a rookie on Ilya’s Ottawa team who barely appears in her series. (TV fans will meet him in season two.) Shane and Ilya kept elbowing their way in.
“Before, I was trying to write this Luca Haas book that I had to abandon because Ilya and Shane kept taking it over,” she told The Hollywood Reporter backstage at a Los Angeles stop on her book tour.
So she gave in. The book they forced on her, Unrivaled, is now the longest she has ever written, and she’s been dropping details about it on tour, including which side characters get more page time and a very specific reason she can’t rewatch the show.
The Couple Who Wouldn’t Leave Her Alone
Rachel’s Game Changers books are queer love stories set in professional hockey, and Shane and Ilya are the most famous couple in them: the Canadian golden boy and his Russian rival turned secret lover. Crave turned their story into Heated Rivalry in November 2025, with Hudson Williams as Shane and Connor Storrie as Ilya. You know how that went.
They’re also the only couple in the series to get two books, Heated Rivalry (2019) and The Long Game (2022). Rachel says she always wanted to go back to them, just not in a “cash-grabby kind of way.” For a long time, she figured the only way to continue was with short stories.
“I just didn’t think there was a full novel there, but this actually ended up being the longest book I’ve written yet,” she said.
The show changed her mind. Reading Jacob Tierney‘s scripts put the two men back in her head, and they started talking again. Early last year, she began playing around with a few scenes “to see how they worked.” The Luca book never stood a chance.
What Unrivaled Is Actually About
Unrivaled is the third Shane and Ilya novel and the seventh Game Changers book. As Variety described the premise, it picks up with the two newly married and publicly out, facing a homophobic backlash in pro hockey led by a podcast called Top Shelf and a “Take Back Hockey” movement.
Beyond that, Rachel is keeping her mouth shut. Season two of the show is filming right now and she’s been on set, so she knows exactly what fans want to ask.
“I’m sure people have very burning questions they’d like to ask, but obviously I can’t talk about it,” she said.
What she will talk about is who’s getting more room in the story.
More Scott Hunter, More Yuna, More Rose And Svetlana
First on the list is Scott Hunter, the hockey star whose public coming out (a kiss with his boyfriend, Kip, in front of the cameras after a championship win) showed Shane and Ilya that another life might be possible.
“I’ve been writing maybe a little more of Scott Hunter into this book than I have into other Ilya and Shane books,” Rachel said. “He’s more of an important side character, so that’s definitely one.”
The draw, for her, is Scott with Ilya. “I think that dynamic’s very fun,” she said. Scott ended The Long Game on the edge of a real friendship with the couple. “I left him in The Long Game as maybe having this burgeoning friendship, and I wanted to play with that.”
On screen, Scott is played by François Arnaud, whose standalone episode turned plenty of viewers into instant fans. If you only know him from the rink, his bi love triangle music video with Orville Peck is worth a detour.
The women are getting more space, too. Rachel said she “tried to do a little more with Yuna,” Shane’s mom, played on the show by Christina Chang. “And, honestly, all of the women. Like Rose and Svetlana, I like to try to include a little more of them into the story.” On TV, those two are played by Sophie Nélisse and Ksenia Daniela Kharlamova.
Why She Had to Stop Watching Heated Rivalry
Writing Unrivaled came with a problem no author plans for: Hudson and Connor.
At the September 29 New York stop of her tour, Rachel said she watched the series as it aired, then cut herself off. “OK, I can’t watch it again until this book is done because I just need to focus on what I’m doing,” she said, as reported by E! News.
“It was not easy because I wanted to watch the show,” she added. “I love everything about the show. I love everything they did with the characters, but I just needed to stay focused on my version.”
Then she got specific. Writing sex scenes, she said, is “very difficult” when you’re picturing Connor and Hudson. “It’s very weird.” We can’t really blame her.
The bigger pressure was the audience. “Suddenly, within a few months, instead of having a small-ish loyal fan base who really cared about these characters, it felt like the whole world was waiting to see what happened next to them,” she said. She told THR her social following jumped from something like 7,000 to more than 400,000. She does read what fans think, but she says she hasn’t made “any huge decisions” based on it.
Sorry, Luca Fans – But Don’t Give Up Yet
As for the book Shane and Ilya pushed aside, it isn’t dead. When THR’s interviewer admitted she was still hoping for a Luca book, Rachel answered, “I am too. I really hope that a really good idea comes to me.”
The demand has jumped in recent weeks, and she has a theory why. In season two, Luca will be played by Edvin Ryding, the Swedish actor who won hearts as Prince Wilhelm in Young Royals.
“Probably part of that is the casting of Edvin Ryding, who has a massive fan base,” Rachel said. She also admitted that she wrote Luca as bait from the start. “I always wrote that character as like, ‘Hey, would you guys like a book about this guy?’ I know I was doing that, so it’s definitely my fault.”
Readers are pushing for a book about Ottawa goalie Wyatt Hayes too, who’ll be played by Robert Naylor. Rachel isn’t promising anything. Some characters might get a book of their own, she said, and some are “just enjoyable side characters.”
When We’ll Finally Get Unrivaled
Unrivaled was originally due on September 29, 2026. In February, Rachel moved it to June 1, 2027. In an Instagram video, she said her new fame had left her little quality time to write, and that her Parkinson’s symptoms had “gotten a bit worse” and “made it difficult physically to write.”
Season two of Heated Rivalry, which adapts The Long Game, is set to premiere in spring 2027, on HBO Max in the US. So the show and the book should land within months of each other.
“This time next year, we’ll have all those answers,” Rachel said.
Considering Shane and Ilya wouldn’t even let her write somebody else’s book, we believe her.