Chapter 16: Running Low

The contact was a guy named Sev. Not his real name — I'd never asked and he'd never offered. He operated out of a pharmacy supply chain that I'd been using since I was nineteen years old, when a teammate's older brother had first explained to me what I was and what I'd need to stay functional in a world not built for me.

I texted him from my car, parked outside the practice facility at six-forty in the morning, forty minutes before anyone else would arrive.

*Running low. Same as usual. Rush if possible.*

The response came back in under a minute, which was either reassuring or alarming depending on the day.

*Timeline's tight. Heat regulations cracking down. Two weeks minimum.*

I stared at the message. Two weeks. My current supply was nine days, maybe ten if I was careful, if I kept the dosage at minimum maintenance level. That was a gap. Gaps were the thing I had spent my entire adult life engineering against.

I deleted the message thread. I got out of the car. I went inside.

The way scent blockers work, for those who haven't spent their life dependent on them, is a combination of chemical suppression and — when the dosage dips — something that functions a little like white-knuckling. At full dose, I was invisible. Physiologically speaking, I presented as a Beta — indeterminate, unremarkable, fine. At reduced dose, I was still mostly invisible. A faint signal in a lot of noise. An itch that an Alpha might notice without being able to place.

The problem was what happened at the bottom of the supply. At minimal dose, under stress, under heat, with a dominant Alpha in close proximity for extended periods —

I didn't finish the thought.

I practiced with my jaw set and my concentration locked down tight, burning every available calorie of mental energy on the ice instead of the countdown I was running in my head. I was good. We were good. Jax and I had hit a new level of synergy in the last week, something that the other players had started calling telepathy as a joke but that was really just the product of obsessive attention — his attention to my tells, mine to his. I knew, now, three seconds before he made a move what that move was going to be. He knew, from the angle of my shoulders, what read I was sitting on.

After practice, in the locker room, he came to stand at his locker and I felt the nearness of him like a frequency change.

"You're distracted," he said, low. Not an accusation. An observation.

"I'm fine."

"You're fine on the ice. Off the ice you've got that jaw thing." He didn't look at me. He was pulling gear off. "Something's wrong."

I didn't answer.

He glanced at me sideways. His eyes dropped briefly to my bag — the inner pocket, where the pill case was. I saw his gaze move there and I felt the ground shift under my feet.

"How many days do you have left?" he asked, very quietly.

Everything in the room receded. "What?"

"I'm not stupid, Leo." Still quiet. Still not looking directly at me. "I know what those are. I know approximately how long a standard prescription runs. I know we're past that window." He pulled his jersey over his head. "How many days."

"Nine," I said, because lying was suddenly beyond me. "My source has a two-week delay."

He was quiet. He finished changing, slow and methodical, and I stood there with my whole nervous system on alert. Then he reached into his own bag — the main compartment, under a roll of tape — and placed something on the bench between us.

A pill case. My exact formulation. Two weeks' supply, maybe more.

I stared at it. "Where did you—"

"Don't ask me that." He zipped his bag. "Don't tell anyone. Don't thank me."

He walked out.

I sat on the bench in the empty locker room and looked at the pill case and thought about a man who had obtained a controlled substance through channels I didn't want to examine, at personal risk, and left it between us on a bench like it was a tube of tape or a practice puck.

I thought about what that was. What that meant.

I picked it up. I put it in my bag. I went home.

I did not sleep.