Chapter 2 — Locker Room Door

Dominic POV

The moment I smelled Theo on the ice, part of me went still somewhere deeper than thought.

One second, I was skating toward him, focused on the game and the seconds bleeding off the clock. The next, something sweet cut through the smell of blood, sweat, and ice. It was faint, sharp, and completely wrong for a hockey rink.

Anyone else would have missed it completely. I did not.

My body reacted before my brain caught up. Every instinct I had went unnaturally still for one sharp second before turning violently possessive hard enough to knock the breath out of me.

Mine.

The thought hit so hard I nearly lost my balance on the ice. The intensity of it unsettled me immediately. This was Theo Maren. My rival. Not someone my body should have recognized this quickly.

It made no sense.

Theo played hockey like he had been built for violence, reckless and impossible to intimidate. I had never cared whether he was an Alpha or Beta because it had never mattered before. But I knew what an Omega smelled like, and Theo smelled exactly like one.

I watched him skate away while panic showed clearly in every movement he made. His gloves were gone, his helmet already off, and tension pulled hard through his shoulders in a way that had nothing to do with the game anymore.

Something was wrong.

A teammate grabbed my shoulder as the buzzer sounded overhead and the arena erupted around us, but I barely heard any of it. Theo had already disappeared down the tunnel, looking terrified, and I was moving before I consciously decided to follow him.

The hallway split into three directions past the tunnel entrance, but I did not stop to think about where he had gone because I did not need to. A faint sweetness drifted through the air, wrong for a place like this.

I followed it automatically.

The thought arrived and refused to leave. If I was right, Theo Maren had spent six years surviving like this through suppressants, patches, and injectors taped beneath hockey gear inside a league that would destroy him the second it learned the truth. He had survived this alone for years.

Part of me wanted to drag him straight to medical before this got worse. The other part already knew I was not letting anyone near him.

The maintenance corridor outside the bathroom sat nearly empty because championship chaos had dragged everyone back toward the ice. Security, medics, and press handlers moved in the opposite direction, leaving the hallway silent except for Theo's scent and the uneven sound of his breathing through the locked door.

I stopped outside the bathroom near the locker rooms. I did not need confirmation to know he was inside. Theo's scent slipped beneath the door, and my lungs tightened around it immediately.

"Theo," I said.

Silence answered me. His breathing remained audible through the door, uneven enough to immediately put me on edge.

I knocked once and kept my voice low. "I know you're in there," I added.

No answer came. The sweetness in the hallway deepened. My hands closed into fists at my sides because if I could smell Theo through a closed door, any Alpha walking within twenty feet of this corridor could smell him too.

I pressed one hand flat against the metal. "Theo, open the door," I commanded.

Several long seconds passed before his voice finally came through the other side, quiet and stripped raw.

"Go away," he whispered.

He sounded wrong, breathless, and shaking.

I had seen this before while playing overseas in Russia. Omegas in suppressant crashes. His suppressants were not simply failing anymore. His body had already moved past the point where another dose would do anything.

"Did your injector break?" I asked.

Silence followed before Theo finally answered. "How do you know that?" he demanded.

"Open the door," I said.

"No," he shot back.

The word came too fast, and the strain underneath it made my jaw tighten. I forced myself to breathe evenly while keeping one hand against the door.

A few seconds later, his voice came again, quieter this time. "I just need another suppressant," he muttered. "That's all. I just need—"

"They aren't working anymore," I interrupted.

A broken sound answered me from the other side.

I rested my forehead briefly against the metal while tension pulled tightly through my shoulders. Inside the bathroom, something crashed against the tile floor before Theo swore sharply under his breath. Then his breathing changed.

A second later, his scent flooded the hallway in a dense wave sweet enough to sharpen my vision instantly. I sucked in one hard breath and held it. Then Theo made a sound through the door, soft and broken enough to strip away the last of my restraint.

Whatever restraint I still had disappeared after that.

I grabbed the handle, found it locked, and drove my shoulder into the door hard enough for it to slam open against the interior wall. Theo stumbled backward before catching himself against the sink with both hands.

I stood there staring at him.

He looked like someone who had been holding himself together for far too long and had finally run out of strength. Sweat soaked through his hair while his face burned flushed beneath the harsh bathroom lights. His chest rose unevenly beneath partially removed gear, and when his eyes met mine, they carried the desperate look of someone trying to decide whether fighting or running was still possible.

Beside his knee, the broken injector pen lay on the floor in two pieces. I stared at it briefly.

Six years of suppressants, lies, discipline, and exhausting control had come down to a shattered injector on a bathroom floor. Something angry twisted hard through my chest, not at Theo but at the fact that he had survived this alone for so long.

Then Theo hit me all at once, and whatever rational thought I still had disappeared instantly.

The bathroom door still hung crooked on broken hinges. Theo was still bleeding onto the floor. My entire body burned with instincts I barely recognized anymore. And the only thing I knew with absolute certainty was that I was not calling anyone. I was not reporting him.

Taking Theo home was a terrible idea. I did it anyway.

The decision was already made before I fully understood it, and that terrified me more than anything I had ever experienced on the ice.