1. MARKED

🤍RAV🤍

I snuck into the school just to watch the infamous Arctic Wolves and the Ice Vipers play, and the energy on the ice was charged in a way that made my fingers curl against my thighs because I could not wait to prove myself tomorrow. I already got my admission letter folded in my back pocket, the paper damp from my shift at the bar, but there was no way I was missing this match.

I had to hurry to finish my job and I forgot to use my suppressant and scent blocker, and I did not realize it until I was already inside and the door had swung shut behind me.

The pheromones of the alphas were high as the adrenaline rush in the game skyrocketed, and I felt them before I understood what I was feeling, a pressure behind my eyes and a tightness in my chest that had nothing to do with the crowd.

Being an omega really sucked. That was why I ran away from home in the first place, the constant comparison to my alpha sister who walked into every room like she already owned it while I stood in the corner praying nobody would notice me.

I was actually born into an all-alpha family and I turned out to be the stain in the family, the one my father looked at like he could not figure out where I had come from and my mother looked at like she already knew and wished she did not. They were waiting for me to turn eighteen to marry me off to some alpha I did not know, but I have dreams. I have always played hockey back home on frozen ponds and borrowed skates.

But God forbid an omega on ice. A female omega.

Yes, that is me. Ravael Steele, in an all-male alpha hockey school.

GOAL!!!

The Arctic Wolves won at the end and they dominated the ice, and I screamed with everyone else even though I knew my voice sat higher than it should and anyone who listened too closely would hear something wrong.

That is the team I am praying will take me, the team I have been dreaming about since I first saw their name on a flyer six months ago, and watching them now with sweat dripping down their faces and their sticks raised to the roaring crowd made something burn in my chest that I had not let myself feel in years.

The game ended and every single male was celebrating, bodies crashing into bodies, voices overlapping until they became one loud wave of noise, and I had to fit in of course even though I knew I was not supposed to be there but the excitement took over.

It was already getting late and I needed to be back here again the next day with my admission letter, so I moved toward the locker room because that was the only way to sneak out without getting caught by the security who watched the main exits like hawks.

The hallway stretched long and dark and the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and I walked fast with my head down and my hands shoved in my pockets because that was what a boy would do and I had been practicing being a boy for months now.

The strong pheromones of alphas hit me before I reached the door, a wave of something thick and musky and overwhelming that crawled into my nose and down my throat and settled heavy in my stomach. My stomach knotted and I stopped walking and I pressed my hand against the wall to steady myself because I needed to get the hell out of this place.

Fuck.

I pushed the door open.

And came face to face with an alpha who looked kinda drunk, his shoulders swaying just slightly like he was standing on a boat instead of solid ground, and even through the haze of his own intoxication his presence hit me like a wall I had walked straight into without seeing it coming.

I felt him before I fully saw him. That was the only way I could describe it, the way his pheromones reached out and grabbed something in my chest before my eyes could even process the width of his shoulders or the length of black hair with red tips that fell across his face and hid his eyes from me. I could not see what color they were but I could feel them on me like a weight I could not shake off.

"What are you doing here?" The deepest voice I had ever heard in all my life, and I have heard alphas speak before but this was different, this was something that rumbled in his chest and landed somewhere low in mine.

I cleared my throat and pulled up the deep alpha voice I had practiced in the mirror for hours. "Taking a leak," I said, and I kept my eyes on the floor because looking at him felt like staring into the sun.

He raised his arm slowly, deliberately, and pointed at the private sign on the wall. His movement was lazy with alcohol but the intention behind it was not. My stomach dropped all the way to my feet.

Fuck. I had missed my way.

The realization hit me in layers. First, forgetting to use my suppressant, because I had rushed out of my shift at the bar and not given myself two seconds to think. Then my scent blocker, equally absent, and I knew it was leaking out of me now because I could feel his nostrils flare even from where I was standing, sweet and wrong and completely out of place in a room that smelled like alpha sweat and post-game aggression.

"Why would an alpha be smelling like vanilla cream?" He growled.

The sound of it crawled up my spine and settled at the base of my neck and my body had the nerve, the absolute nerve, to like it.

I took a step backward. He took one forward. The lockers behind me were close enough that I could feel the cold metal radiating through the air before I even touched them.

Damn this stupid alpha and omega instinct. I hate it.

I pushed my hands against his chest and they landed against something solid and unyielding and warm, and the warmth was the worst part because my palms wanted to stay there and I had to actively remind them that they belonged to me. My legs tried to move backward but my body was already choosing sides and it was not choosing mine.

"A female omega in an all-male alpha school?" His voice dropped lower, darker, like he was putting something together through the fog of alcohol and instinct.

Fuck, the bastard was flooding my senses with his pheromones and I could not think straight because my body was responding to him before my brain could catch up.

"Let me go, you bastard, who said I am a female!" I twisted my wrist against his fingers and my voice cracked on the last word, the deep tone I had practiced for months splitting open and falling apart until what was left was just me, just Ravael, small and caught and nothing like the boy I had needed to be tonight.

His grip did not loosen.

He walked me back into the lockers and the metal hit my spine cold and sudden and I gasped from the shock of it, and then his hands were moving and I was struggling and my brain was screaming get out but my body was doing something else entirely, leaning into every point of contact like it had been starving for exactly this without telling me.

He dragged my sweatpants down and pulled my hoodie over my head until I was standing there with nothing but my bindings. I tried to cover myself but he caught my wrists and pinned them above my head and the cold metal of the locker pressed against my knuckles and his body pressed against the front of me and I could feel every inch of him through his jeans.

I kept telling myself to fight. I kept meaning to.

His mouth found my neck and something inside me went completely quiet and I hated that more than any other part of this because the quiet felt like surrender and I did not want to surrender, I had never surrendered to anything in my life, and here I was going still under his hands like my body had already signed a contract my brain had not agreed to.

He fumbled with his belt. I heard the clink of the buckle. I heard my own breathing, too fast and too loud in the small space between us.

Then he was pushing inside me and I gasped so hard I thought my lungs might crack open because he was too big and it hurt and the hurt bloomed into something else almost immediately, something that spread up through my stomach and into my chest and made my hips roll forward to meet him before I could stop them. I hated myself for that. I hated how easily my body betrayed everything I had decided about who I was going to be.

His rhythm was hard and desperate and unsteady, chasing something he could not name through the alcohol haze, and every thrust pushed a sound out of my mouth that I could not catch in time and eventually stopped trying to. My mind kept telling me this was wrong and my body kept saying yes to him anyway and somewhere in the middle of all of it I stopped fighting the gap between them.

His breathing turned ragged. His rhythm grew erratic.

Then his teeth sank into the spot where my neck met my shoulder.

The pain was sharp and deep and my whole body arched into it instead of away from it, an instinct so old and so buried that I did not even recognize it as mine until it was already happening. Some part of me that lived below thought and choice and everything I had worked for knew exactly what this moment was before my mind could name it.

He was marking me.

I felt the bond snap into place like a lock clicking shut on something I had not known was open, his scent pouring into the wound and settling there, permanent and irreversible and mine in a way I had never asked for anything to be mine.

He buried himself deep one final time and then he went still and his full weight came down against me and pressed me into the cold floor and his breathing slowed and I understood before I could even react that he had blacked out completely, his body limp and heavy and his face slack against my shoulder.

I lay there staring at the ceiling and trying to remember how to exist.

Then I scrambled out from under him with my hands shaking so hard I could barely grip my clothes, pulling my sweatpants up and dragging my hoodie over my head and not looking back at him because if I looked back at him I would commit murder and lose my dream of ever being on ice.

I grabbed my cap from the floor and I ran.