2. VANILLA CREAM

❄️ZOREN❄️

"Get up from the floor you bastard."

There is only one person who owns that annoying voice and I did not want to hear it right now or ever but Rylan never cared about what anyone wanted and that was the problem with him from the very beginning.

I opened my eyes and the bright light made me close them back immediately.

"Turn off the fucking light Rylan."

"I met it on, and why are you lying on the floor in here… wait." I heard him sniffing the air and I already knew where this was heading before he opened his mouth again because Rylan never let anything go and he was always paying attention when he should have been minding his own business and this was going to be a whole conversation I did not have the energy for. "Who did you fuck in here? You didn't come to watch me play. Match ended two hours ago and you were busy fucking!"

My head pounded harder with every word that came out of his mouth and I pressed the heel of my palm against my forehead and tried to push the pain back into whatever hole it had crawled out of but it was not going anywhere and neither was Rylan.

"Just shut up for a second. My head hurts more hearing your voice."

I must have drunk the whole bottle and I knew exactly whose fault it was. Damn that old man.

I opened my eyes again and he had turned off most of the light and I could see him properly now and he was still wearing his jersey and his helmet was in his hand like he had come straight from the rink without stopping and his hair was pink.

"Why the fuck did you dye your hair pink?"

"Because I wanted to,” he shrugged as if that's the most reasonable answer. “And why is your private locker smelling like sex and…" he sniffed the air again. "Where did you get an omega to fuck? Don't tell me you sneaked in one of the watchers or did you finally agree to—"

"You will not finish that statement."

I glared at him and the anger was already boiling in my throat like bile and I did not need him or anyone else to remind me of what the old man wanted because I already knew and I had been refusing him for years and I would keep refusing him until the day I died.

There is no way that old man is going to decide what I do with my life again and he has already taken enough and he keeps trying to take more and I keep pushing him back and it never ends and it will never end and that is the reason I drank the whole bottle in the first place and I was not going to explain that to Rylan or anyone else.

First I must play hockey and I did and I made his damn school the highest in the country. Then he wants to use my life to become more powerful and he thinks I am still a child who does not see what he is doing and the joke is on him because I have been watching him for years and I know exactly what he is and what he wants and he will not get it from me.

"Let's get out of here and stop asking stupid questions."

I got up and my body was heavy. Rylan watched me arrange my jeans and my top because Rylan always watched and always noticed and that was the thing about him that made him useful and unbearable at the exact same time and I did not have the energy to decide which one he was tonight.

"Coach wants to see you tomorrow though," he said as we were walking back to the main arena.

"It's about the new students coming in tomorrow," Rylan added when I did not say anything and I already knew about the students and I was already ready to kick every single one of them out because I did not want them here and I did not want their fresh faces and their egos and their desperate need to prove something on my ice.

There were just a few boys lingering around the arena since it was already late in the night and the Arctic Wolves won and I bet the club and bar were filled up now with bodies and noise and people celebrating a victory that should have been mine to celebrate too and instead I was walking back to my dorm with a headache and a smell I could not get out of my nose.

But even as we walked toward my private dorm and Rylan said something else that I did not listen to because my head was too loud and my thoughts were too heavy and the cold air was not doing enough to clear anything out of my system.

Vanilla cream.

How did a female omega sneak into the private areas of the school and how did she disappear before I woke up and why could I still smell her on my skin even now with Rylan walking beside me and the cold air hitting my face and the headache still pounding behind my eyes and nothing making sense the way it was supposed to.

I did not even remember her face and that was the thing that kept circling back and biting at the edges of my thoughts because I could remember the smell and I could remember the feel of her and I could remember something sweet and wrong and completely out of place.

Damn that old man again and again for messing with my head and for pushing me into a bottle I should not have touched.

I pressed two fingers against the side of my neck and exhaled slowly through my nose.

I just pray I did not mark her and I have been praying it since I woke up on the floor and smelled her on my own skin and felt the soreness in my jaw that meant my teeth had done something I did not give them permission to do.

Putting myself inside her was already a line I should not have crossed. But marking her, bonding her to me without her name or her face or a single thing I could use to find her in the morning, would not just be a complication.

Marking her would be a catastrophe.