Chapter 2: The Deal in the Dark

Elliot POV

There were many things I hated about Sebastian Wolfe, but the worst was the way he made silence feel crowded.

The locker room was empty except for the two of us, yet the moment he stepped inside, the air changed. It thickened and pressed until every breath I took felt like I was breathing him in.

I stood beside my locker in my half-removed gear, trying to look steadier than I felt. My ribs ached. My broken stick lay against the bench like proof of everything I had lost tonight. And something moved through me in slow, deliberate waves, like a tide coming in against a wall I had spent six years building. My body was issuing a warning. Standing this close to him, I couldn't pretend I didn't hear it.

Sebastian shut the door with quiet care.

"Get out," I said.

He leaned against it, head tipped slightly. "You are always this friendly after a loss?"

"Only with men I can't stand."

"That should hurt my feelings."

"It doesn't."

"No." Just slightly. "Probably not."

He pushed away from the door and walked toward me. Unhurried. Confident in a way that lived in his body like a second pulse. I had spent years performing that kind of ease.

Sebastian simply was it.

"Are you here to gloat?"

"I already won. I don't need to."

He stopped a few feet away. Close enough that I could see the flecks of green in his hazel eyes, the crooked line of his nose, the faint scar near the corner of his mouth. His beauty wasn't delicate; it was forged, every flaw intentional.

And beneath the sweat and ice and cold arena air was something warmer. Cedar, smoke, winter wind.

It hit me like a fist.

Something deep inside my chest tightened, woke, and leaned toward him before I could stop it.

My suppressants should have prevented that. The fact that they hadn't was information I couldn't afford to sit with. Not here. Not with him three feet away and getting closer every second. They always had before. Six years, and they had never once failed me like this.

"What do you want?" I asked.

His gaze drifted over my face, then lower, tracing the line of my throat with a slow deliberateness that made every hair on my body rise. "I wanted to see you angry up close."

"Whatever game you're playing, save it."

"You think this is a game?"

"With you, everything is."

He took the final step. My back hit the locker with a dull metallic thud. Sebastian planted one hand beside my head, not touching, just trapping. Every carefully maintained wall shuddered.

Underneath the fury was something alive and hungry and years starved, and it recognized him in a way I had no word to contain.

This was the kind of wrong that could end everything.

"Tell me something, Gray," he said softly. "Do you always breathe this fast around men you hate?"

"Move."

"No."

His face was inches from mine. Cedar, and something underneath it that my suppressed biology was responding to like a question it had been waiting years to be asked.

The back of my neck burned with the particular awful sensitivity of a scent gland that a triple dose of suppressants was no longer fully controlling.

Not here. Not now. Not with him.

"You want me gone?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Then why haven't you shoved me yet?"

I didn't have an answer that was safe to give.

His gaze dropped to my throat and stayed. Too long. Too focused. "I'm not the one trembling."

I froze.

Tiny tremors through my fingers, my wrists, the muscles in my thighs. All that careful control, and he had found the crack in under an hour.

"What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing."

"Liar." No heat in it. It struck anyway.

His free hand lifted slowly, hovering near my jaw, barely there. A question, a threat, and something else I had no name for.

"Don't," I whispered.

"You scared of me?"

"No."

His hand dropped. Not reaching. Just removing the only thing keeping the space between us defined.

"Good. Because I'm not trying to scare you."

The mockery drained out of the room. What remained was pure intent, aimed at me like I was the only thing worth looking at.

"What are you hiding from me, Elliot?"

My first name. In his mouth. Like it meant something.

"Nothing."

"You're a terrible liar."

"And you're a bastard."

"That too." He leaned in, mouth near my ear, breath warm against my neck, directly over the scent gland that was currently betraying everything I had worked to hide. My suppressants buckled like paper in the rain.

"A deal is a deal," he murmured.

"What deal?"

"Tonight," he said, his voice dropping to something that vibrated in my chest like a frequency I hadn't known I was built to receive.

"You belong to me."

Fire and ice simultaneously. Desire and terror dressed identically.

I didn't move. That was the part that would haunt me later, that for one unguarded second, I didn't move at all.

Then the voices hit the corridor. The team returning.

I jerked back hard. "You've lost your mind."

"Maybe." His gaze dragged over my mouth. "Or maybe you've been driving me there for two years."

Sebastian stepped back and looked at me one last time. Certain in a way that terrified me, because certainty from Sebastian Wolfe was never empty.

"This isn't over."

Then he walked out.

I stood alone in the cooling quiet, heart loud and unsteady, suppressants doing absolutely nothing useful. The back of my neck still throbbed with a warmth that had nothing to do with the arena.

He had come too close. He had seen too much.

And the most dangerous thought, the one that followed me all the way home,  was not that Sebastian Wolfe suspected what I was.

It was that some deep, exhausted, years-starved part of me had wanted him to find out.

And had done nothing to stop him.