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 moment he turned that lock, the air in the empty room changed, thickening and pressing until every breath I took felt like I was breathing him in. I stood beside my locker in my half-removed gear, keeping my spine locked straight to hide the shudder in my ribs. My broken stick lay against the bench like proof of everything I had lost tonight, while 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, and standing this close to him, I couldn't pretend I didn't hear it.

"Get out."

Sebastian leaned against the heavy wood of the door, his head tipped slightly. He didn't look at my face; his eyes tracked the rapid pulse jumping at the base of my throat. "You are always this friendly after a loss?"

I uncurled my fingers from my palms, forcing my hands flat against the cold metal locker behind me. "Only with men I can't stand."

"That should hurt my feelings."

"It doesn't."

"No." He shifted his weight, his skates scraping a shallow groove into the rubber matting as one corner of his mouth twitched. "Probably not."

He pushed away from the door and walked toward me, unhurried and 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, and the faint scar near the corner of his mouth. His beauty wasn't delicate; it was forged, every flaw intentional. And beneath the sweat, ice, and cold arena air was something warmer—a mix of cedar, smoke, and winter wind that 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, and 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.

I gripped the edge of the wooden bench until my knuckles went stark white. "What do you want?"

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

I reached for the straps of my chest protector, ripping the Velcro open with a harsh snap. "Whatever game you're playing, save it."

He took a sharp step forward, cutting the distance between us in half. "You think this is a game?"

I kept my hands tight against the gear, refusing to back down. "With you, everything is."

He took the final step anyway, completely absorbing the space between us until my back hit the locker with a dull metallic thud. Sebastian planted his right hand beside my head, his broad shoulder blocking out the rest of the room and caging me. Every carefully maintained wall shattered. Underneath the fury was something alive, 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.

He tilted his head, his face inches from mine as his eyes searched the movement of my mouth. "Do you always breathe this fast around men you hate?"

My hands came up, palms flat against his chest to force some distance, but he didn't budge an inch. "Move."

"No."

Cedar and smoke filled my nose, triggering something underneath it that my suppressed biology responded to like a question it had been waiting years to be asked. The back of my neck burned with the awful sensitivity of a scent gland that a triple dose of suppressants was no longer fully controlling.

Not here. Not now. Not with him.

Sebastian leaned lower, his nose brushing the hair at my temple. "You want me gone?"

"Yes."

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

I locked my jaw, keeping the truth behind my teeth.

His gaze dropped to my throat and stayed, his chest rising and falling in a heavy, deliberate rhythm against my hands. "I'm not the one trembling."

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

I tightened my grip on the fabric of his jersey, pulling him down an inch to force him to look at me. "What's wrong with you?"

"Nothing." His free hand lifted, hovering near my jaw as his fingertips barely traced the air above my skin, a gesture that felt like both a question and a threat.

"Don't," I whispered.

"You scared of me?"

"No."

His hand dropped to his side, removing the only thing keeping the space between us defined. "Good. Because I'm not trying to scare you."

The playboy ease drained out of his expression, leaving a raw, heavy intent that locked onto me like a target. He leaned in until his chest pressed directly against mine, the heat of his skin bleeding through his damp jersey. "What are you hiding from me, Elliot?"

Hearing my first name in his mouth made my knees weaken against the locker. "Nothing."

"You're a terrible liar."

"And you're a bastard."

"That too." He moved closer still, his mouth hovering just over the shell of my ear, his breath warm against my neck and directly over the scent gland that was currently betraying everything I had worked to hide.

My suppressants buckled like paper in the rain, and a heavy, dark current of raw Omega pheromones spilled into the air between us, completely unsuppressed.

Sebastian went completely rigid, his eyes turning pitch-black as his nostrils flared, drinking in the scent.

"A deal is a deal," he murmured against my skin.

I tried to turn my head away from the heat of his mouth, but my body refused the command. "What deal?"

"Tonight," he said, his voice dropping to a low, gravelly register that vibrated straight through my ribs. "You belong to me."

Fire and ice hit me simultaneously, desire and terror dressed identically.

I didn't move. That was the part that would haunt me later, that for one unguarded second, my hands stayed resting against his chest, completely paralyzed by the sheer weight of his Alpha presence.

Then a heavy boot slammed into the outside wood, and the locked handle violently rattled, the metal grinding against the frame as my team tried to force their way in.

The trap had snapped shut, and the entire room smelled like my ruin.