Chapter 3: The Secret Under My Skin

Elliot POV

By the time my teammates came back into the locker room, I had my expression under control.

That was the only part of me I controlled. My skin felt wrong in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion, like a hand pressed flat against a crack in a dam with the pressure building steadily on the other side. I kept my head down, peeled off my gear with numb fingers, and answered no one.

I made myself look like a man too furious about a loss to talk. That part, at least, was true.

The guys muttered sympathy, and someone cursed Sebastian's entire bloodline, but tonight the noise barely reached me. My mind stayed trapped inside that final exchange, the phantom heat of his mouth still lingering against the shell of my ear.

A deal is a deal. Tonight, you belong to me.

Why hadn't it felt like a joke?

Night had settled hard over the city by the time I finally left the arena. My apartment was close, a bleak sanctuary against the dark. I let myself in, shoved the door shut, and turned the deadbolt with a heavy, metallic click.

I went straight to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. With my dark hair and freckles, I had the kind of face people underestimated until I gave them a reason not to, and I had worked for years to make my body tell a different story. Right now, the reflection looking back at me looked like a stranger on the verge of ruin.

Cold, ugly fear moved through me.

The warning signs had been building for weeks: worse sleep, heightened sensitivity, and scents becoming harder to ignore. My suppressants still worked, but only barely; like a hand pressed flat against a crack that was getting wider, the water was beginning to seep through.

I reached for the cabinet above the sink, pulled out the small case hidden behind prescription painkillers, and flipped it open. Inside were two things that ruled my life more than hockey ever had: suppressants and a secret.

The truth was simple enough to say and deadly enough to destroy me: I was not a Beta, but a hidden Omega. I had started suppressants young enough to pass every medical test the league required, six years of perfect discipline, and six years of it working fine.

Until Sebastian Wolfe started looking at me like he could smell blood beneath my skin.

I popped a pill from the blister pack and swallowed it dry, then, because my chest still felt tight, I took another. I braced my palms against the porcelain edge of the sink and waited for my breathing to slow.

It wasn't the first time someone had looked too long. Three weeks ago in Vancouver, a league medical officer had been waiting outside the locker room, which wasn't unusual on its own. What was unusual was the way he watched me walk past, something slower than routine, his eyes filing things away. I had clocked it, tightened my grip on my gear bag, and kept moving. I doubled my dose the next morning and told myself it was nothing.

Standing here now, with the ghost of cedar still caught somewhere in the back of my throat, I understood it had been nothing. It had been the beginning.

Then my phone lit up on the counter with an unknown number. I stared at the glowing screen, every instinct turning ice-cold, and swiped it open.

You should lock your door tonight.

The bathroom floor seemed to shift under my bare feet, and a second message arrived before I could even process the breath in my lungs.

Pretty things get stolen.

All the air left me. My first stupid thought was Sebastian- who else talked like that? It was cruelty wrapped in something almost intimate. But Sebastian didn't have my number, and if Sebastian wanted to rattle me, he did it to my face, always.

This felt different. Colder.

I walked out of the bathroom and checked the door, even though I had already secured it, then checked the windows and the security chain. My hands refused to steady, vibrating with a low, chaotic energy. I called my private doctor only to get voicemail, and I almost called my coach, but my thumb hovered over the screen and stopped.

What would I even say? I think someone knows I'm a biological fraud.

I sat on the edge of my bed, staring into the shadows. The suppressants had finally dulled the sharpest edge of what had been happening to my body all night, but something unresolved remained beneath my skin, restless and dangerous.

I hated how easily my thoughts circled back to him.

I lay down in the dark and ran the numbers the way I always did when panic threatened to become something I couldn't manage alone. What did Sebastian actually know? Not suspect, know. He knew my suppressants were failing, he knew something biological had happened between us in that locker room, and he knew I wasn't a Beta.

What he didn't know, what he couldn't know, were the specifics, the six years of forged data, the lethal dosage I took just to stay on the ice, and the medical records I had scrubbed and rebuilt from scratch at nineteen with the help of a doctor who owed my former coach a favor and had never asked a single question.

Sebastian knew the shape of the secret, not the secret itself, and that was a difference that still mattered. I held onto that thought with both hands until a thin, uneasy sleep finally, mercifully took me.

Sometime after midnight, I woke up with a violent jerk.

For one terrifying second, I didn't know why, and then I smelled it, Alpha. It wasn't physically present in the room, just caught in the ragged edges of a nightmare, but my body reacted before my brain could intervene, my heart pounding so violently it bordered on physical pain.

No one was in the apartment, and the locks were intact.

I threw off the covers, went to the window, and shoved the heavy curtain aside.

A black SUV sat directly across the street with dark windows, its engine idling as a faint cloud of exhaust rose into the freezing air. I stared at it, telling myself it was a coincidence and telling myself to breathe.

Then the passenger window rolled down.

Sebastian Wolfe leaned one massive arm out into the night and looked straight up at my apartment, straight at me, certain, like a man who had been waiting long enough and had no intention of waiting anymore. He lifted two fingers in a slow, lazy salute and smiled.

My blood ran cold. I had never given him my address, and I had never given anyone in the league my address.

And then, a different notification popped up on my screen, a message sent from a completely different number, colder, with no games in it, one final text that had arrived while I slept.

The league already has a file on you, pretty boy. You have seventy-two hours before it lands on the commissioner's desk.