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, the pressure building steadily on the other side. I kept my head down, peeled off my gear, 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. Someone cursed Sebastian's entire bloodline. Tonight it barely reached me.

My mind stayed trapped inside that final exchange.

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

So why hadn't it felt like a joke?

Night had settled hard over the city by the time I left the arena. My apartment was close. I let myself in and locked the door.

I went to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. Dark hair, freckles, the kind of face people underestimated until I gave them a reason not to. I had worked for years to make my body tell a different story.

Right now, it was telling me I couldn't afford it.

Cold, ugly fear moved through me.

The warning signs had been building for weeks. Worse sleep. Heightened sensitivity. Scents are becoming harder to ignore. My suppressants still worked, but only barely, like a hand pressed flat against a crack that was getting wider.

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.

I was an Omega. A hidden one. I had started suppressants young enough to pass every medical test the league required. Six years of perfect discipline. Six years of it have been working fine.

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

I took a suppressant. Then took another. I braced my palms against 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. Not unusual on its own. What was unusual was the way he watched me walk past,  something slower than routine, something that filed things away. I had clocked it and kept moving.

I doubled my dose the next morning and told myself it was nothing.

Standing here now, with cedar still caught somewhere in the back of my throat, I understood it had not been nothing.

It had been the beginning.

Then my phone lit up on the counter.

Unknown number.

I stared at it. Every instinct turned cold. I opened it.

You should lock your door tonight.

The floor shifted. A second message arrived before I could think.

Pretty things get stolen.

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

This felt different. Colder.

I turned the lock even though it was already secured. Checked the windows. Checked the chain. My hands refused to steady. I called my doctor, voicemail. Almost called my coach. Stopped.

What would I say?

I sat on the edge of my bed. The suppressants had dulled the sharpest edge of what had been happening to my body all night, but something unresolved remained beneath my skin. Restless. Dangerous.

His.

I hated how easily my thoughts circled back to him.

I lay 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 he actually know? Not suspect, know. He knew my suppressants were failing. He knew something biological had happened between us in that locker room. He knew I wasn't a Beta.

What he didn't know, what he couldn't know, was the specifics. The six years. The dosage. 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.

He knew the shape of the secret. Not the secret itself. Not yet. That was a difference that still mattered. I held onto that thought with both hands until sleep finally, mercifully came.

***

Sometime after midnight, I drifted into a thin, uneasy sleep.

I woke with a jerk.

For one terrifying second, I didn't know why. Then I smelled it. Alpha. Not physically present,  just caught in the edges of memory, enough that my body reacted before my brain could intervene. My heart pounded so violently it bordered on panic.

No one was in the apartment. No one had entered.

I got out of bed and went to the window, shoved the curtain aside…

A black SUV sat across the street. Dark windows. Engine running.

I stared at it. Told myself it was a coincidence. Told myself to breathe.

The passenger window rolled down.

Sebastian Wolfe leaned one 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. I had never given anyone my address.

And on a different number, colder, with no games in it, one final text 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.