Chapter 5: Mine

Elliot POV

The world went silent.

Sebastian knew. Maybe not everything, but enough. It was there in the stillness of his body, in the way the air between us shifted from dangerous to something that had no name yet.

He had stopped playing.

"I don't know what you're talking about," I said.

"You're a bad liar when you're scared."

"I'm not scared."

"That's your biggest lie tonight."

Anger snapped through me fast enough to steady my hands. "You don't know a damn thing about me."

"No," he said. "But I know this isn't normal. The second I touched you, my whole body recognized something my brain hadn't caught up to. That doesn't happen with Betas."

I said nothing.

Sebastian took one step. I backed up before I could stop myself, spine hitting cold brick. He planted one hand beside my shoulder, not touching, just trapping, and the cedar and smoke of him hit me like a wall I had been walking toward for two years without knowing it.

Six years of triple doses. Six years of perfect discipline. All of it is useless with him this close.

"Why me?" The words left before I could stop them.

His hand tightened against the brick. "Because I can't stop looking for you. That became my problem a long time ago."

His gaze sharpened, dropping to my throat, my pulse.

"What are you using to hide it?" he asked, quiet and precise.

I looked away. "Nothing."

He caught my chin. Firm fingers, thumb pressing the edge of my jaw, and my whole body jolted like a live current had found the one wire I forgot to insulate. A sound broke from my throat that I had not given permission for. Small. Undone. Honest in a way that terrified me.

Sebastian's eyes went dark instantly.

"Elliot." Just my name. Like something he'd been carrying a long time and had finally set down.

"Let go," I whispered.

"Not yet."

I lifted my hands to push him away. They landed on his chest and stayed, because his heart was slamming. Fast and unsteady. He was not calm. His shoulders were rigid, eyes fever-bright.

This was pulling him under, too.

That undid me more than anything else.

"Tell me what you are."

My chest seized. He saw it the instant it happened.

Panic exploded. I shoved him hard, stumbled toward the door, keys scraping uselessly in shaking hands.

His voice brushed the shell of my ear , low and certain.

"You smell like mine."

Every muscle locked.

It didn't sound like a line. It sounded like biology. Like an Alpha's instinct naming what it had already decided, with the absolute conviction of something that had always been true.

I stood there while that landed. While it moved through me and found every place I had sealed shut.

Then I turned.

He was inches away. The hunger was there. So was the war. He was losing both.

"You're my Omega."

Silence.

"You're wrong," I managed.

"I'm not. I've spent two years trying to explain it away." His voice dropped. "Stop lying. Not to me. Not tonight."

I closed my eyes.

Six years. Suppressants and silence and a life built so completely around a lie that the lie had become the only self I knew. I had carried it through every game, every medical check, every grinding moment of survival.

I had carried it alone, because there had never been anyone safe enough to set it down in front of.

There still wasn't.

Except he already knew.

"If anyone finds out, I lose everything," I said. "My contract. My career. Six years, gone overnight."

"I know."

"The league doesn't allow Omegas. If that file reaches the commissioner…"

"It won't." Iron in his voice. "Not if I stop it."

"Why would you?"

He looked away for just a second. Like the answer cost him something he hadn't planned to spend.

"We were never just enemies."

Then: "Marry me."

The words hit the air and stayed.

"An Alpha's bonded mate cannot be compelled to submit to league medical review without consent. It's in the charter, original Omega rights legislation, never repealed. If you're my mate on paper, the file is useless. They cannot touch you without coming through me." His jaw was set.

"Nobody in this league is coming at me."

"You planned this."

"Since I saw the tail on you after the game. Yes." Something tightened in his expression. "The part where you make me feel like this, I did not plan that."

"And what do you get?"

"Time," he said. "To figure out what you already are to me."

I did the only thing I knew how to do with something I couldn't afford to feel.

I calculated.

He was right about the clause. I had read the charter the year I went pro, looking for the one sentence that might save me if everything went wrong. I had found it. Filed it away like a fire escape I prayed I'd never need.

If not him, who. The answer had always been no one. Six years of building my life around that answer, telling myself it was discipline, telling myself the isolation was a choice.

Standing here, I understood it had never been a choice.

It had been the loneliest thing I had ever survived.

I lifted my chin.

"Agreed."

He held out his hand.

I looked at it for one second. Then I shook it, firm, brief, the most irreversible thing I had ever done.

His fingers held mine a half-second too long. I let go first.

I went inside. Locked the door. Pressed my back against the wood in the dark.

By this time tomorrow, I would be engaged to my greatest rival. By this time next week, his husband on paper.

I had spent six years making sure no one ever got close enough to matter.

I had just invited the most dangerous man I knew to stand directly between me and everything I was afraid of.

I told myself it was a strategy.

I stood in the dark and almost believed it.