The rut blockers.
The fuckingrut blockers.
Tolseratide. The pharmaceutical leash that the sports medicine specialist had prescribed two years ago with thecalm, clinical detachment of a man whose job was to manage the athlete and not the human being living inside the athlete.It will modulate the hyperstimulation, Kael. Reduce the frequency and intensity of rut episodes. Allow you to compete at the level your talent warrants without the liability of uncontrolled hormonal surges that compromise your judgment and your team’s performance.The pitch had been practical. Persuasive. Delivered in the language of competitive advantage and risk management, and I’d signed the consent form because the alternative—the reality the blockers were designed to prevent—was a thing I couldn’t afford to repeat.
What the specialist hadn’t mentioned—or had mentioned in the fine print that I’d been too desperate to read—was the cost. The blockers didn’t eliminate the drive. Didn’t suppress thewant. They suppressed the body’s ability torespondto the want, which was a fundamentally different operation and one that produced a fundamentally different kind of suffering. The desire remained. Fully intact. Broadcasting its demands with the same frequency and volume it had always maintained, pounding against the walls of a system that had been chemically locked from the inside. The sensation was maddening—a hunger that couldn’t be fed, a thirst that couldn’t be slaked, the biological equivalent of smelling a five-course meal through a window you couldn’t open.
And the knot. Theknot. The signature Alpha mechanism that was supposed to form during climax with the reliable, automatic certainty of a system designed by evolution to function without conscious intervention—reduced to a stuttering, pharmaceutical ghost of itself. Partial. Painful. Incapable of achieving the full, locking expansion that an Alpha’s body interpreted as completion and that the absence of produced a persistent, low-grade sense of failure that settledinto my chest after every attempted release and stayed there like a tenant who’d stopped paying rent but refused to vacate.
Can’t even get a few decent shots of cum out.
And I’m too embarrassed to tell anyone how bad it’s gotten.
Because the shame wasn’t the blockers themselves. The shame was the reason they existed.
Hyperstimulation syndrome. The clinical designation for Alphas whose testosterone production exceeded the standard range by a margin significant enough to qualify as a medical condition rather than a biological advantage. Rare. Affecting approximately two percent of the Alpha population. Characterized by elevated aggression, amplified territorial response, and rut cycles so intense that the normal, manageable disruption of a standard Alpha rut became, in hyper stimulated individuals, a cognitive and behavioral override that could compromise judgment, impulse control, and the fundamental distinction between desire and demand.
In plain language: my body produced double the testosterone of a standard Alpha, which meant I needed an Omega in my orbit and I needed to fuck regularly, or my brain short-circuited and I became a feral menace operating on pure, designation-level imperative—the kind of Alpha that the designation system had been designed to socialize away from and that pharmaceutical science had been developed to contain. Not a man making decisions. A body executing directives. The desperate, overriding, conscience-absent need to pin any available Omega and fuck them until the release came and the knot formed and the pressure that had been building in the circuitry finally,finallyfound its outlet.
That’s what happened. Once. One time. And it was enough to put me on medication for the rest of my competitive career.
The memory surfaced through the steam like a body rising from water.
The previous Omega. The one whose name I had excised from my vocabulary with surgical precision because keeping it meant keeping the memory attached to it, and the memory was a thing that lived in my chest like a shard of glass lodged too deep to extract. She’d been in heat. Standard cycle. The pack had been managing it—rotating shifts, Renzo and Maddox handling their share of the caretaking while I managed from the periphery, because even then, before the diagnosis, I’d known that my intensity during an Omega’s heat wasdifferent. Heavier. Carrying an urgency that the other Alphas didn’t seem to share, as if the signal her heat broadcast was being received by my biology at a higher volume and decoded with a shorter processing time.
I’d almost knotted in her.
Without consent. Without warning. Without the conscious, deliberate agreement between Alpha and Omega that knotting represented—the biological commitment, the physical lock, the designation-level bond that once formed during heat was nearly impossible to reverse. My body had initiated the sequence autonomously. The knot had begun to swell inside her while she was beneath me, and the sound she’d made—the gasp, the stiffening, the breathless, frightenednothat had cut through the hormonal fog like a hand pulling a fire alarm—had been enough. Barely enough. I’d pulled out. Managed it. Passed it off as foreplay, as a near-miss, as the kind of heat-adjacent close call that happened in pack dynamics and didn’t warrant discussion.
But that wasn’t what had frightened me.
What had frightened me—what had sent me to the sports medicine specialist within forty-eight hours with the grim, non-negotiable determination of a man seeking treatment for a condition he would not allow to recur—was what I’d seen when I’d closed my eyes during that moment.
Not her face.
Not the Omega beneath me.
Octavia’s.
Storm-gray eyes. Wide. Blurred with tears. The specific, devastating expression of a woman whose trust had been violated by the man she’d given it to, and who was begging—not demanding, not commanding,begging—him to stop. The hallucination had lasted perhaps one second. Maybe less. But the image had branded itself onto the inside of my eyelids with the permanence of a burn scar, and in the years since, it had not faded. Not once. Not for a single day.
It would break me.
If I did that to her—if the hyperstimulation overrode my control and my body took what it wanted from the one woman on this planet whose pain I couldn’t survive causing—it would destroy me in a way that no loss on the ice, no career-ending injury, no professional failure could approximate. Because Octavia Moreau could hate me from the boards and we could fuck in those sheets and she could roll her eyes and call me a douche and score my commitment skills at negative one, and all of that was survivable. All of that was the dynamic. The bickering. The friction. The specific, combative, I’ll-die-before-I-submit energy that had characterized us from the first time we’d met and that I’d privately, secretly, in the rooms of my mind that I didn’t let anyone visit, loved about us.
But if she genuinely hated me—if I pushed her boundaries, if Ibecame the thing I saw behind my eyelids that night—I would never live with myself.
I could never be that person to her.
So I took the blockers. And the blockers took everything else.
I turned the shower off.
Let the water drip from my body in the silence that followed—the steady, metered percussion of droplets hitting the tile floor, each one a tiny, rhythmic punctuation in the quiet aftermath of another failed attempt at normalcy. I stood in the steam. Breathed. Three counts in, seven counts out. The regulation pattern that the sports psychologist had prescribed for post-frustration management, which I employed with the same grim, mechanical discipline I brought to every other protocol in my life: not because it helped, but because the act of following a protocol was its own form of control, and control was the only currency I had left.
Four days.
Four days since the party. Four days since Octavia’s heat had begun in the back of an SUV and had proceeded to fill my house—myhouse, the space I’d maintained as a sanctuary of order and self-regulation—with a scent so pervasive, so relentless, so biologically targeted that it might as well have been piped directly into my bloodstream through an IV line.
