Blockers.
I frowned.
The banter dissolved. The smirk receding as the word lodged itself in my awareness with the sharp, snagging,that-doesn’t-fitquality of a puzzle piece that had been handed to me without the context needed to place it. Blockers. Pharmaceutical. Suppressive. The category of medication that athletes took when a biological function exceeded the manageable threshold and required chemical intervention to permit competitive performance.
Heat suppressants were blockers. Anti-anxiety medications were blockers. And rut blockers?—
Rut blockers.
“Blockers?” My voice dropped the teasing register entirely. Replaced it with the direct, no-deflection,I’m-asking-and-you’re-answeringtone that I deployed when the subject matter had transitioned from banter to consequence. “Why are you taking blockers?”
He frowned. Looked away. The head turning toward the far wall with the deliberate, disengaging rotation of a man physically removing his eyes from the conversation because maintaining contact would make the evasion he was attempting impossible.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
Seven words. Flat. Final. Delivered with the end-of-discussion authority that captained hockey teams and terminated press conferences, and that, in most contexts, with most people, functioned as an impenetrable boundary that the population of earth had collectively learned not to cross.
I was not most people.
My arm hooked around his neck.
The movement was fast. Wet. The specific, grappling-adjacent, I-am-a-five-foot-six-Omega-and-physics-is-my-weapon maneuver that involved leveraging my position in the tub—elevated, behind him, with the advantage of his seated posture placing his neck within reach of my arms—to loop my forearm around the front of his throat in a hold that was less chokehold and moreyou-are-not-leaving-this-conversation. Water splashed over the tub’s edge. His sweats absorbed the overflow. The position was ridiculous—a naked, post-heat Omega restraining a six-foot-four hockey captain from a bathtub—and I did not care.
He choked. Not from the pressure—the hold was firm but carefully calibrated to restrict his rotational freedomwithout actually threatening his airway—but from theaudacity. The sheer, unhinged, Octaviana-grade boldness of a woman who had heard a man sayI don’t want to talk about itand had responded by putting him in a headlock.
“Sørensen.” My mouth was close to his ear. My voice carried the low, measured,I-am-not-playingfrequency that men who knew me well recognized as the final warning before consequences became physical. “I think you’re forgetting I can kick your ass. Naked or not.”
He groaned. The sound vibrating against my forearm where it pressed to his throat.
“You realize,” he managed, his voice strained by the hold and the indignation and the deeply specific frustration of a professional athlete being physically restrained by a woman who weighed approximately a hundred pounds less than him and whose leverage advantage he was refusing to override because doing so would require applying force to an Omega his body had classified asprotectand his designation wouldn’t permit, “that you’re atiny figure skatertrying to take on a hockey player?”
“Sure,” I conceded. “Valid facts. But I have a really high-pitched scream.” I tightened the hold by approximately one percent. “And I can easily get three disoriented, sleepy Alphas in here in three seconds flat and make you look like a villain. So why thefuckare you taking blockers?”
He groaned again. Louder. The sound carrying the compressed, maxed-out exasperation of a man who had been outmaneuvered by a combination of leverage, logic, and the implicit threat of a scream that would summon reinforcements he would then need to explain his way out of—a scenario whose public-relations implications were significantly worse than disclosure.
“Can younottry to make me look like a rapist?”
The words were bitten. Raw.
Carrying a weight that exceeded the sentence’s surface-level frustration by approximately ten thousand pounds, and that landed in the steam-filled bathroom with the specific, devastating thud of a word that had been chosen not for its rhetorical value but for its personal relevance. “Why the fuck do you think I’m taking these rut blockers to begin with?”
The sentence hit me like a blade catching the ice at the wrong angle.
My arm loosened.
The hold relaxing from restraint to rest—the forearm remaining against his throat but the pressure dissolving, the grip transitioning from confrontational to something closer to an anchor as the words he’d just said reorganized themselves in my awareness and their meaning assembled into a shape I hadn’t expected.
Why do you think I’m taking these rut blockers to begin with?
Rut blockers. The pharmaceutical intervention designed to suppress the Alpha reproductive cycle. Prescribed to Alphas whose rut episodes exceed manageable parameters. Whose biology, unchecked, produces behavioral and physiological responses that compromise their control and?—
Their control.
Their control over what they do to an Omega.
Can you not try to make me look like a rapist.
Why the fuck do you think I’m taking?—
