I swallowed.
“So I cut ties with her. Went back on the full dose. That was more than two years ago.”
The bathroom held its breath.
The faucet dripped. The steam curled. The bathwater settled against the porcelain with the quiet, ambient sound of a surface that had absorbed the confessions deposited into its vicinity and was holding them without judgment.
She was quiet.
Not the performative quiet of a woman formulating a response. Not the loaded, about-to-detonate quiet that preceded one of her trademark verbal eviscerations. Therealquiet. The rare, held, full-body stillness of Octavia Moreau absorbing information at a depth that required her entire processing capacity and that she honored by not filling the space with premature words.
This is the first time I’ve said any of this out loud.
To anyone. Not Maddox. Not Renzo. Not the sports medicine specialist who prescribed the blockers, because the conversation with him had been clinical—symptoms, dosages, management protocols—and had never touched the emotional substructure that the medical terminology was built on top of. I’ve carried this alone. In the same rooms where I carried my pride and my composure and the specific, carefully maintained performance of a man who had everything under control. And the weight of it—the sheer, compressive, years-of-silence weight of a secret that lives in your chest and grows denser with every day you don’t release it—isleaving me now. Transferring from my body to the steam. From the steam to the air she’s breathing. From the air to the woman whose chin is on my shoulder and whose arm is around my neck and who hasn’t moved or spoken or flinched.
She spoke.
“Those blockers have bad side effects, Kael.”
The sentence was quiet. Direct. Stripped of the banter and the bickering and the Octaviana-grade theatrical energy that she deployed in public. This was the medical professional’s daughter speaking—the woman who had grown up with a father whose coaching career had included a comprehensive education in sports medicine, who had absorbed pharmacological knowledge the way she’d absorbed skating technique, and who was now applying that knowledge to the chemical compound currently failing in her Alpha’s bloodstream.
I didn’t respond.
Because I knew. The side effects were listed on page three of the pharmaceutical insert I’d been too desperate to read and had since memorized through lived experience: reduced sensitivity, impaired knotting, diminished ejaculatory function, potential hormonal rebound upon discontinuation, and—in extended-use cases exceeding two years—the risk of paradoxical overstimulation events, vasomotor instability, and the specific, dignified medical phrase for the thing that had just happened to my nose:spontaneous epistaxis secondary to vascular fragility induced by prolonged androgen modulation.
I changed the subject.
Or tried to. The captain’s instinct for controlling the direction of a conversation—the same skill that managed post-game press conferences and pack disputes and coaching-staff negotiations—attempted a redirect with the clumsy,obvious,I-don’t-want-to-discuss-this-furtherenergy of a man whose evasion techniques had been severely compromised by emotional exhaustion.
“Aren’t you on heat suppressants?”
The deflection was transparent. She saw through it immediately—I could feel the slight, amused exhale against my shoulder that indicated she’d clocked the maneuver and was choosing, for the moment, to permit it.
“Stopped.” Her voice carried the casual, medical-history-disclosure tone of a woman who discussed her pharmacological status with the same comfort she discussed her skating program—openly, technically, with the confidence of someone who understood her own biology and managed it actively rather than passively. “Because of the accident. The suppressant compounds would contraindicate with my current medication stack—the anti-inflammatories for the knee, the vestibular therapy compounds for the post-concussive residual. If I reintroduce suppressants, the interaction produces either a systemic allergic response or a seizure event. My doctor was against it. Firmly, loudly, and with the specific, medical-professional intensity of a man who did not want to see his patient back in the hospital because she’d gambled on pharmaceutical chemistry.”
She shifted behind me. Her chin adjusting on my shoulder.
“So I’m enduring heats again. Though they don’t come as frequently—two, maybe three times a year. Won’t have another until close to summer at this rate.”
I huffed.
The sound was involuntary. Loaded. Carrying the specific, compressed disappointment of a man who had just been informed that the Omega whose heat had been fillinghis house for four days would not be cycling again for months, and whose body had registered this information as a supply shortage rather than a scheduling update.
“A shame.”
She smirked against my shoulder. The movement of her lips against my skin producing a warm, curved pressure that I felt in the nerve endings of my trapezius and in the less anatomically precise region of my chest where things that shouldn’t ache were aching.
“Your loss.”
I sighed. Decided the conversation had explored enough vulnerable territory for one evening—or morning, technically, since the predawn light was beginning to gray the edges of the bathroom’s frosted window.
“Finish your bath. I’m gonna get you some clothes.”
But she didn’t let me go.
Her arm tightened around my neck. Not the headlock—not the aggressive, interrogation-grade, I-will-scream-for-reinforcements compression she’d deployed earlier. A hold. Gentle but firm. The specific,staypressure of a woman who had decided the conversation wasn’t finished and whose physical language was overriding my verbal attempt at exit the way a hand on a leash overrode a dog’s attempt to cross a street.
I stilled.
