Chapter 41: "Why are you always so serious, Cap?"

The silence of the room returned, heavy and suffocatingly thick with the dense, unmistakable scent of frozen pine, orchid, and the sharp tang of spent release.

For a long, agonizing few minutes, the only sound was the synchronized, heavy thud of our chests rising and falling against each other.

Finally, after what felt like forever as I felt the knot throb at my entrance, the knot gradually receded.

Reid slowly pulled out of me. The sudden emptiness left my raw walls twitching in a desperate, involuntary way, but before the heavy deluge of his seed could even begin to spill out onto the sheets, his fingers brutally pressed into my opening.

I flinched, a sharp gasp catching in my throat as he plugged the wet entrance, his knuckles catching the slick on my inner thighs.

"Don’t let it leak," Reid murmured, his voice low and gravelly as he stared down at his fingers at work. A lazy, unbothered smirk pulled at his lips. "It would be such a waste after all that effort to override those pills."

I lay there, completely spent, my limbs feeling like lead weights sinking into the mattress. The loose shirt was still tangled around my chest, soaked through with a mixture of cold sweat and his heavy pheromones.

Slowly, I forced my neck to turn, my cheek sliding against the damp pillow as I looked at him. The tears were still leaking from the corners of my eyes, tracking hot lines down my temple.

"Why...?" I choked out, my voice raw, trembling with a profound, aching exhaustion. "Why do you find it... so fun to torture me? What do you get out of this?"

Reid didn’t pull his hand away. He just shifted his weight, propping his head up with his free arm as he looked down at me, his smoky grey eyes entirely clear, completely unaffected by the emotional wreck he had just made of me.

"Why are you always so serious, Cap?" he asked, his tone shifting back into that casual, snobbish rookie arrogance. He shrugged his shoulders slightly. "Can’t you just loosen up? I already agreed to your terms. I told you I’m not going to try anything when people are around, and I won’t expose you. You’re completely safe out there. Can’t you just learn to let loose for once?"

I ground my teeth together, but I didn’t have the energy to fire back.

"Think about it," Reid continued, his fingers shifting slightly inside me, keeping his semen securely sealed inside me. "Since you’ve been pretending to be a Beta all these years, you’ve never actually had sex with anyone before, right? Always so cautious. Always playing the perfect, untouchable player. You should just think of this as using me. Use my pheromones like a regular boost to your system, use my body to satisfy yourself, and stop thinking so damn hard about the semantics."

He leaned in a little closer, his eyes dropping to the slight tremble in my lower lip. "I’m not the one who’s solely enjoying this, after all. I see how your body reacts to me, Evans. You like it too. You just can’t bring yourself to admit it because you’re so stuck up, so terrified that your precious identity is going to get revealed—and probably because I’m a younger guy taking your spot at the top."

With a soft chuckle, he finally pulled his fingers out, sliding off the bed and sitting up on the edge of the mattress. He ran a hand through his blonde, messy hair, completely unbothered by his nakedness in the dim light of my bedroom.

"Life doesn’t have to be all that serious," he said, staring out toward the dark window.

My eyes closed slowly, his final words echoing through the hollow, aching quiet of my mind.

Life doesn’t have to be... all that serious.

A bitter, silent laugh caught in my chest, sending a dull throb through my bruised ribs. He could say that. He was a dominant Alpha, a prodigy rookie with the world at his feet, completely unburdened by the laws of biology or the constant, terrifying threat of losing everything he had ever worked for.

He didn’t have to navigate a world built to restrict him. He didn’t have to forge documents, take black-market drugs, or look into his sister’s worried eyes and lie just to keep a pair of skates on his feet.

For him, this was a game. For me, it was survival.

But there was one thing he was right about. My body and my inner Omega, didn’t care about the risk. It loved his touch, his Pheromones and his defilement, as if it was made just for him.

Life doesn’t have to be all that serious. But if I don’t take it seriously, I’ll get caught in a flow that could get me off the path I’ve maintained for years and into a crossroad.

And when that happens, I might find myself in serious trouble.

I began to settle into the comfort of his scent, lulling my exhausted mind into a deep, dreamless sleep before I could even try to find a way out of his cage.

The intense pain from the night had left my whole body aching.

When I finally opened my eyes, the bright morning sun was pouring through the window, hitting me right in the face, forcing me to crinkly my brows before fluttering my lashes open.

The apartment was completely quiet, except for the slow, steady breathing right beside me.

​I turned my head.

​Lying there, tangled in the messy sheets, was Reid.

​My heart did a sudden, violent skip. I instinctively tried to sit up, but the second I twisted my torso, a sharp spike of pain shot straight up my spine.

I groaned, collapsing back into the pillows and clutching my left side. The brutal way he had held me down and forced himself inside me was still very clear in my body.

​Once the initial wave of pain passed, I looked down beneath the blanket.

​I was completely clean. The sticky, humiliating slick and the remnants of his semen that usually coated my thighs after he was done with me were gone. Someone had wiped me down while I was unconscious.

​I frowned, staring at the side of his face. Did he clean me up? Since when did he care? Usually, the second he got what he wanted, he just left me to myself, watching with that snobbish amusement while I struggled to stand up. But here he was, in my bed, sleeping so peacefully and calmly that he didn’t even look like the devil he was.