Page 112 of The Price of Ice

His stomach lurched. She hadn’t said anything, but just as he’d suspected, she’d judged him for it. And how could he even blame her?Hejudged himself.

“So, like, this is how I have dealt with heats, and I’m sorry you had a bad experience, but that doesn’t make the pills bad for everyone.”

Kallen stopped next to a fenced garden, thinking. “I didn’t say they were bad,” he pointed out.

Analisa stopped too, staring him down from all of her five foot eight. “You implied it pretty clearly.”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure where you got that from, I wanted toaskyou if you felt okay on them. Because all this time I have been thinking that they are the magic solution to heats,that maybe they make you a little groggy or whatever. Or that they didn’t want me taking them because they wanted me to— to beavailable. But after my last heat... Well, I wouldn’t take them if someone said it was the only way to play hockey again.” It was only as he said it that he realised how true the words were.

She huffed. “You still not saying they are bad?” she challenged.

“They are badfor me,” he argued, trying his best not to get angry. Levy should see him now! “But if they are bad for me, they probably are bad for at leastsomeother omegas, right?” His teeth clicked as he shut his mouth. “Are they okay for you?” he forced himself to ask. Of course he was biased after what had happened to him, but hewasopen to a different perspective.

Maybe whatever genetic rarity made him good at lure also made the pills interact differently with his system.

“They areworth it,” she snarled. “Those pills mean I don’t have to depend on some piece of shit alphanotfucking up and getting me pregnant, or fuckingbonded. So yeah, I get headaches sometimes, but it’smychoice.”

His stomach fell. He’d still wanted to believe that somehow, they could be okay for other omegas, but of course they weren’t. If she’d been truly happy with them, she wouldn’t have got so angry at him inquiring about it. Having spent the last three years of his life at the mercy of alphas, some considerably shittier than others, he couldn’t even argue that it wasn’t worth a headache not to have to hope things would turn okay, not to be so utterlypowerlessand know there was nothing you could do to make your chances a little better.

He knew he couldn’t control everything in his life, but he could controlsomethings and he wanted to do his very best with those. Just stack the dice in his favour a little bit for when fortune just crashed the whole thing.

The only difference between them was that he’d taken his chances with a contract and alphas that had claimed to be his family, his protectors... and Analisa had opted for a chemical solution.

And neither of those had worked out as well as they might have hoped.

“Okay,” he told her, as gently as he could manage. His own anger had evaporated, but now he felt like he might cry instead. He knew exactly how she felt, how every omega must feel in their position. Stuck without an exit route that didn’t go through broken glass or burning coals.

Being told that love would save them, if only they gave themselves up to it. But knowing, deep down, that a person who owned you couldn’t really love you.

They’d love your body or what you could do for them, but not you.

Mini insisted they continue the walk and Analisa turned them around to head back to her house without another word. Kallen followed her.

It took him two blocks to find the courage to ask, rough and too quiet, “What if there was another way?”

She was already ahead and it took her an extra step to stop.

“Both choices right now are pretty shitty, right?” he kept going. “But I don’t think nature is out to get us, so what if we could use lure like they can use will?”

For a long moment, all he had to go on was the stiff cut of her shoulders. Then they dropped and she turned to give him a narrow-eyed look.

He could have been angry at her for it, if he hadn’t understood it so well. Of course she didn’t trust him, much less anything that gave her hope. When you were in an unbearable situation and you couldn’t get out, you couldn’t afford hope.

Hope could kill you if you let it, each disappointment a new wound that never quite healed... until you were done with it all and you couldn’t find the strength to get back up at all.

“I have no idea if it would work,” he admitted. “But it kinda... Itdidfor me. Once,” he added, laughing because he knew how stupid it sounded. He shrugged.

Analisa had grudgingly apologised for snapping at him, and Kallen had waved it away.

Two days later, he’d let her drive his mother’s car to a special meeting Taylor had set up while he went online and looked up options to get his car back from Jiro.

It wasn’t officially quitting the team, but it was a very definite step in the right direction. If anyone in the building noticed and reported it to Management, they were sure to call him and he had no idea what he’d do then. But it wasn’t unreasonable to want his car back even just for the off-season.

Mr Evans had already put his report through, and he’d predicted McKinley would get cited almost immediately as soon as a judge saw it. Kallen couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t go to Management with it the moment he did.

Whatever his lawyer had theorised, Kallen didn’t think the White Cats would reach out to him with an olive branch. But he was as protected as could be, far away from them all, at home with his parents, with the police and a lawyer he trusted on his side. If he wasn’t home, he was either with Analisa or at Fair Sport, so really...

He didn’t know how to stop bracing himself for it anyway.

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