Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Keep scrolling for a miracle.
What began as a panicked search in the heat of a parking lot bled into days, then weeks, his browser history turning into a graveyard of half-read threads and bookmarked medical abstracts. Nights he told Andrew he was studying, he was bent over his phone instead, the screen’s glow carving lines into his tired face.
Andrew bought it, of course. Why wouldn’t he? As far as he could see, Chris was just the average teenager edging into adulthood, moody, withdrawn, and restless. He figured it was the usual, the awkward flailing that came with trying to figure out who you were supposed to be after eighteen. And Chris let him believe it, let the silence carry the lie, because it was easier than explaining the truth.
Mia never noticed either. She was too busy laughing with her friends, her world orbiting school and small freedoms, safe in the belief that her older brothers had everything under control. Sometimes she’d pop her head in and ask if Chris wanted to join, and he’d smile and say he was fine. Always fine.
But he wasn’t.
His chest squeezed, breath shallow, every time he opened another forum thread that spiraled into horror stories: people who’d been caught buying uncalibrated inhibitors, dragged into court, stripped of whatever life they had; rumors of seizures, organ failure, pheromone glands burned out to uselessness. And worse, the posts that weren’t warnings but advertisements. Black-market promises. Guaranteed suppression. Full erasure. No profile needed.
He wanted to scream, to run, to tear the world apart just to make a space where he could exist without being found. Instead, he picked the phone back up with shaking hands, the screen lighting his face like a secret.
He kept scrolling.
He scrolled when he should have been sleeping, his eyes bloodshot and burning, ears pricking at every creak of the floorboards in case Andrew came to check. He scrolled in the bathroom with the door locked and the shower running just in case. He scrolled on the bus, in class, and in every stolen second he could claw out.
And every search led him deeper into the same conclusion: he needed something stronger than over-the-counter. He needed precision. Calibration. A prescription he could never risk asking for.
The thought coiled tight around his ribs, a snake squeezing slow. If he was wrong, if the doctor had missed something, if "dominant" wasn’t just a word but a trap waiting to snap shut, then one day someone would know. Someone would smell it on him, see it in the way his body reacted, and it would be over.
It built slowly, like a storm edging closer each day, until the waiting became unbearable. Weeks of scrolling turned into months, the silence inside him stretching thin, brittle, and ready to split at the seams.
He thought about giving up more times than he could count. About deleting the searches and the bookmarks, about pretending none of it mattered. But he couldn’t, not when every whisper of scent in the air made his chest tighten, not when the word ’dominant’ still scraped at him like a blade hidden under his skin.
And then, one night, buried three tabs too deep in some forgotten forum, he found it.
Not an ad, not a casual thread. A lab. Clean branding, slick promises. Private testing. No questions asked. Guaranteed results.
His stomach dropped. It was what he’d been hunting for, what he’d been terrified to find.
The price was obscene. Enough to make most people close the page in disgust. But Chris had money. Not a fortune, not a bottomless well, but enough saved, hidden carefully where Andrew would never see. The temptation pressed like a hand around his throat.
Still... what if they guessed? What if they took one look at him, at his numbers, and called the authorities? What if they sold him out before he even got the results?
He couldn’t risk that.
So he played it as smart as he could at almost nineteen years old.
He contacted them anyway, but not for the full profile. Only for the pheromone panel... the bare minimum. The one designed for alphas who wanted to check virility, for betas curious about sensitivity. The kind that wouldn’t dig too deep, wouldn’t light up red flags.
He sent the message with shaking hands, crafting it into something that sounded careless, even cocky. Didn’t have the funds for the full panel yet, in the middle of suing the state for misgendering me... long story, bad paperwork. Just need the basics while it gets sorted out.
When their reply came back, polite, efficient, and almost bored, he nearly dropped the phone. We can do that. No issue. Payment upfront.
Chris exhaled hard, shoulders shaking, his chest squeezed tight with both relief and dread. He pressed the screen to his forehead again, whispering into the glow like it could hold the words for him.
"This is it. Just the panel. Nothing more."
But even as he said it, a part of him knew this wasn’t the end of the spiral. It was only the start.
—
The clinic was smaller than he expected. Not a dingy back-alley operation, but not the gleaming marble and chrome of state-approved hospitals either. Somewhere in between. A private clinic with a license and expensive enough for those desperate for relief.
He kept waiting for the trap. For someone to look up from the desk and narrow their eyes, to call security, to pull him into a room and ask questions he couldn’t answer.
But once he swiped his card, everything changed.
The receptionist’s smile warmed, the nurse’s tone softened, the doctor barely glanced at him beyond the form on the tablet. Money smoothed everything, as it always did.
The process was unexpectedly easy. A sterile room, a cuff on his arm, a vial of blood. No small talk, nobody asking him how this happened and why. Just the sharp sting of the needle, a strip of tape, and the faint hum of a centrifuge down the hall.
"Results will be ready in about twenty minutes," the nurse said, and disappeared with the sample.
Chris sat frozen on the paper-covered bench, his heart trying to hammer through his ribs. Every sound, footsteps, doors closing, the low murmur of voices, sent his pulse skittering.
His mind was going places, imagining that they’ve found out what he was just by the color of his blood. That they would drag him away from the life he knew with a collar and a new name.
When the doctor finally came back, he held only a thin card. Not a file, not a folder, just a rectangle of stiff paper, pale blue with the clinic’s crest stamped in the corner.
Prescription.
Chris stared at it, half expecting it to burn through his skin when he took it.
It wasn’t even personalized. No name, no ID number, nothing that could tie it back to him. Just the doctor’s signature scrawled across the bottom, the medication’s name, its composition, and precise instructions on dosage.
"That’s it?" Chris asked before he could stop himself.
"That’s it." The doctor tucked the tablet back into his coat, his tone already dismissive. "You’ll only be able to use it at our partner pharmacies, but it’ll cover what you need. Expensive, but effective."
Chris’s hand tightened around the card, the edges biting into his palm. No questions. No suspicion. Just another client with money.
He walked out of the clinic with the card pressed flat against his chest like a secret brand, every step light and hollow.
For the first time in months, the weight in his lungs eased. Not gone, but shifted, dulled by the sharp relief that no one had stopped him, no one had seen through him.
Nobody cared who he was.
As long as he paid, he could exist.