He clears his throat, looking forward again.
"And most importantly, you are the first Omega to make me feel anything. I spent years thinking I was broken. That the part of me that was supposed to respond to Omegas, the biological pull, the instinct, the spark that every other Alpha described, was simply missing from my wiring. I convinced myself I was defective. That I would never feel the things my brother felt, thethings Cal felt, the things Raphaël felt when he caught you on the ice."
His jaw tightens briefly before relaxing.
"Then you showed up. And the wiring was not missing. It was waiting."
I grip his hand so tight my knuckles ache, and I have to physically press my lips together to keep the swell of emotion from escaping as a sound that would embarrass us both on a public street.
We cross at the next intersection, Etienne checking both directions with the instinctive vigilance of someone who grew up looking out for himself, guiding us to the opposite sidewalk where a row of boutiques lines the block with their lit windows glowing warm against the grey dusk. The shift in scenery is subtle but intentional, moving us from the restaurant district into a stretch of shops that cater to aesthetics and impulse purchases and the general desire to own beautiful things.
"You asked why," he continues, his eyes scanning the storefronts as we walk. "The honest answer is that I grew up in my brother's shadow."
I watch his profile. The way his jaw sets when he is about to be vulnerable. The slight furrow between his brows that appears when he is translating internal truths into spoken words, as if the act of giving voice to buried feelings requires effort.
"In our culture, especially with firstborns, they are the lead of the family. The parents invest everything in the eldest child. The attention. The resources. The pride. Anyone born after is just cargo unless the second child happens to be the first male, in which case there is a brief window of usefulness before the novelty fades." He shrugs, the gesture too casual for the weight of what he is describing. "It is gender-biased and outdated, but it is how my family operates. How a lot of families still operate, if we are being honest about the traditions people cling to."
He checks the crosswalk signal and guides us across to the boutique side, our shoulders brushing as we navigate a patch of uneven pavement.
"Growing up like that made me want to build myself into someone who never has to rely on his family for validation. Or money. Or proof that he matters." A wry smile tugs at his lips. "So I started investing at sixteen. Stocks first. Then index funds. Then, because I was sixteen and reckless and operating on the kind of arrogance that only teenagers who have been ignored possess, cryptocurrency."
I raise my eyebrows.
"I know." He laughs softly. "It sounds reckless. And it was. But I did the research. Obsessively. Stayed up until three in the morning reading whitepapers and market analyses while my family slept, poured every cent from my part-time job into Bitcoin and Ethereum when they were still cheap enough for a teenager's budget." He pauses. "And it paid off. Significantly. I hit the right coins at the right time, reinvested the returns, diversified once the volatility scared me enough to be smart about it."
I stare at him with new eyes. This quiet, gentle, journal-writing goalie who wears the same rotation of three hoodies and eats cafeteria food without complaint is sitting on a fortune he earned himself at sixteen.
"I got rich," he says, the word coming out flat and factual rather than boastful. "But my family does not really know. I keep it to myself. They did not invest in me when I was invisible, so I see no reason to let them benefit now that the investments paid dividends. That is not bitterness. It is boundaries."
Boundaries. Another word that resonates in my chest cavity like a tuning fork struck against bone.
"They only started noticing me recently because of sports," he adds, a dry edge entering his tone. "The upcomingpreliminaries have my name circulating in press coverage for the first time. The commentators enjoy comparing my composure to Bastian's volatility, my calm demeanor on the ice to his temper, and suddenly my family has opinions about my career that they never had when I was practicing alone in empty rinks at six in the morning."
I tug his hand.
Not gently. A firm, decisive pull that forces him to stop mid-stride, his momentum carrying him half a step past me before he turns back with a question in his brown eyes.
"Are you not lonely?" I ask.
The question drops between us like a coin into still water, and the ripples spread across his expression in real time. Surprise first. Then recognition. Then the quiet surrender of a man who has been asked the one question he avoids asking himself.
He stares at me.
Long and searching, his dark eyes moving across my face with the intensity of someone reading a passage they have been trying to understand for years. The streetlamp above us flickers once, casting a brief shadow across his features before steadying, and in that fractured light I see every mask he wears slip by a fraction of an inch.
Then he smiles.
Not the careful, measured smile he offers the world. A real one. Tired and honest and tinged with the kind of acceptance that only arrives after years of sitting with an ache you cannot fix.
"Yeah," he admits.
The single syllable carries the weight of a confession that has never been spoken aloud. I hear it in the texture of his voice, in the roughness at the edges that smooths itself before mostpeople would notice, in the way his hand tightens around mine as if gripping the only anchor in an open sea.
"That is why I write, actually." A nervous laugh escapes him, short and self-deprecating, the kind of laugh people use to soften truths that feel too raw for daylight. "I write to express the emotions I do not know how to say out loud. To envision what it would be like to just... fall in love. To meet people and let my guard down and not catalogue every possible exit before I have even walked through the entrance. To stop calculating the probability of pain before allowing myself the possibility of joy."
His gaze drifts to the storefronts beside us, unfocused, seeing past the lit displays into the reflection of his own thoughts.
"It is difficult. Living inside your own head all the time. Building entire worlds on paper because the real one does not have room for you. But writing has helped. That and journaling. They are the release valves I use to prevent the pressure from becoming unmanageable." His smile turns self-aware. "Maybe that is why I seem so tamed. So composed. Because the page absorbs what I cannot show. And in reality, someone who grew up the way I did, overlooked and underestimated and quietly furious about all of it, should be angrier than I present. The calm is not absence of feeling. It is the result of redirecting the storm somewhere it cannot cause collateral damage."
