This eye roll is casual.
Unguarded. The rolling motion of eyes that are responding to social stimuli without consulting the void’s authorization protocol first. As though some part of her facial control system has decided that this particular room, with these particular people, at this particular moment, can be trusted with an unfiltered response.
Intriguing.
The word keeps applying itself to things she does.
I should find a different word.
I’m not going to.
“There’s no vibes,” she says. The flat register is back—the void reasserting its authority over an output channel that briefly escaped its supervision. “He helped me since I woke up, and I didn’t want to bother Haw?—”
She doesn’t finish the name.
Because the owner of the name is behind her.
Hawk moves with the particular, silent velocity of a man whose feral neurology has been monitoring the conversation from the back wall and has decided, at the precise moment his name entered Victoria’s mouth, that proximity is no longer optional. He crosses the kitchen in three strides that myauditory system doesn’t register until his hand is already there—wrapping around the front of her neck.
Not aggressively. Not the grip of a man asserting dominance over a body. The touch is firm but measured—the particular hold of fingers that know this throat intimately, that have mapped its contours and its pulse points and the specific pressure that transitions from contact to control without crossing into pain. His palm curves against the front of her neck, fingers spanning from one side of her jaw to the other, and the grip tilts her head backward—forcing her gaze up, forcing her chin to lift, forcing her line of sight from the horizontal plane of the kitchen island to the vertical axis that terminates at his face.
He kisses her.
Not gently. Not the exploratory, permission-seeking contact of a first kiss or an uncertain kiss or the kind of kiss that people perform when they’re conscious of an audience and calibrating their intensity accordingly. This is adeclaration—his mouth finding hers from above, the angle aggressive, the pressure comprehensive, the kiss of a man who has spent the last several hours unable to do this and is compensating for the deficit with an urgency that makes the contact look less like affection and more like sustenance.
Victoria’s body responds before her mind does. Her shoulders, which have been carrying the particular tension of a woman who is surrounded by Alphas she hasn’t fully vetted, release. The rigid line of her spine softens. Her left hand—the one closest to him—lifts from the island’s surface and finds his wrist, her fingers wrapping the joint with a grip that is not pulling him closer and not pushing him away butholding—anchoring herself to the contact the way a person anchors to something stable during an earthquake.
If that isn’t a declaration of love, I don’t know what is.
I watch them.
Not with discomfort. Not with the particular, performative disinterest that most people deploy when they witness intimacy between strangers and want to communicate that they’re civilized enough not to stare. I watch them with the clinical attention that I apply to phenomena that interest me—the biomechanics of the grip, the neurochemical exchange visible through posture changes, the way her scent—cold iris and night rain—deepens in the moment of contact, as though the chemical response to his proximity is measurable through olfactory output.
It doesn’t make me jealous.
Not exactly.
What it makes me is?—
Competitive.
The observation is unexpected and, upon reflection, accurate. I’m not envious of what Hawk has with her. I’m curious about what it would take to produce a similar response from her with a different set of inputs. Whether the shoulder release and the spine softening and the hand finding the wrist would occur with a different touch. Whether the void’s defensive perimeter, which apparently admits Hawk without challenge, would admit someone else under different conditions.
Whether I could make her moan into my mouth and quiver at my touch in a way that makes this possessive display look like a preamble rather than a climax.
The thought is?—
Not clinical.
Not clinical at all.
I file it away for later examination under conditions that don’t include my brother’s grin in my peripheral vision.
Lucien’s grin.
I notice it from the corner of my eye—the full, devastating, shit-eating expression of a twin who has been watching my face during the kiss and has read something in it that I didn’t intend to broadcast. His gray-blue eyes are bright. His smirk has evolved into a grin that carries the particular delight of a man who has identified leverage and is already calculating the optimal moment to deploy it.
I elbow him in the gut.
