He doesn’t let me finish.
His mouth meets mine before the insult completes, swallowing the final syllable with a kiss that is not gentle and is not tentative and is not the careful, permission-seeking contact of a man testing the waters.
It’s firm.
Both of his hands are on my face now—the second having found my other cheek during the fraction of a second between my consent and his action, framing my jaw with a grip that communicates everything his words couldn’t. His lips press against mine with the absolute, committed pressure of a man who has been wanting to do this for years and has decided that the time for hesitation expired approximately when a car bomb nearly killed the person he was hesitating over.
And something inside me?—
Something ancient. Something that has been locked in a room since the academy, kept behind a door markedDO NOT OPEN BECAUSE YOU WILL NOT SURVIVE WHAT’S INSIDE?—
Detonates.
Not the violence of the car bomb. Not the destructive, shrapnel-throwing force of an explosion designed to end things. The opposite. The force of something expanding—rushing outward through every corridor I’d sealed, every room I’dlocked, every chamber of my chest that I’d emptied and boarded up and declared permanently uninhabitable.
I kiss him back.
My hand finds his wrist—the one attached to the hand on my right cheek—and grips it. Not pulling him away. Holding him there. Anchoring the contact with the same desperation that his arms had shown during the blast—don’t let go, don’t you dare let go—my fingers digging into the skin above the Norse runes as if releasing his wrist would allow the moment to escape.
And the kiss ignites.
Not slowly. Not with the gradual escalation of two people cautiously exploring unfamiliar territory. We’ve been here before. Our mouths know each other—know the angle, the pressure, the specific way his lower lip fits between both of mine, the way my upper lip traces the scar on the corner of his mouth that he got during a sparring accident in our second year when I’d accidentally caught him with an elbow and spent the next three days pretending I didn’t feel guilty about it.
This.
This is what I longed for.
What I yearned for from my previous pack and never received because they were never capable of giving it. Not the mechanics of a kiss—lips and pressure and the biological exchange of pheromones that the Alpha-Omega system uses to calibrate compatibility. Any pack can provide mechanics.
This is different.
This is the kiss of a man who means it.
Who kisses like I am everything worthy and more. The way Roman used to kiss me after we’d argued like cats and dogs, after the insults had been exhausted and the competition had been shelved and there was nothing left in the room but two people who wanted each other with an intensity that their rivalry couldn’t contain.
He moans.
Into my mouth. The sound vibrating against my lips and traveling through my jaw and down my throat and into the chest that’s already cracking. Not a performative sound—not the theatrical vocalization that some Alphas produce to signal desire. This is involuntary. Dragged from somewhere deep and private, the auditory evidence of a man who is tasting something he’s been starving for and whose body is responding before his pride can edit the response.
I don’t fight it.
When his tongue teases the seam of my lips, I let him in.
The contact deepens with the inevitability of two things that were always meant to be connected finally achieving contact—his tongue finding mine, the taste of coffee and adrenaline and the specific, biochemical signature of Roman Kade’s desire flooding my senses with information that my Omega physiology processes at a speed my conscious mind can’t match.
Our tongues entwine.
And the kiss simply…deepens. Expands. Fills the hospital room with a heat that the monitoring equipment registers as an increase in my cardiac output, the chirping accelerating to a tempo that would alarm a nurse if any were present and is instead providing the world’s most clinically intrusive soundtrack to a kiss that should have happened a decade ago.
When we break apart, we’re a breathless mess.
His forehead rests against mine. Our breathing mingles in the inch of space between our mouths—ragged, uneven, the shared respiration of two people who have just done something that neither of them can file under rivalry or competition or professional interaction. His hands are still on my face. My hand is still on his wrist.
And looking into his eyes?—
At the ice blue that isn’t cold anymore. That is hot. Burning. Carrying an intensity of hunger and tenderness and the specific, devastating combination of desire and fear that occurs when someone wants you so completely that the wanting itself has become terrifying.
It breaks me.
