I would lay my life on the line for this woman.
And I have known her for a cumulative total of twenty minutes.
That is either chemistry or psychosis, and I genuinely cannot tell which.
"Archie?"
My father's voice shatters the suspended moment like a fist through plate glass.
I blink. The living room reassembles itself around me. The hostile Alpha still standing two feet from Sage's face, his smirkfrozen in recalibration. The two associates on the settee, coiled and calculating. The woman on the opposite couch, Sage's mother presumably, whose composed expression has cracked just enough to reveal the genuine surprise beneath.
I turn my head over my shoulder.
Dad fills the doorway with Coach Holloway beside him. My father is six foot three, barrel-chested, built like a man who played professional hockey for twelve years before his knees surrendered and he transitioned to coaching. His graying red hair, the genetic origin of my own, is pushed back from a weathered face that is currently cycling through confusion, assessment, and the particular parental expression that communicatesyou better have a very good explanation for whatever the hell I just walked into.
Coach Holloway stands at his right shoulder, his reading glasses pushed to the top of his head, his flannel untucked on one side, his entire demeanor radiating the controlled alarm of a father who has entered a room where his daughter is being cornered by strange Alphas and another young Alpha is standing close enough to her neck to leave a scent mark.
"What's going on?" The woman on the couch adjusts her posture, smoothing her skirt with manicured fingers that do not tremble because women like her have trained the uncertainty out of their physical vocabulary. "We were having an introduction meeting. For Sage's potential pack."
Coach Holloway frowns.
The expression restructures his entire face. His brow descends like a storm front rolling across a prairie, his jaw shifts forward, and his eyes, warm and wry when he greeted us at the front door forty minutes ago, harden into the steel-gray focus of a man who has coached professional athletes through career-ending injuries and playoff collapses and is now directing that same intensity at the three men sitting in his living room.
He is going to say words. I can see them forming behind his teeth. Words that will be directed at his wife, at the three Alphas, at the situation he clearly did not authorize and is furious to have discovered. Words that will initiate a confrontation between parents that will consume the room's oxygen and leave Sage standing in the middle of it, caught between two opposing forces that have been using her as a bargaining chip since before she was old enough to understand the transaction.
I am not interested in watching that play out.
My hand finds Sage's.
Her fingers are cold from the sweat drying on her skin, calloused at the pads from years of gripping hockey sticks, the knuckles scarred with the faded evidence of fights I suspect she started and finished in equal measure. My hand closes around hers and tugs, pulling her against my side with a gentle firmness that I calibrate precisely: firm enough to move her, gentle enough to give her the option to resist.
She does not resist.
She stumbles into my flank with a surprised exhale, her shoulder connecting with my chest, her scent flooding my immediate atmosphere with peppermint and grass and that maddening cherry blossom undertone that my hindbrain has been craving since Tuesday morning.
"I came to borrow Sage," I announce to the room.
The words leave my mouth with a confidence that surprises me. Steady. Declarative. The voice of someone who has a plan and expects cooperation rather than resistance, which is remarkable considering I did not have a plan three seconds ago and am currently improvising with the desperate creativity of a forward who has lost the puck behind the net and needs to generate a scoring chance from nothing.
Sage's head snaps toward me.
The expression on her face is not gratitude. It is not relief or appreciation or any of the receptive emotions one might expect from a person being extracted from a threatening situation by someone who just defended her honor.
It is a cringe.
A full, unfiltered, facial cringe that compresses her features into an arrangement communicatingwhat the absolute fuck are you doingwith a specificity that transcends language. Her green eyes narrow. Her nostrils flare. Her upper lip curls in a way that suggests she is two seconds from biting my hand off at the wrist.
And it is the funniest thing I have seen in months.
A smirk breaks free from the corner of my mouth before I can contain it. Not a big one. Not the cocky, performative kind that Alphas deploy as social currency. A small, involuntary curl of lip that happens because her expression is genuinely, objectively hilarious, and the contrast between the gravity of the situation and the absolute disgust on her face at the idea of being borrowed by me is comedy operating at a frequency only I can hear.
"If you weren't aware," I continue, turning my attention to the room while keeping Sage's reluctant hand firmly in mine, "I received a full scholarship to the prestigious Valenridge University. The sports university." I let the name land. Watch it register across the faces in the room: recognition from Coach Holloway, surprise from Sage's mother, measured indifference from the three Alphas. "You know. The one that is about to redefine how Omegas are integrated into competitive athletics."
I pause on purpose. Let the silence do its work.
"I met Sage a few days ago, and she offered to tutor me."
Sage is gawking at me now.
