"Yup!" Her voice pitches upward with an enthusiasm so aggressively performed that it circles past convincing, through unconvincing, and arrives at a bizarre kind of charm. "Everything he said is true! Let me handle this timely matter first!"
She tugs me.
Hard.
My feet leave their planted position as her grip hauls me toward the doorway with the urgent momentum of a forward dragging a puck carrier toward the offensive zone. Her hand is a vice around my fingers, her shoulder leading the charge, her legs covering ground with the explosive speed of an athlete whose primary mode of locomotion is sprint-or-die.
She is strong as fuck.
For her frame. For any frame. This girl has a grip that could crack a walnut and a top speed that could win a foot race against most of the men I have trained with.
She catches the envelope from Jeffrey mid-stride, her free hand snatching it from his grip without breaking pace. "Thank you, Jeffrey," she breathes as she passes, the words compressed into a single exhale of genuine gratitude.
Then she stops at the doorway.
Plants her feet. Turns.
Looks directly at the three Alphas on the settee, at her mother's rigid posture and frozen expression, at the room she is leaving and the arrangement she is refusing with the kind of public defiance that will have consequences she is choosing to accept in advance.
"I'm not interested in whatever deal you're trying to make." Her voice is steady. Clear. Carrying a certainty that was not present when she entered this room fifteen minutes ago. "Find another Omega to entertain such. Like Archie emphasized, I'm into younger Alphas. And I one hundred percent agree with him."
She pauses.
Tilts her head.
And delivers the final line with a sweetness so toxic it could strip paint.
"Your cock is surely too small to shut me up into being an obedient bitch."
"WHAT?!"
Coach Holloway and my father produce the word simultaneously, at matching volume, with identical expressions of parental horror that would be funny if I had time to appreciate the comedy. But Sage is already moving, her hand locked around mine, her legs churning, her voice floating behind us like a banner towed by a speeding aircraft.
"I'm studying with Archie! Don't disturb us unless it's for food!"
The staircase blurs beneath my feet. Polished marble steps taken two at a time, her sneakers squeaking on the surface, my own shoes scrambling for traction as she tows me upward with a velocity that suggests she has been fleeing rooms in this house since childhood and has perfected the escape route through years of practice.
A hallway. Portraits on the walls. Doors flashing past in my peripheral vision. The scent of her hair, damp and dark and carrying the salt-sweet aroma of a four-hour training session, filling the narrow corridor between us as she runs and I follow and neither of us speaks because speaking would require breath and breath is currently being allocated to the sprint.
She yanks open a door at the end of the hall. Pulls me through it. Releases my hand long enough to slam the heavy wood behind us and throw the lock with a decisive click that seals us inside.
Her bedroom.
I absorb the details in a single sweep because my brain is still operating in the hyper-attentive mode that kickboxing training instilled and adrenaline has not yet released. White bedding, immaculate, probably her mother's influence. Hockey posters covering every vertical surface, probably her rebellionagainst it. A custom gear rack occupying the entire west wall, sticks and skates and rolls of tape organized in a system that makes sense to a hockey player's brain and nobody else's. A desk buried under analytics printouts and empty energy drink cans. The faint scent of her permeating every fabric surface, grass and peppermint and cherry blossom woven into the bedsheets, the curtains and the carpet beneath our feet.
Silence.
Not the tense, loaded kind from the living room. A different variety. The breathless kind that follows a sprint, where your lungs are working too hard for your mouth to participate in conversation and your body is still vibrating with the kinetic memory of rapid movement.
She turns.
Her back presses against the locked door, her shoulders rising and falling with each gulped breath. The oversized t-shirt has slipped off one shoulder during the sprint, exposing the strap of a sports bra and a collarbone that glistens with a fresh layer of sweat. Her hair is completely destroyed, navy and emerald strands plastered to her temples and her neck and one cheek, the elastic band that was holding it together having surrendered its structural duties somewhere between the living room and the second-floor hallway.
Her green eyes lock onto mine.
And the atmosphere in the room shifts.
Not gradually. Not in polite increments. The air between us changes composition in a single, molecular instant, the oxygen thickening with the combined output of two scent profiles that have been separately overwhelming and are now, in this enclosed space, behind a locked door, creating a reaction that my chemistry education did not prepare me for.
