I bite my lip.
Hard enough to feel the pressure. Hard enough to redirect the surge of heat that his expression sends cascading through my abdomen into something manageable, converting attraction into physical sensation the way athletes convert pain into performance. My eyes narrow into a glare that I hold with the focused intensity of a goaltender tracking a puck through traffic.
He meets it without flinching. Without blinking. Those green eyes absorbing my hostility and reflecting it back as interest, converting my aggression into data, processing my defiance the way his brain processes everything: carefully, thoroughly, with conclusions he keeps to himself.
Then he laughs.
A real one. Not a chuckle or a huff or a controlled exhalation through the nose. A genuine laugh that reshapes his entire face, crinkling the skin around his eyes, deepening the dimples, making him look younger and warmer and infinitely more dangerous than the quiet nobody he pretends to be.
He walks toward me.
Each step deliberate, unhurried, covering the distance between the us with the measured pace of someone who knows exactly how much space he is consuming and is consuming it on purpose. His undershirt stretches across his chest with each stride, the white cotton luminous against the freckled skin of his arms.
He stops close enough for his scent to wrap around me in an invisible embrace. Close enough for the warmth radiating from his body to mingle with the residual heat of my shower-flushed skin. Close enough for me to see the individual variations of green in his irises: moss at the outer ring, jade in the middle, a ring of gold so bright it looks backlit.
He leans down.
His mouth arrives at my ear with a proximity that converts speech into sensation, the words landing against the shell of my ear as vibrations before my brain has time to process them as language.
"I kind of like that defiance of yours." The whisper is warm. Rough at the edges, like gravel smoothed by water. "But don't let any other Alphas walk over you, Wildcard." A pause. Deliberate.The space between sentences filled with the sound of my own pulse. "I may have to step in."
The goosebumps return.
Full cascade. Starting at the ear his breath just touched and rolling down my neck, across my shoulder, along the length of my arm to the fingertips still clutching the Valenridge acceptance letter. Every follicle on the left side of my body responds independently, each one a tiny muscle contracting in response to a stimulus my nervous system has categorized as simultaneously threatening and irresistible.
He pulls away.
The distance returns in increments, his warmth receding from my airspace degree by degree, his scent thinning from enveloping to lingering. He straightens, crosses the room in four strides, and reaches the door with the silent efficiency I am beginning to understand is not a skill he developed but a quality he was born with. Some people are loud. Some people are quiet. Archie Hale Rosedale exists in a frequency that rooms do not register until he chooses to be registered.
His hand lands on the doorknob.
He turns.
"Congrats on the entry."
The words are genuine. Stripped of the banter and the provocation and the layered verbal sparring that has constituted ninety percent of our interaction. A clean, undecorated acknowledgment of an achievement that matters, delivered with the simplicity of someone who understands exactly how much this acceptance letter represents because he is holding a similar one and knows the weight.
Then his expression shifts.
The warmth cools. The openness closes. I watch it happen in real time: the green eyes receding behind whatever barrier hemaintains between the person he is in this room and the person he presents to the world outside it. A door closing behind a door.
"Pretend you don't know me, though." His voice has flattened back to baseline. The measured, unremarkable cadence of a nobody who does not fight and does not kiss and does not whisper provocative things into Omega girls' ears while they hold acceptance letters in trembling hands. "I don't act like this anywhere else."
My mouth opens to argue.
To protest the absurdity of being told to pretend that the last hour did not happen. To demand an explanation for why a man who just defended me from predators and kissed me senseless and called me Wildcard with a tenderness that made my hindbrain purr would then stand at my door and ask me to erase him from my public memory like footage being scrubbed from a security camera.
But he is gone.
The door clicks shut behind him with the quiet, definitive sound of a period placed at the end of a sentence I was not finished reading.
I stand in the center of my bedroom.
Alone.
His shirt is on my shoulder. His scent is in my lungs. His words are lodged in the tissue of my inner ear, still vibrating, still warm, still carrying the specific frequency of a whisper designed to be heard by one person and remembered by that person indefinitely.
Pretend you don't know me.
