Four days of her moans bouncing off my bedroom walls at volumes the architecture was not designed to contain. The specific, devastating,variedcatalogue of sounds that Octavia Moreau produced during sexual activity—and I’d heard the full range, because four days provided ample sampling—from the low, commanding directives she issued to the Alphas servicing her, to the higher, breathless,undonesounds she made when the control was stripped away and thewoman beneath the dominance emerged, vulnerable and needing and magnificent in her surrender.
Four days of her aroma drifting through the ventilation system with the invasive, boundary-ignoring persistence of a phenomenon that respected neither walls nor doors nor the pharmaceutical barriers I’d erected between myself and the biological reality of what was happening two floors below. The scent had saturated my bedroom. My sheets. My clothes. The air I breathed during every waking hour and every sleepless minute, filling my lungs with a signature my body recognized ascompatibleand that my medication was chemically preventing me from responding to—the olfactory equivalent of watching someone else eat the meal you’d been starving for while handcuffs kept you in your chair.
Four days of fucking hell for my sleep schedule.
And now I’m standing in a shower at three in the morning, too exhausted to train, too wired to sleep, too proud to admit that the misery is self-inflicted and too stubborn to change the conditions producing it.
Did they think I didn’t want to be down there?
Did Luka—with his smirks and hisour Octaviaand his calculated, I-know-exactly-which-buttons-to-press psychological warfare—did he actually believe I waschoosingisolation over participation? That I was sulking by preference rather than necessity? That the man who’d sent Maddox sprinting across campus mid-scrimmage to claim an Omega he hadn’t spoken to in five years was the same man who’d voluntarily lock himself in a bedroom while she was being thoroughly, enthusiastically fucked by his entire pack?
I loved that woman.
The admission materialized in the steam-thick air of the bathroom with the quiet, devastating finality of a confessionthat had been queued for years and had simply stopped waiting for permission. Past tense.Loved. The grammatical distance a coward’s hedge—a linguistic barrier erected between the statement and the more dangerous, more current, more accurate version that lived beneath it and that I was not, in this bathroom, at this hour, in this condition, prepared to upgrade to present tense.
She was the first Omega I’d envisioned a future with. Not a function—not the biological utility of an Omega’s presence in a pack, the heat management, the hormonal stabilization, the institutional requirement of designation-verified affiliation. Afuture. The word in its fullest, most vulnerable, most terrifying dimension. Mornings. Arguments. The sound of blades on ice echoing from the backyard rink while I watched from the kitchen window with coffee in my hand and the specific, uncomplicated satisfaction of a man whose home contained a person who chose to be in it.
And then I fucked it up.
The same way I fuck up everything that requires vulnerability instead of strategy. I ghosted her. The way I ghosted my father when his bankruptcy became a burden I didn’t want to carry. The way I ghosted the friendships that got too close, the relationships that got too real, the connections that started demanding emotional investment I hadn’t budgeted for. The Kael Sørensen specialty: present when the dynamic is surface-level, absent the moment depth is required.
And now I’m paying the price.
I dried off. Changed into clean sweats. The pair from the bottom drawer—the soft, fleece-lined ones I reserved for the rare occasions when my body demanded comfort and my discipline couldn’t override the request. I toweled my hairwith rough, impatient strokes and looked at myself in the mirror.
I look like shit.
The assessment was clinical and accurate. The pale complexion that normally read ascomposednow read asdepleted—the blue undertones of my skin amplified by four days of insufficient sleep, turning the area beneath my eyes into bruised crescents that looked less like fatigue and more like evidence. My platinum-blonde hair, still damp, fell across my forehead without its usual architectural discipline. My eyes—pale gray, normally the color of controlled winter skies—were bloodshot. Red-threaded. The physiological receipt for a body that had been chemically prevented from resting while being biologically prevented from doing anything else.
Not going to practice today. Can’t. The coaching staff will have questions I don’t want to answer, and my reaction time in this state would be a liability in the crease. One misdirected slap shot and I’m concussed because my reflexes are operating at approximately forty percent of their standard speed.
I am headed for the bed. The plan was elementary: collapse, force the nervous system into submission through sheer exhaustion, achieve a minimum of four hours of unconsciousness through whatever combination of fatigue and Epsom salts andwhatever people did for relaxation these dayscould be assembled from the resources available. Sleep. The simple, essential, should-not-be-complicated biological function that my body had been denied by the symphonic collaboration of rut blockers, Omega pheromones, and the specific, personalized torture of hearing the woman he loved being pleasured by other men through a ventilation system he was now considering demolishing with a hockey stick.
Because they weren’t just kissing her down there. They weren’t doing the bare minimum.
I’d heard enough through the floorboards and the ductwork to assemble a comprehensive audio profile of what had been occurring in the bedroom below mine. The rhythm of the bed frame. The specific, identifiable sounds of Luka’s growls—possessive, territorial, the Alpha-in-charge frequency that I recognized from ice time and that was now being deployed in a context that made my jaw clench until my molars protested. Maddox’s deeper, quieter contributions—the enforcer’s voice, usually reserved and minimal, producing sounds I’d never heard from him in three years of shared living. Renzo’s laughter—because the man laughed during sex, the playful, bright, unbothered sound of someone who approached intimacy the way he approached the ice: with joy and zero self-consciousness.
And Octavia.
Her voice had been the constant. The thread running through every phase of the four-day cycle—the commands, the moans, the breathless laughter, the moments of quiet that were somehow louder than the noise because the silence meant she was being held, or kissed, or looked at with the kind of focused attention that required no sound to be devastating. Her demands—and shedemanded, because Octavia Moreau did not request during sex the way she did not request on the ice; sheinstructed, shedirected, she commanded with the sovereign authority of a woman who knew what she wanted and considered ambiguity a waste of time—had filtered through the floor with enough clarity that I could have transcribed them.
And I could only imagine what it would be like.
To be ordered by her. To receive the directives instead ofoverhearing them. To be the Alpha, she pointed at and said, " Kneel, " and to discover—as Luka had discovered on a frat house floor, as Renzo had apparently discovered in a bedroom that shared my ventilation system—that obeying Octavia Moreau was not submission. It was a privilege.
I hate taking orders from anyone else. Coach struggles to get me to execute a standard drill modification. My packmates have learned that suggesting a change to my routine is an exercise in futility that costs more energy than it produces. I have been, for the entirety of my adult life, the man who gives directions and the man who follows his own.
But tell me that Moreau walked into this room right now and told me to get on my knees and beg, and I would do it.
I’d do it the way Luka did it at that party. Without checking who was watching. Without calculating the social cost. Without the strategic, chess-player’s assessment that I apply to every other decision in my life.
Because watching him do it—watching from across that crowded room as the goaltender who’d once lain in my bed in Stockholm dropped to his knees on a dirty floor and was kissed by Octavia like she was transferring life force through her lips—had been the most honest thing I’d witnessed in years. And the jealousy that it produced wasn’t singular. Wasn’t aimed at one of them. Was aimed at BOTH—at the connection between them, at the fearlessness of the public display, at the thing they had that I’d walked away from twice: once with her, once with him.
I massaged the residual ache of the failed knot with a gentleness my frustration didn’t want to grant. Pressed my forehead against the bathroom door. Breathed.
I hate this feeling. The post-attempt crash. The wash of humiliation that settles over you like a cold sheet when your body fails to complete a function it was built to perform, and the failure feelsless medical than personal—as if the blockers aren’t the problem, as if YOU’RE the problem, as if the inability to climax properly is a referendum on your viability as an Alpha rather than a side effect listed on page three of a pharmaceutical insert you were too desperate to read.
I want to be normal.
