Conversation. Honesty. The admission that I didn’t come to the room because I couldn’t trust my body, not because I didn’t want to be there. The explanation of the blockers. The rut. The hyperstimulation. The hallucination that had driven me to pharmaceutical management. The truth about why I ghosted her five years ago—not because I stopped wanting her, but because I started wanting her at a level that my biology couldn’t safely contain, and I chose absence over the risk of becoming the thing I feared most.
That’s a lot to say to a woman in sweats at three in the morning.
Just go to bed, Kael. Sleep. Deal with it tomorrow when you’ve had rest, and your composure is functional, and you can approach the conversation with the strategic discipline it requires.
I took a step toward the bed.
Stopped.
I can’t keep running from her.
The thought arrived with the blunt, immovable certainty of a play that had been developing for five years and had finally reached the phase where the outcome was determined by a single decision, and the decision was: move or don’t.
My packmates are in. All of them.
The evidence was comprehensive. Luka—who had gone to his knees on a frat house floor and learned her figure skating program in a week and volunteered as a fourth pack member to prevent her disqualification—was not in the process of leaving. Maddox—who had sprinted across campus in full gear and had spent the last four days discovering that the enforcer in him could be gentle and the gentle in him could be strong—had fucked her with the kind of quiet, thorough devotion that I’d heard through my floorboards and that told me, in the audio vocabulary of intimacy, that his commitment was not performative. Renzo—the playboy who didn’t get attached, who moved through Omegas the way he moved through defensive zones, with speed and zero intention of staying—had showered with her. Had made her laugh. Had discovered, if the sounds from the bedroom were any indication, that being dominated by an Omega was a preference he hadn’t known he had and was now enthusiastically pursuing.
They’re infatuated.
And I’m the only one left.
The last holdout. The captain who assembled the formation and can’t bring himself to take his position in it. The man who sent a proxy to claim her and chose the room above hers and walked into the aftermath and asked why she didn’t want him, as if the answer weren’t inscribed on every wall of his behavioral history in letters large enough to be read from the parking lot.
And I’d be the hardest one to break.
Not because of the stubbornness. Not because of the pride. Because the breaking requires honesty, and the honesty requires vulnerability, and the vulnerability requires trust, and I have spent my entire adult life ensuring that the trust I offer is conditional, revocable, and never, ever extended to its full length—because thelast time I trusted fully, the Omega I gave it to tried to dismantle my career, and the time before that, the goaltender I gave it to woke up to a cold bed and a closed door because I was too afraid to still be there when the morning forced us to discuss what the night had meant.
But she’s on my ice.
In my skates.
And the sound of her blades through my cracked window is the most honest thing I’ve heard in five years.
I sighed. The exhale was long, pressurized, carrying the specific frequency of a man whose resistance had been structural and whose structure had just encountered a force it couldn’t withstand. I clenched my fists. Unclenched them. Clenched them again—the oscillation of a body negotiating with itself, the muscles wanting to move and the fear wanting to stay and the man in the middle trying to determine which directive was louder.
The blades sang outside the window. Another edge. Another arc. The moonlight catching the Gold Seal chrome and scatters it like thrown stars.
I turned toward the door.
My feet found the hallway. The stairs. The dark, quiet, Omega-scented descent to the main floor where the mudroom waited with its rack of hockey skates and its shelves of gear and the specific, familiar pair of Bauer Supremes that I’d been lacing since my first year of competitive hockey and that were sitting on the second shelf from the bottom, exactly where I’d left them.
Knowing damn well where my skates were.
CHAPTER 23
Sixty Letters
~OCTAVIA~
“The fall wasn’t the worst part.The worst part was finding out who pushed.”
The music followed me across the ice.
“Masters” by Perlo—a slow, aching, piano-driven ballad that I’d queued on my phone before stepping onto the rink, the device tucked into the pocket of the oversized sweats that pooled at my ankles and bunched at my waist and carried, in every fiber of their fleece-lined interior, a scent that was not Maddox’s.
Frosted pine. Cold steel. Aged whiskey.
These are Kael’s sweats.
