“Once I formalized the pack with Maddox and Renzo—made it official, structured, the kind of operational unit that could support an Omega properly—they were fine with us bringing someone in. A temporary Omega. Someone whose presence would stabilize my biology and give the pack the designation balance that three Alphas without an Omega couldn’t achieve on their own.”
I trailed off. The memory of the woman I’d chosen—the figure skater from the federation circuit, the one whose name I’d excised from my vocabulary—surfacing with the specific, bile-flavored taste of a decision I regretted at every level of analysis.
“But that bitch…”
The word was unprofessional. Inaccurate. The clinical term wasmanipulative, exploitative, and deliberatelyundermining, butbitchcaptured the emotional content more efficiently than three adjectives and a compound modifier.
“She was another catastrophe.” I felt my jaw tighten—the involuntary, frustration-activated compression that my masseter performed whenever this particular archive was accessed. “The kind of Omega who wanted theaccessoriesof pack life without the substance. Money. Gifts. The social currency of being affiliated with Olympic-caliber hockey players—the Instagram posts, the courtside visibility, the bragging rights she could distribute to her friends like party favors. She wanted to sit in the stands and look decorative and broadcast our relationship status to every follower who cared.”
“What shedidn’twant,” I continued, and the distinction was the one that had turned the arrangement from disappointing to destructive, “was to bepresent. Never attended a single training session. Never watched a game from start to finish. Never tried to understand the sport that was our livelihood, the schedule that structured our existence, the discipline that defined who we were as athletes and as men. It’s…difficult. To be with someone who doesn’t appreciate your world. Who sees the jersey and the sponsorship and the media exposure and treats the career beneath it as an inconvenience that competes with their shopping schedule for your attention.”
She nodded behind me.
The motion was small—a dip of her chin against my shoulder that I felt as a warm, gentle press of contact. The gesture carried no commentary. No interruption. The quiet,I’m-listeningacknowledgment of a woman who understood, at the cellular level, what it meant to love a sport so completely that a partner’s indifference to it felt like indifferencetoyou. Her chin settled on my shoulder and stayed there—resting, grounding, the specific, unspoken intimacy of a body choosing to maintain contact because the contact itself was a form of support.
And fuck. Having her body pressed against my back—even partially, even through the tub’s marble edge, even with the wet hair dripping onto my bare skin and the steam turning both of us into damp, overheated, emotionally excavated versions of ourselves—feels so fucking good. So specifically, irreplaceably good that the memory of the years without it clarifies into a pain I can now accurately measure because I have the contrast.
I missed her. Not the concept. Not the category. HER. The specific, irreducible, couldn’t-be-substituted-by-any-other-Omega-on-the-planet her.
I continued.
Because the window was open and the truth was in motion and stopping now would leave the most important part undelivered, which would be worse than the discomfort of delivering it.
“There was a night,” I said, and my voice dropped further—lower, quieter, entering a register I hadn’t heard myself use since the morning I’d woken up in Stockholm alone and realized what I’d lost. “Where I was just…frustrated. The accumulation of months of inadequate release compounded by the blockers’ interference with the knotting mechanism and the basic, humiliating,I-am-a-functional-Alpha-who-cannot-functionally-climaxreality that the medication had produced. And I fucked her. Again and again. Trying to reach a release that the blockers kept pushing further away. I’d lowered the dose—thought the reduction would help, thought giving my biology a longer leash would allow the system to produce what the full dose was suppressing.”
A breath.
“It was just so fucking frustrating. Needing that release so desperately—not wanting it,needingit, the way your lungs need oxygen, the kind of biological demand that doesn’t negotiate or compromise or acceptclose enoughas a substitute forcompletion—and having your own chemistry prevent you from getting there. I hadn’t had a proper climax since…”
I trailed off.
Her lips pressed against my shoulder. Soft. The pout traveling through the point of contact and into the muscle beneath with the warm, involuntary tenderness of a mouth that was reacting to the hurt in my voice before the mind had formulated a verbal response.
“Since me?” she murmured.
I didn’t want to admit it.
The nod was slight. The smallest possible physical confirmation I could produce—a millimeter of downward movement, the gravitational minimum of an acknowledgment, offered to the steam-filled air above the bathwater rather than to her face because looking at her while confessing that my body hadn’t properly functioned since the last time she’d been in it was a vulnerability I couldn’t manage and a disclosure I refused to verbalize.
I won’t say it with words. The nod is enough. She’ll understand. She always understood the things I communicated through silence and motion and the specific, involuntary, can’t-be-controlled language of a body that trusted her even when my mind was busy constructing reasons not to.
She understood.
I felt it in the way her chin pressed slightly deeper into my shoulder. The way her arm tightened by a fraction around my neck. The quiet, received,I-heard-what-you-didn’t-sayshift in her breathing that told me the nod had been decoded and filed in the same archive where she kept every other piece of information I’d given her through gesture rather than grammar.
“It got to the point,” I continued, because the momentum was carrying me now and stopping would require a force I no longer possessed, “where she was tired. She wanted me to stop. And I…”
The words thickened. Caught in my throat like ice jamming a drain. The memory of that night—the desperation, the frustration, the moment where the biological demand had nearly overridden the conscious decision and my body had almost done the thing my mind was horrified by—pressed against the walls of the sentence and made the delivery feel less like speaking and more like expelling a foreign object.
“I didn’t want to stop. Because I needed the release so badly that the wanting had started to eclipse the listening. And that moment—the gap between what she was asking and what my body was demanding—made me realize…”
I saw the face again.
Not the Omega who’d been beneath me. Not the woman whose name I’d erased. Behind my eyelids, in the dark, in the space where the truth lived unedited: Octavia’s storm-gray eyes. Wide. Blurred with tears. The hallucination that had lasted one second and branded itself permanently into the neural pathway between my desire and my fear.
I dared to whisper it.
“I never wanted to do that to you.” The words were barely audible. Carried more by vibration than volume, transmitted through the contact points where her body touched mine—her chin on my shoulder, her arm around my neck, her chestagainst my back—as much as through the air between my mouth and her ear. “So why would I be okay with doing it to any other Omega? It was…a line I couldn’t cross. Couldn’triskcrossing. Not with someone whose pain I wouldn’t survive causing.”
