“Kael,” I corrected, my voice strained with the effort of maintaining both composure and basic respiratory function. “His name isKael.”
“Yeah, whatever.” Candy waved a dismissive hand through the air, the gesture carrying the energy of a woman who had decided that the phonetic distinction between a leafy green vegetable and a six-foot-four Alpha with storm-colored eyes was beneath her attention span. “Same shit.”
She pulled her phone from the carpet and began scrolling with the focused, predatory efficiency of someone who had already located her target and was simply navigating to the confirmation.
“Isn’t hehere?”
I choked.
Not the polite, throat-clearing kind of choke that could be disguised as a cough and dismissed with a wave. Thefullkind. The kind where protein shake evacuated my body through mynose—a warm, vanilla-scented stream of humiliation that burned the inside of my nostrils and splattered onto the front of my sweatshirt with a wet, damning finality that left zero room for dignified recovery.
Candy’s reaction was instantaneous and spectacularly unhelpful.
“Wellfuck,” she hollered, her voice cracking with barely suppressed laughter as she watched me sputter and cough and swipe frantically at my face with the sleeve of my hoodie. “My bad. I should have timed that better.”
“Youthink?” I wheezed, my eyes watering, my sinuses burning with the acrid aftermath of nasally expelled whey protein. I pressed the heel of my palm against my forehead and glared at her through the blur of involuntary tears. “You can’t just—you don’t justdropthat while someone is drinking?—”
But my gaze had already landed on her phone screen.
And every word in my vocabulary evaporated.
The image was recent. Campus media, from the look of the professional lighting and the Olympia Academy watermark in the lower corner. A roster feature—the kind the academy’s athletics department published to generate buzz ahead of tryout season.
And there he was.
Kael Sørensen.
Platinum-blonde hair with silver-white streaks cropped close at the sides and left longer on top, those distinctive silver-white streaks spiking through the crown like frost on a windowpane. The sharp jaw that looked like it had been engineered by someone who held a personal grudge against softness. Pale gray eyes staring directly into the camera with the unblinking, bone-level composure of a man who had never once in his life been startled by his own reflection.
He looked like winter had decided to take human form and then been mildly inconvenienced by the requirement to wear a hockey jersey.
“Wait a damn minute.” I snatched the phone from Candy’s hand, ignoring her indignant yelp, and brought the screen closer to my face as if reducing the distance might somehow alter the reality being presented. “Is that him?”
My pulse had relocated to my throat. The scent memory hit me before the visual had finished processing—phantom, unbidden, butvivid: frosted pine and cold steel and the deep, warming finish of aged whiskey. A scent I hadn’t physically encountered in five years but that my Omega receptors had apparently preserved in high-definition archival storage, ready to deploy at the slightest provocation.
Bastard still looks like that. The audacity.
Candy nodded, pulling herself out of the splits with afluid motion that transitioned seamlessly into a cross-legged seat—because her body apparently treated structural impossibilities as suggestions. “IknewI recognized him. Everyone on campus is talking about him and his pack. The Ironcrest line.” She leaned forward, elbows on her knees, freckled face alight with the conspiratorial energy of a woman delivering intelligence briefing. “Apparently, they’re being positioned as the frontrunners for the Winter Games roster. The coaching staff is treating them like the chosen set—first pick for ice time, private strategy sessions, the whole preferential treatment package.”
I scrolled. More photos loaded beneath the first—additional roster features, action shots from what appeared to be an intrasquad scrimmage. Kael at center ice, stick in hand, his posture carrying the effortless authority of a captain who’d never needed to raise his voice because his presence did the volume control for him. Beside him, other jerseys. Other faces I didn’t recognize.
“But they haven’t filled the full team yet,” Candy continued, plucking a stray thread from the knee of her leotard. “Waiting for more recruits to arrive from international programs, apparently. Transfers, scouted players, the whole pipeline. Olympia Academy isn’t playing games when it comes to assembling the right roster—” She paused for emphasis, letting the next words land with intention. “Because nobody thought Kael Sørensen would return to the ice.”
I looked up from the phone. “Why wouldn’t he?”
The question left my mouth and I heard it—heard the genuine confusion in my own voice, the bewilderment of a woman who had once known this man’s body as intimately as her own and yet had somehow missed entire chapters ofhis story. And the realization landed with a dull, familiar ache.
I don’t know the lore.
I’d fucked him. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner—and occasionally as a midnight snack when the heat suppressants wore thin and his scent drifted under my door like an invitation I was physiologically incapable of declining. We’d gone from strangers to fuck buddies to something thatalmostresembled a friendship—late-night conversations that stretched past the boundaries of pillow talk, shared meals that lasted longer than the sex preceding them, a gradual, unspoken accumulation of intimacy that neither of us had been brave enough to name.
And then we’d gone back to strangers. Swiftly. Completely. With the kind of clean, surgical severance that only happened when both parties agreed—silently, mutually—to pretend the connection had never existed.
The trajectory of young adult love. Fuck buddies. Friends. Strangers. In that order, in record time, with no intermission and no refund policy.
It was nothing like the stories. Nothing like the cozy romances I read with embarrassing frequency—the small-town second-chance narratives where the Alpha showed up with a groveling apology and a grand gesture and the Omega forgave him because the prose told her to. Real life, especially for Omegas, operated on a different script. One where the grand gesture never materialized, the apology arrived as a social media like three months too late, and the only second chance you got was the chance to learn the same lesson with a different Alpha who’d eventually disappoint you in the same fundamental ways.
Hell to the no.
