The blade went in clean and came out bloody, and I deserved every millimeter of the incision. She wasn’t wrong. The worldhadforgotten. I had forgotten—or worse, I’dchosennot to remember, which was a different species of abandonment entirely. Forgetting was passive. Choosing to stay away while remembering everything was active cruelty dressed in the language of self-preservation.
Two steps forward, one step back. That’s the cadence with her, and it’s going to stay that way for a long time. Maybe forever. And I don’t want her to make it easy. I don’t deserve easy. I deserve every sharp edge, every rolled eye, every verbal blade she slides between my ribs, because the alternative—her indifference, her silence, the absence of her anger—would mean she’d stopped caring. And her anger? Her anger means I still register. Still exist in theemotional landscape she’s navigating. Still matter enough to wound.
I’ll take the wounds. Every single one.
She reached the rink exit before I did.
My fault. I was moving too slowly—partly because my legs were staging a labor strike after ninety minutes of unfamiliar figure skating demands, and partly because I was distracted. Watching her walk. The way her hips moved with that unconscious, biomechanically perfect sway that was the product of twenty years of training her body to be aware of its position in space at every moment. The turquoise ends of her hair swinging against the middle of her back. The bag strap cutting a diagonal across her shoulder blade.
Focus, Petrov. You are a professional athlete. You are not a thirteen-year-old watching his first?—
She pushed the door open.
Or rather, shestartedto push the door open, and the door pushed back.
It swung inward with a force that came from the other side—someone entering as she was exiting, the timing catastrophic, the collision instantaneous. Octavia’s forward momentum met an immovable object in the doorframe, and the impact produced a sharp, startled “oof” that was expelled from her lungs with the involuntary urgency of a body that had just been stopped mid-stride by a wall of solid mass.
I was behind her in two steps.
Large steps. The explosive, lateral-burst strides of a goaltender whose crease instincts had just identified a collision in his zone and whose body had responded before his brain finished processing the input. My hand found the small of her back—palm flat, fingers spread, stabilizing her center ofgravity from behind while her upper body recoiled from the impact.
But someone else had gotten there first.
A hand—large, bare-knuckled, wrapped around her wrist with a grip that was reflexive and precise and carried the unmistakable authority of a man whose physical instincts operated at a frequency most people couldn’t access. The hold was protective. Not possessive. Not aggressive. The instinctive, split-second intervention of someone who had seen a body tilting backward and had corrected the trajectory before gravity finished its work.
We were both touching her.
My palm against the small of her back. His hand around her wrist. Her body suspended between us in the doorway, held upright by two points of Alpha contact that she had not requested and could not have anticipated.
And then she took a breath.
Sharp. Audible. A single, serrated inhale that cut through the ambient noise of the corridor and the rink and the humming fluorescents with the surgical precision of a scalpel through silk. I felt it—felt her rib cage expand against my palm, felt the air enter her lungs in a rush that was not exertion and was not fear but wasrecognition. The full-body, Omega-receptor, designation-level recognition of a scent signature that had bypassed her conscious mind entirely and gone straight to the part of her biology that remembered before it was told to.
A name left her lips.
Quiet. Fractured. Carrying the weight of years and the specific, devastating timbre of a woman who had just been ambushed by her own history in a doorway she’d been trying to walk through.
“Kael?”
I looked up.
The man standing in the doorframe was a fucking monument. Six-four. Shoulders that could have been measured in architectural units. Platinum-blonde hair with silver-white streaks spiking through the crown like frost on granite. A jaw that looked like it had been carved by someone who considered softness a personal failing. And eyes—pale, storm-gray, iceberg-cold eyes—that were fixed on Octavia’s face with an intensity so focused, so absolutelylocked, that the rest of the corridor might as well have ceased to exist.
He was in full hockey gear. Practice jersey. Pads. The Ironcrest crest stitched onto his chest in silver and navy. A hockey stick in his free hand—the one that wasn’t currently wrapped around the wrist of the woman I’d spent the last ninety minutes trying to earn back.
I recognized him.
Not from the roster photos. Not from the campus buzz. From the specific, territorial, Alpha-to-Alpha frequency that his scent was broadcasting at a volume that could have been detected from the parking lot. Frosted pine. Cold steel. Aged whiskey. The olfactory equivalent of a no-trespassing sign written in a language every Alpha was born fluent in.
Kael Sørensen.
Captain of the Ironcrest line. The man whose pack had been earmarked for Olympic gold. And he was holding her wrist like he’d never let go of it in the first place.
Mother fucking hell.
CHAPTER 7
Alpha Sandwich
