Wait.
What?
My brain—which had been operating at approximately forty percent capacity due to the dual-Alpha scent saturation, the sleep deprivation, the emotional wreckage of the morning, and the deeply unhelpful visual of being sandwiched between two men who collectively represented approximately thirteen feet and five hundred pounds of athletic Alpha—latched onto Luka’s phrasing with the sudden, laser-focused precision of a woman whose instincts had just detected a frequency worth investigating.
Kael’s response was immediate. A snarl—low, guttural, vibrating at a register that was less verbal than biological, the Alpha equivalent of a warning light flashing red.
“Nothing has changed.” His voice had dropped to the sub-bass range where statements stopped being conversational and started being territorial. “I still despise your delusional, weak as?—”
“You two fucking each other?”
The words left my mouth with the casual, incendiary precision of a match being flicked into a room that everyone had agreed wasn’t flammable.
Silence.
Complete, crystalline,deafeningsilence.
Both pairs of eyes dropped to me simultaneously. Green from behind. Gray from the front. Two Alpha gazes converging on my face with the synchronized intensity of spotlights finding a target, and the combined weight of their stares was a physical sensation—a pressure against my skin that was equal parts territorial confusion, scandalized disbelief, and the specific, arrested expression of men whose brains had just experienced a catastrophic input error and were rebooting in real time.
I crossed my arms over my chest. Shifted my weight onto one hip. Let the silence ferment for three additional seconds because timing, as any performer knew, was the difference between a joke that landed and a joke that fell flat.
“Hmm.” I tilted my head, studying them with the contemplative, slightly disappointed expression of a scientist whose hypothesis hadn’t been confirmed. “Maybe my instincts are off.”
Kael recovered first—barely.
“What,” he said, and his voice had ascended from sub-bass to a frequency that was entirely too loud for a corridor at six-forty in the morning, “in thefucking namegot you to that conclusion?”
I rolled my eyes. A full, unhurried, orbital revolution that I allowed to complete its rotation before I deigned to respond, because Kael Sørensen’s indignation was a renewable energy source and I saw no reason not to harvest it.
“Well, I don’t know.” My tone was conversational. Light.The vocal equivalent of a shrug. “Last time I checked, I clearly had flings with both of you,actually. Though Petrov had the longer streak.” I paused. Smiled. The kind of smile that was less about warmth and more about watching someone’s blood pressure spike in real time. “Obviously.”
Kael repeated the word as if I’d handed him a live grenade and he was deciding which hand to hold it in. “Obviously?”
I dismissed the echo with a wave—the same hand-through-air gesture Candy employed when discarding information she deemed beneath her processing power—and continued.
“I know you two well enough to read you both like open books. The bickering. The body language. The fact that you just described Luka’s physique with more adjectives than a Harlequin cover blurb.” I uncrossed my arms and planted both hands on my hips, settling into the stance that Angelo had once described as my “cross-examination posture” and that Candy had more accurately described as my “about to ruin someone’s whole day” posture. “So when did you start bending?”
I directed the question at Kael.
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No sound emerged. Kael Sørensen—the man who had captained hockey teams since the age of sixteen, who commanded locker rooms with a single glance, who had once silenced an entire press conference by raising one eyebrow—was standing in a corridor at six-forty-something in the morning, jaw ajar, rendered functionally mute by a five-foot-six Omega in practice leggings.
Speechless. Good. I’ve still got it.
Since the captain’s vocal cords had apparently filed forearly retirement, I turned to Luka. Arched an eyebrow—the left one, my precision instrument, calibrated for maximum interrogative impact.
“Or are you doing the bending?”
Luka’s smirk was instantaneous. Devastating. The full deployment of that quarter-turn mouth combined with the softened green eyes and the relaxed jaw of a man who had decided that if the conversation was going to combust, he was going to enjoy the warmth.
“I’m initiating the bending,” he said. And winked.
I gawked.
Briefly, involuntarily, with the genuine, unfiltered surprise of a woman who had lobbed a grenade expecting it to land in neutral territory and instead watched it detonate directly on the target with a smile.
“I’m not surprised that you’re a top,” I said, and the words came out at a lower volume than intended—more murmured than declared, more directed at the floor than at either of the two Alphas currently bookending my personal space, “but I really did want you to be a bottom.”
Luka laughed. Full, rough, the sound bouncing off the corridor walls with the bright, percussive energy of a man who had just been handed exactly the response he’d been hoping for. His eyes crinkled at the corners. His chest shook behind me—I could feel the vibration through the residual proximity of his body, which was still entirely too close for a conversation that had begun with a collision and evolved into a sexual-orientation interrogation.
