He leaned forward. Not far. Just enough that his voice reached my ear at a volume designed for an audience of one.
“I’m only a bottom for you, Diamond.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Heat surged to my cheeks with the speed and subtlety of a forest fire in a drought. I could feel the blush climbing—neck, jaw, cheekbones, the tips of my ears—a traitorous, full-body thermal event that my Omega biology produced in response to Alpha vocal frequencies delivered at close range and that absolutely no amount of willpower, breathing technique, or feminist theory could suppress.
I huffed. Turned my face away. Fixed my gaze on a particularly uninteresting section of corridor wall and pretended—with the conviction of someone who knew they were failing and had decided to commit to the performance regardless—that the warmth flooding my face was a temperature-regulation issue and not a physiological response to a man whispering about sexual positions in my ear while another man who’d once fucked me into multiple calendar weeks of recovery stood two feet away looking like winter had filed a noise complaint.
“I’m going to pretend,” I announced, addressing neither of them and both of them and possibly the fluorescent light fixture above, “that I didn’t clock any of this. Because I can smell the drama a mile away, and I have neither the time nor the emotional bandwidth to unpack whatever thefuckis happening between you two.”
Kael, who had apparently located his vocal cords in the rubble of his composure, straightened to his full height—which was excessive, unnecessary, and clearly designed to remind everyone present that he occupied more vertical space than the conversation warranted.
“I’m not fucking gay.”
The declaration was delivered with the rigid, over-enunciated emphasis of a man who had just been asked to deny a charge he found personally offensive, legallybaseless, and factually irrelevant, and who was choosing to address it with the same energy he brought to disputed penalty calls: loud, definitive, and directed at no one in particular.
I rolled my eyes. Again. At this rate, my ocular muscles were going to qualify for their own Olympic event.
“No shit.” My tone was flat. Clinical. The verbal equivalent of reading a lab result aloud. “You’re bi. Because youtotallydon’t mind pussy, playboy.”
A growl. Low, rumbling, originating from a depth in his chest that was less vocal and more geological—the sound of tectonic frustration being processed through an Alpha’s larynx. The frosted-pine note in his scent spiked, sharpening in the cold corridor air the way a blade sharpened on a whetstone—the automatic, pheromone-level response of an Alpha whose composure was being systematically dismantled by an Omega half his size.
“I’m not a playboy either.”
I shrugged. One shoulder. Minimal effort. The gestural equivalent of the wordirrelevant.
“Not my business.” I met his gray eyes with a directness that I hoped communicated the full scope of my indifference, though the traitorous blush still lingering on my cheekbones was probably undermining the delivery. “Or my problem.”
Kael’s jaw tightened. The pale eyes narrowed to a gauge that would have made a lesser woman reconsider her life choices and a smarter woman take a step backward. I was neither.
“Itcouldbe your business,” he said, and his voice had dropped again—not to the sub-bass of territorial aggression but to a lower, more dangerous register that I recognized from years ago. The frequency he used when he was beinghonest and hated himself for it. “If you were a normal Omega and actually tried to be more submissive.”
Oh.
Oh, he did NOT.
I laughed.
Not the polite, diplomatic kind. Therealkind—bright, sharp, carrying the serrated edge of a woman who had just been handed the most predictable, mostboring, most taxonomically Alpha response available in the conversational playbook and was going to enjoy dismantling it the way a cat enjoyed dismantling a mouse that had made the catastrophic error of entering the wrong kitchen.
“The only one I’m being submissive to,” I said, and my voice was steady, clear, carrying the projection and diction of a woman who had spent twenty years performing to audiences of thousands and understood that the best lines demanded enunciation, “is an Alpha with actual commitment skills. Andthus far—” I let my gaze travel from Kael to Luka and back, a deliberate, measured sweep that gave each of them equal time in my line of sight and equal space in the sentence that followed, “neither of you have mastered that particular skill. So have fun ranking yourselves up from your current score, which sits at a combined, cumulative, deeply embarrassingzero.”
I paused.
Looked at Kael.
“Actually—no. You’re negative one. Because you’re a douche.”
The sound that left Kael Sørensen’s mouth was not a word. It was the vocal equivalent of a blue screen error—a strangled, half-formed exhalation that lived in the no-man’s-land between indignation and disbelief, accompanied by anexpression so profoundly affronted that it could have been framed, mounted, and displayed in a gallery titledAlphas Receiving Unprecedented Feedback.
I didn’t wait for recovery.
“Now if you’ll excuse me.” I straightened my bag strap, lifted my chin, and stepped around Kael’s considerable frame with the practiced economy of a woman who had spent her career navigating around objects that were larger than her and thought they were more important. “I have shit to do.”
I made it four steps down the corridor before the addendum arrived.
I stopped. Turned. Pointed directly at Luka, who was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and an expression on his face that hovered somewhere between amused, awed, and mildly aroused—a combination I elected not to examine.
