He put both hands out in front of him, palms up, fingers spread, blocking my path to the car with all the authority of a man wearing nothing but Calvin Kleins and goosebumps.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t walk away. Just—give me thirty seconds.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, shifted my weight to one hip—the left one, with that slight sideways jut that my mother called my “courtroom stance”—and arched a single eyebrow.
He knew what that meant. Five seconds. Maybe less, depending on how spectacularly he managed to piss me off in the interim.
Angelo groaned, dragging both hands down his face. “I’m not trying to purposely hang you out to dry, Tavi. I swear. I’m serious about this—about qualifying, about the program, about all of it.” He dropped his hands and met my eyes, and to his credit, the amber in his gaze had the decency to look strained. “I just needed to blow off some steam. You know? Like—you’re an Omega. You get heats and shit.”
And shit.
He said “and shit.”
I rolled my eyes so hard I’m fairly certain I caught a glimpse of my own prefrontal cortex. “And what do you get, Angelo? Ruts that send you on a horny freight train with every new Omega you meet who gives you the time of day?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.
“Wedoget ruts,” he said, as if this were news. As if I hadn’t been navigating the minefield of Alpha-Omega dynamics since I presented at fourteen. “And my actions are justifiable. She’shot, Tavi.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose between my thumb and forefinger and inhaled slowly through my teeth. The airtasted like ice crystals and the faint, distant sweetness of someone baking in the athletic nutrition lab—brown butter and toasted oats—and I let it ground me. Breathe in the bakery. Breathe out the urge to commit homicide.
“Everyoneand their aunty is hot here, Angelo.” My voice was flat. Surgical. “We’re training for the fuckingOlympics. You actually have to look decent and maintain a six-pack to even be acknowledged at this rate. Half the Betas on campus are walking around looking like marble sculptures that someone accidentally animated, and the Alphas—” I gestured at the general vicinity of his body with a level of exasperation that bordered on violence. “You’re just fucking her because she’s flexible and you have some fetish revolving around girls who can do the splits and suck cock.”
A passing Beta in a track jacket nearly tripped over the curb.
“That’s not true,” Angelo said, but the denial was weak. Watered-down. The vocal equivalent of skim milk pretending to be whole.
I uncrossed my arms, planted both hands on my hips, and leveled him with a glare that had once made a senior judge at the U.S. Figure Skating Sectionals excuse himself to get a glass of water mid-score announcement.
Angelo lasted approximately four seconds under it.
“Fuck—okay, okay.” He scrubbed the back of his neck with one hand, his jaw tight. “You’re right. I’ve got… a bit of a thing for flexible women. I’ll own that. But do you see me hitting onyou?”
I tilted my head. Just slightly. The way a cat tilts its head before deciding whether to destroy something.
He groaned—deep, guttural, genuinely pained. “Listen. If it wasn’t because you’re a terrifying fucking force of naturewhen we’re on the ice, I would’ve made a pass at you alongtime ago. But also—” He swallowed. Actually swallowed. “That douche you used to be involved with threatened to disembowel me if I tried to make a move on you. So I’ve been following the rules.”
Every cell in my body went rigid.
Don’t say his name. Don’t you dare?—
“That wasfive years ago,” I said, and the words came out sharp enough to cut glass.
Kael Sørensen.
He usually went by Kai, because apparently even hisnamehad to be abbreviated to accommodate the oversized ego housed inside that six-foot-four frame of pure, unrepentant Alpha arrogance. The mere mention of him—not even by name, just by implication, by the shadow of his existence drifting into a conversation I was already losing patience with—sent a wave of something hot and acidic crawling up the back of my throat.
Kael Sørensen was the kind of Alpha that poets wrote sonnets about and therapists built retirement funds on. Broad shoulders that blocked doorways. A jaw that could’ve been carved by someone with a personal vendetta against soft features. Platinum hair that he wore slightly too long, always falling into those pale, storm-colored eyes that had a way of making you feel like you were being studied, cataloged, and filed underminein the span of a single glance.
He was also the single most overprotective, possessive, territorial, growling waste of exceptional bone structure I’d ever had the catastrophic judgment to get between the sheets with.
And theonlyreason we’d ended up tangled together in the first place was the sheer, undeniable physics of it.Massive Alpha. Petite Omega. A dynamic so textbook it was practically a case study. I’d been twenty years old, freshly enrolled in my first elite training program, navigating the hormonal minefield of a body that had spent years being suppressed by competition-grade heat blockers. My sexual history prior to Kael had been—politely—underwhelming. A Beta in college who treated foreplay like a speed run. A fumbling encounter with another Omega during heat week that had been more confusing than satisfying.
And then Kael.
Kael, who fucked like it was a performance art piece he’d been rehearsing his entire life. Kael, who could make me forget my name, my ranking, and the entire governing body of the International Skating Union with one hand on my hip and his mouth against my neck. Kael, who was the blessing my body had been begging for—the kind of ruthless, thorough, bone-deep satisfaction that required a minimum of five business days of recovery time and left me walking like I’d just dismounted a particularly aggressive mechanical bull.
God, he was good.
