The placement was instinctive—Alpha possessive, the broad span of my palm settling against the column of her neck with a pressure that was firm without being restrictive, present without being punishing. My thumb rested against the pulse point beneath her jaw, where her heartbeat kicked against my skin at a tempo that matched the bass line and exceeded the recommended rate for non-emergencies. Her head was tilted back against my shoulder. Her eyes half-closed. Her mouth open, breathing hard, the red lipstick smeared from our earlier exchange into a crimson geography that mapped every kiss and near-miss of the past hour.
I didn’t know how long we’d been kissing in the middle of this dance floor, either. Time had stopped operating in alinear fashion approximately three drinks ago and was now functioning in a loop—kiss, dance, grind, kiss, dance, grind—each revolution indistinguishable from the last, each one burning hotter than the one before.
I could have my arms around her all night and die happy.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the realization that’s been building since the moment I saw her crouched on the ice in a fetal position at five this morning. I’ve been searching. For five years, I’ve been searching for some approximation of this—some replacement, some substitute, some woman whose scent and whose body and whose sharp, devastating, uncompromising mind could fill the space that Octavia carved into me the night we met in Halifax. And the search produced nothing. An empty succession of interactions that I entered hoping they’d feel like this and exited knowing they never would.
No Omega came close.
Not one.
I caught his scent before my brain registered the source.
Frosted pine. Arriving through the party’s saturated atmosphere with the cutting, unmistakable clarity of a blade through silk. Cold steel following—that surgical, temperature-less metallic note that I’d first encountered three years ago in a hotel room in Stockholm and hadn’t been able to scrub from my scent memory since, regardless of the distance I’d put between myself and its origin. And beneath both, completing the signature with the quiet, devastating finish of an aged spirit meeting the tongue: whiskey. The kind that had spent years in the dark becoming what it was.
Kael.
The name landed in my awareness with the blunt, complex weight of a puck hitting the back of the net—the play you saw developing, that you tracked through everyphase, that your instincts told you would arrive at this exact trajectory, and that you still couldn’t stop.
I didn’t open my eyes.
Kept them closed. Kept my forehead pressed against the crown of Octavia’s head, her damp curls against my skin, her scent filling my lungs with every breath. Kept the moment sealed for one more second before the complication entered the frame and rearranged the emotional geometry of the evening.
I don’t know whether to groan in frustration or be fucking thrilled.
The ambivalence was the thing. Theboth. The simultaneous, contradictory impulses firing in parallel—the territorial Alpha instinct that wanted this dance floor, this woman, this moment to remain a closed system; and the other instinct, the one I was less willing to name, that felt his presence in the room like a frequency my body was tuned to receive and couldn’t switch off.
Part of me wants him to see this. Wants him to stand at the edge of this crowd and watch me hold the woman he walked away from and feel, in his frozen, controlled, too-proud-to-bend chest, exactly what it feels like to be on the outside of a thing you discarded.
And part of me wants him closer.
Which is the part I don’t talk about.
I sensed his presence without opening my eyes. The specific, atmospheric shift that Kael Sørensen produced when he entered a room—the temperature dropping a degree, the ambient energy tightening, the other Alphas in the vicinity unconsciously adjusting their posture and their volume the way lesser bodies adjusted when a larger gravitational force entered the system. I couldn’t determine thedistance. Couldn’t tell if he was watching from the perimeter of the dance floor with those pale, calculating, miss-nothing eyes, or if he was closer—near enough to count the drops of sweat on my collar, near enough to see the placement of my hand on Octavia’s throat, near enough to smellheronmeandmeonherand to understand, with the strategic mind that made him the most dangerous captain in this academy, exactly what that scent transfer signified.
Shouldn’t care.
We’re not a thing. Haven’t been. Weren’t, technically, ever—because a thing requires acknowledgment, and Kael Sørensen never acknowledged it. Not publicly. Not privately. Not in the morning after Stockholm when I’d woken in his hotel room with his scent saturating the sheets and his side of the bed cold and the door closed and no note, no text, no indication that the previous night had been anything other than a controlled experiment he’d decided not to replicate.
The fucker didn’t have the courage to publicly be okay with bending both ways.
And that was a one-time thing. One night. One hotel room. One series of decisions made in the dark that felt, at the time, like the most honest thing either of us had ever done—and that was reclassified, by morning, into the category of things that Kael Sørensen did not discuss, did not repeat, and did not permit to exist in the narrative of who he was.
Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
His rejection. The silence afterward. The way he’d looked at me in the hallway at the next tournament—through me, past me, the pale gray eyes carrying the specific, controlled blankness of a man who had decided that the person in front of him didn’t exist because acknowledging their existence required acknowledgingwhat had happened between them, and acknowledging what had happened required courage he didn’t have.
That hurt as bad as anything I’ve experienced on the ice. And maybe it makes me understand—with a clarity that the tequila has stripped of its usual defensive padding—exactly how much pain I must have caused Octavia, too.
Different mechanism. Same wound. Walking away from someone who trusted you with their body and their vulnerability and their unguarded, three-in-the-morning self, and choosing your own comfort over their pain.
Kael did it to me. I did it to her.
The math is ugly, and it’s mine to carry.
The realization settled into my chest with the weight of a verdict I’d been avoiding for years, and the tequila—which had been functioning, until this moment, as a pleasant, golden sedative—turned into a truth serum that I hadn’t consented to consume.
I broke the kiss.
