Not sharply. Not with the abrupt, defensive jerk of a man fleeing vulnerability. With the slow, measured separation of someone who needed to look at the person in front of them and say the thing that the moment required, because the alternative—continuing to kiss her while the weight of what I’d done sat unspoken between us—was a kind of dishonesty I was no longer willing to sustain.
Our noses touched. I was towering over her—the height differential exaggerated by her backward lean against my chest, her head tilted up, her gray eyes heavy-lidded and luminous in the strobe-fractured dark. Her breathing was rapid. Her lips swollen, red, wrecked. The scent pouring off her skin was almost unbearable in its intensity—sweet andcomplex and generating a heat in my lower abdomen that made coherent thought a negotiation rather than a given.
My back against her spine. Her body molded into the contours of mine with the fluid, trusting weight of a woman who had decided, for tonight, that leaning on someone was an option she’d permit.
I whispered against her lips.
“I never should have left.”
The words were rough. Tequila-stripped. Carrying the specific, raw timbre of a confession extracted under conditions the confessor hadn’t anticipated.
“It hurt you,” I said. Not a question. A statement delivered as an acknowledgment—the verbal equivalent of signing a document I’d been refusing to read. “Didn’t it.”
She smirked.
Even now. Even with her eyes glazed with desire and her body molten against mine and the bass vibrating through us both like a shared heartbeat—she smirked. Because Octavia Moreau did not receive emotional vulnerability without processing it through the refinery of her intelligence first, and what came out the other side was never the raw material you’d sent in.
“You always get sentimental when he’s around.” Her voice was a low, husky murmur that I felt more than heard, the vibration traveling through her throat and into the palm still resting against it. Her storm-gray eyes—heavy, knowing, seeing too much as always—held mine with the steady, amused, devastating focus of a woman who had just read the sentence I hadn’t written. “You know that?”
One hundred percent accurate.
As fucking always.
She was the only Omega—the onlyperson—who couldread me like that. Who could watch me kiss her on a crowded dance floor and sense, beneath the desire and the tequila and the five years of accumulated hunger, the secondary emotional frequency that Kael Sørensen’s proximity generated in my nervous system. She didn’t know the full story. Didn’t know about Stockholm or the hotel room or the cold side of the bed. But she didn’t need the details. She read the effect the way she read music—not note by note but as a whole composition, the emotional architecture revealed through the performer’s body rather than the score on the page.
I huffed. Leaned down. Pressed my forehead against hers—the contact warm, grounding, an anchor point in a night that was spinning faster than my ability to track it.
And that’s when I noticed.
We were both drenched in sweat—the dance floor was a furnace, the bodies around us generating a collective thermal output that the building’s Victorian-era insulation was entirely unequipped to manage. Sweat was expected. Normal. The baseline state of any person who’d been moving at this intensity for this duration in this environment.
But Octavia wasburning.
Not warm. Not dance-floor-hot.Burning. The heat radiating from her skin where my forehead touched hers was several degrees above what exertion and alcohol could account for. Her cheeks were flushed—not the attractive, exercise-induced pink of a woman who’d been dancing, but a deeper, more saturated red that started at her cheekbones and spread toward her temples. Her breathing had shifted: faster, shallower, carrying a slight, rapid tremor that wasn’t exertion but was instead the specific respiratory pattern thatpreceded a biological event I recognized from years of proximity to Omega physiology.
And her scent.
Her scent had changed.
The already-intense signature that had been radiating from her skin all night had undergone a tonal shift—subtle but unmistakable to an Alpha standing this close. The base had deepened. Warmed. Acquired a richness, adensity, that hadn’t been present an hour ago. The sweetness had intensified, climbing from ambient to enveloping, and beneath it—threading through the composition like a new instrument joining an orchestra mid-movement—was a note I couldn’t name but recognized at the designation level. A heat note. The pheromone signature that an Omega’s biology produced when the reproductive cycle initiated and the body began broadcasting its status to every Alpha within olfactory range.
I pulled back.
Abruptly enough that the space between us admitted cold air, which hit her overheated skin and produced a visible shiver. I arched an eyebrow at her.
“When was your last heat?”
She stared up at me.
The expression on her face was the precise combination of intoxication and confusion that resulted from a woman who was five shots deep and mid-grind receiving a clinical question about her reproductive biology. Her storm-gray eyes blinked twice—slow, heavy, the deliberate, processing blinks of someone whose cognitive bandwidth was currently allocated to desire and alcohol and was being asked to reallocate to medical history on zero notice.
Then she smirked.
“Is this the new way to hit on a girl you want to fuck?”She tilted her head, the damp curls shifting across her bare shoulder. “Because it could work.” Her gaze dropped to my mouth and climbed back to my eyes with the slow, deliberate trajectory of a woman evaluating a menu she’d already decided to order from. “You have a sexy voice.”
I groaned. The sound was caught between amusement and genuine alarm—the vocal output of a man whose protective instincts had just been activated by biological data his partner was too intoxicated to interpret correctly.
“We’re going home.”
