The declaration was firm. Nonnegotiable. The same tone I used with rookie forwards who thought they could deke me on a breakaway—the voice that saidthis play is over, and the outcome has already been decided.
She grinned. Wide, unguarded, the red lipstick splitting across her face like a sunrise. “If we’re going back to the dorm and I’m actually in heat—” She turned in my grasp, rotating until her chest was pressed against mine and her hands were flat against my collar and her face was tilted up with the heavy-lidded, desire-saturated expression that I recognized from years of memorizing her at close range. “That’s gonna be a no-go.” She wrinkled her nose. “The walls are thin asfuck.”
And there it is. That look in her eyes. The specific, unmistakable, I-know-what-I-want-and-it’s-you look that my girl gets when the wanting has migrated from suggestion to demand.
She’s thirsty for me. And the heat is going to turn that thirst into a wildfire within the hour if we don’t get her somewhere safe.
“My place?” I offered. The Ironcrest housing complex was off-campus—private suites, thicker walls, designed for pack accommodation. Better infrastructure for what was coming.
She considered it. The brief, tequila-slowed deliberation of a woman weighing options with the diminished processing speed of someone whose body was diverting resources from cognition to biology at an accelerating rate.
Then her eyes drifted past me.
Over my shoulder. Locking onto a point in the crowd behind us with the involuntary, magnet-to-metal pull of an Omega whose pheromone receptors had just detected a compatible Alpha signature and whose biology had overridden her conscious gaze direction to track the source.
I didn’t need to guess who was behind me.
I turned. Looked over my shoulder with the measured, unhurried rotation of a man who had spent the last hour aware of exactly where Kael Sørensen was in this building and was only now choosing to acknowledge it visually.
He was ten feet away.
Standing at the boundary where the dance floor ended and the raised seating area began, occupying the transitional space with the still, territorial, immovable presence of a man who had chosen his vantage point with strategic intent. Full height. Arms crossed. The platinum-blonde hair with its silver-white streaks catching the strobe light in intermittent flashes that made him look like a winter storm given human form. His pale gray eyes were locked on us—onher—with the focused, unblinking, analytical intensity that I’d seen him bring to face-offs and penalty kills and every high-stakes situation that required absolute concentration.
He hadn’t been watching from afar.
He’d been watching fromexactlyclose enough to catalogue every detail—the hand on her throat, the kiss, the way she’d pressed her ass against me in rhythms that the music hadn’t required—and his expression carried the controlled,surface-level composure of a man whose internal state was a several-car pileup he was managing with the rigid discipline of someone who would rather dislocate his own jaw than let the room see him react.
Frosted pine and cold steel saturated the air between us.
Our eyes locked.
Green on gray. Alpha on Alpha. The silent, loaded, frequency-dense exchange of two men who had shared a hotel room in Stockholm and hadn’t spoken about it since and were now standing ten feet apart at a frat party with the Omega they’d both failed positioned between them like the answer to a question neither of them had been brave enough to ask.
“We’re leaving.”
I said it to Kael. Directly. Not as a request. Not as information. As astatementdelivered with the territorial certainty of an Alpha who had claimed his position and was announcing his next move to the only other player on the board whose opinion he recognized as relevant.
Kael’s eyebrow arched. A single, precise elevation that communicated approximately fourteen questions and zero intentions of asking them aloud.
His gaze shifted. Dropped from me to Octavia—and the shift in his expression was immediate. The controlled composure cracked by a fracture so small that only someone who’d spent years studying that face—from across hotel rooms, from across ice surfaces, from across the specific, devastating distance that Kael Sørensen maintained between himself and anything that threatened his self-control—would have detected it.
“Why is her face so red?”
The question was directed at me but his eyes were on her.Narrowed. The analytical focus that made him the most dangerous captain in this academy applied to the clinical observation of an Omega whose cheeks were flushed past the threshold of alcohol and exertion.
I rolled my eyes. The gesture was automatic, fond in a way I refused to examine, and accompanied by the specific exasperation of a man who was watching the object of his complicated emotional history arrive at a diagnostic conclusion approximately three seconds behind schedule.
Octavia, meanwhile, pouted.
“It can’t bethatred.” Her voice was a whine now—the petulant, adorable, tequila-loosened protest of a woman whose vanity had just been challenged by a medical symptom. “I don’tgetred-faced from alcohol.”
She was shifting in my grasp. Antsy. The restless, involuntary fidgeting that preceded a heat’s full onset—the body’s way of communicating that the hormonal cascade had been initiated and the window for proactive management was narrowing with each passing minute.
The protective instinct surged through me with a force that bypassed cognition entirely. Alpha. Primal. The designation-level imperative that overrode tequila and jealousy and the complicated, unresolved wreckage of my history with the man standing ten feet away and replaced them all with a single, absolute directive:keep her safe.
I noticed the shift in her scent—the deepening, the warming, the heat note intensifying from suggestion to declaration—and I wrapped my arm around her waist. Pulled her against my side. Held her with the structural, full-body commitment of a man whose goaltender’s instincts had just reclassified the situation from social event to emergency response.
I looked at Kael.
