“Let’s go. Quick.”
His gaze lifted. Found mine over the top of Octavia’s head.
Gray on green. The loaded, dense, multilayered exchange of two Alphas who shared a history they’d never spoken about and were about to share a night that would make the silence afterward significantly more complicated.
“Her in the middle,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. The gesture was automatic, familiar, carrying the exasperated fondness of a man who was being told a thing he already knew by a man who assumed he needed reminding.
“I remember.”
Kael took her left side. I kept her right. She walked between us—bracketed, protected, the Omega flanked by two Alphas whose bodies formed a corridor through the crowd that parted without being asked, because the combined scent output of Kael Sørensen and Luka Petrov at full territorial broadcast was the olfactory equivalent of a police escort.
We moved through the party. Past the dance floor. Past the bar where the bartender tracked our departure with the resigned expression of a man whose generous pour had been definitively outbid. Past the hockey players at the pool table who clocked our formation—two Alphas, one Omega, moving with coordinated urgency toward the exit—and communicated their assessment through a series of raised eyebrows and low whistles that we collectively ignored.
The night air hit us at the door. Cold. Clean. Carrying the frost-edged bite of Vermont in the pre-winter months, and Octavia shivered between us—the temperature differential between the overheated interior and the outdoor coldproducing a full-body tremor that both Kael and I responded to simultaneously, each pressing closer, each offering body heat through proximity with the instinctive, wordless synchronization of Alphas whose biology had been activated by the same Omega signal and whose bodies had decided, independent of their conscious minds, to cooperate.
A vehicle idled at the back of the house. A black SUV—Ironcrest’s team transport, its engine running, Maddox behind the wheel with Renzo in the passenger seat. The headlights cast long, yellow beams across the frost-dusted gravel.
We guided her toward it. One step, then another. Her heels clicking against the cold ground, her body warm between ours, her scent filling the night air with a signature that was escalating by the minute—sweeter, denser, the heat note climbing from suggestion to insistence to the unmistakable, biological declaration that the cycle had begun and the clock was running.
This is happening.
We’re walking toward a car that belongs to a pack I was recruited into six hours ago, flanking an Omega who scored three perfect tens this morning and is now entering a heat she didn’t plan for, and the man on her other side is the Alpha who broke me in Stockholm and sent a proxy to claim her at an audition and is currently looking at both of us with an expression that suggests he’s already five moves ahead in a game I didn’t know we were playing.
And I don’t care.
Because whatever this is—messy, complicated, improvised, built on bureaucratic lies and half-truths and the fragile scaffolding of a pack that exists more on paper than in practice—it’s also the first thing that’s felt right in five years.
The first time my body and my instincts and the aching,stubborn, refuses-to-quit part of my chest have all agreed on the same directive at the same time.
Keep her safe. Stay close. Be here.
I opened the SUV’s rear door. Kael guided her in. I followed.
The door closed behind us with a definitive, mechanical click, and the vehicle pulled away from the frat house and into the dark Vermont night, carrying three people who had spent five years circling each other through separate orbits and were now, finally, catastrophically, inevitably converging—knowing we were about to walk into a merry-go-round of lustful heat with the woman we’d been craving for years.
CHAPTER 14
Clean Zesty Mint
~OCTAVIA~
“The fever wasn’t the problem.The problem was how good the fire felt.”
Heats are always a pain in the ass.
That’s the thesis. The foundational, immutable, peer-reviewed-and-published truth that every Omega learns approximately thirty seconds into their first cycle and carries with them for the rest of their biological existence like a suitcase they didn’t pack and can’t put down. Heats were inconvenient.
Heats were disruptive. Heats loved—loved—to arrive at the most spectacularly inopportune moments the calendar could offer, as if the hormonal cascade responsible for triggering the cycle had access to your personal schedule and specifically selected the window where its arrival would cause maximum chaos.
Like tonight.
When I’d had every intention of dancing until my heels broke or my feet revolted, whichever came first. When theplan had been simple and uncomplicated and beautiful in its specificity: get drunk, get on the dance floor, lose myself in the bass and the rhythm and the warm, electric pleasure of someone’s hands on my body—which I wasthankfulhad been Luka’s, because the man, despite his six-foot-two frame and the chiseled, goaltender-engineered bulk that made him look like he’d been assembled by a committee that considered agility an afterthought, couldmove.
Like jelly.
Like the music was a liquid he was poured into rather than a sound he was responding to. His hips had a fluidity that shouldn’t have been anatomically possible for someone whose professional movement vocabulary was staccato—butterfly drops and T-push recoveries and the explosive, lateral bursts that characterized goaltending. But on a dance floor, with tequila dissolving the athletic rigidity and an Omega pressed against his chest, the man transformed. Every movement smooth. Every rhythm matched. The two of us finding that effortless, inexplicable sync where your body stops being your own and becomes part of a shared instrument, and the music plays both of you simultaneously.
