Saints And Sulkers
~LUKA~
“The crease teaches you to hold the line.She taught me when to let it go.”
Ilooked at the door.
Renzo stood in the doorway with the relaxed, unhurried posture of a man who had materialized at precisely the right moment and was fully aware of it.
He was carrying a tray—an actual, legitimate, someone-owns-kitchenware tray—stacked with bottles of ice-cold water whose condensation was already tracking silver rivulets down their sides, and a platter of finger food arranged with a level of care that suggested either a high-end delivery service or an Alpha whose domestic competencies extended significantly beyond the average athletic household. Bruschetta. Skewered grilled chicken. Sliced fruit fanned into patterns that were more presentation than practical.
Crackers with some kind of artisanal cheese that I could smell from across the room—sharp, aged, carrying therich, fermented depth of a dairy product that had been allowed to become interesting.
Thank fucking goodness.
The relief was instantaneous. The sight of food activated a hunger signal that I had been suppressing for—how long had it been? The math was unreliable, the timeline blurred by tequila and dancing and the consuming, all-encompassing gravitational pull of Octavia’s heat, which had occupied every available unit of my attention and processing power and left precisely zero bandwidth for mundane biological requirements likeeating. My stomach, suddenly reminded that it existed, contracted with a ferocity that bordered on hostile.
Renzo smirked. The expression was knowing, easy, carrying the observational sharpness of a man who read rooms the way I read shooters—quickly, accurately, and with the specific intent of anticipating what was needed before it was requested.
“From that look,” he said, shifting the tray to one hand with the casual balance of someone accustomed to carrying weight without rearranging his body to accommodate it, “I can tell you probably need a sandwich.”
I chuckled. The sound was rough—stripped raw by hours of exertion and dehydration and the specific vocal wear that came from an evening divided between whispering endearments and growling territorial warnings at an Omega in full heat who had tested every boundary of my stamina and my self-control with equal enthusiasm.
“You have no fucking idea what a saint you are.”
Renzo tilted his head. The green hair—vivid, almost neon under the bedroom’s warm lighting—shifted across his forehead with the movement. “I try. Depends on my mood,though.” His dark eyes flicked toward the hallway behind him with the brief, loaded glance of a man referencing a situation he was choosing to address obliquely rather than directly. “And whether Kael’s being an ass or not.”
He paused. Let the sentence settle.
“He’s at least ‘asleep.’”
I arched an eyebrow. The gesture was automatic, reflexive—the goaltender’s instinct for detecting an incoming shot disguised as a pass. The wordasleephad been delivered with the specific, audible emphasis of a man framing it in quotation marks so large they were practically architectural.
“Define ‘asleep,’” I said. “With the quotation marks.”
Renzo’s smirk widened a fraction—the micro-expression of a man who appreciated precision in conversation and had just received it. But he didn’t answer. Instead, his gaze shifted from me to the bed.
To Octavia.
She was asleep in my arms.
Curled against my chest with the boneless, surrendered weight of a body that had been running at maximum output for hours and had finally negotiated a ceasefire with the hormonal cascade responsible for the siege. Her damp curls were spread across my chest—purple, turquoise, platinum strands tangled into a post-heat impressionist painting. Her breathing was slow. Deep. The rhythmic, measured cadence of genuine rest rather than the fitful, panting half-sleep that heat cycles produced between their more demanding phases. Her face was still flushed—the rose-tinted warmth that spread from her cheekbones to her temples like a watercolor wash, evidence that the heat was on pause rather than concluded—but the expression beneath the color waspeaceful. Soft. The tight, needing, fever-bright intensity that had characterized her for the last several hours had loosened, replaced by the vulnerable, unguarded openness that sleep alone could produce in a woman who spent her waking life behind walls so fortified they had their own postal code.
I didn’t want to let her go.
The impulse was biological, territorial, operating at the designation level that existed beneath rational thought—the Alpha imperative that classified the Omega in my arms asmineand resisted any transfer of custody with the primal, nonverbal intensity of a creature guarding something precious in a world it did not trust.
Renzo walked forward. Set the tray on the nightstand with a quiet, careful placement that suggested he was familiar with the protocol of moving around sleeping Omegas—the reduced noise, the deliberate movements, the awareness that post-heat rest was fragile and easily disrupted. Then he turned to me.
“Is it okay if I take her?”
Take her.
The growl left my chest before my brain had finished processing the request.
Low. Guttural. Vibrating at a frequency that was less vocal than geological—the tectonic rumble of an Alpha whose territorial circuitry had just received an input it categorized as a threat and had responded with the subtlety of a landslide. My arms tightened around Octavia’s sleeping form. My jaw locked. The muscles along my shoulders and neck contracted into the rigid, defensive posture of a body preparing to absorb an impact, which was approximately nine thousand percent disproportionate to the actual situation—a man holding a tray of bruschetta asking to transfer a sleeping woman to a bed.
Oops.
