I reeled it in. Forced the growl to die in my throat. Unclenched my jaw by degrees, the way you released a muscle spasm—slowly, deliberately, against the resistance of a body that wasn’t convinced the all-clear was justified.
Renzo, to his credit, didn’t flinch.
Didn’t step back. Didn’t lower his gaze in the submissive gesture that most Alphas deployed when a larger Alpha growled at them in close quarters. He stood perfectly still. Patient. His dark eyes steady, his posture open, his clean-zesty-mint scent maintaining its ambient, unthreatening presence in the room’s air without spiking or retreating. He was waiting. Not for the growl to end, but for me to locate my words—the human language that my designation had temporarily evicted in favor of the more primal vocabulary it preferred in situations involving Omegas and proximity and other Alphas.
He’s good at this. Whatever this is—the stillness, the patience, the refusal to escalate—he’s done it before. With someone bigger than him. Someone whose growl was probably louder.
Kael. He’s done this with Kael.
“Yes,” I finally said. The word emerged with approximately forty percent more gravel than standard speech required, but it was a word, which represented a significant upgrade from the territorial rumbling I’d been contributing to the conversation moments earlier. “Yes. You can take her.”
He nodded. Crossed to the bed with the measured, deliberate strides of a man who understood that sudden movements around a post-growl Alpha were inadvisable, and reached for Octavia with hands that were careful, precise,and carried the specific, practiced tenderness of someone who had performed this exact maneuver before.
The black dress had been discarded hours ago, and was now being replaced by one of my t-shirts that Renzo was putting on her. The shirt was enormous on her. Swallowed her frame. Made her look smaller than she was, which was a feat of visual trickery that would have been comical if it weren’t also the most devastatingly tender thing I’d ever seen. My diamond didn’t stir.
She transferred from my arms to Renzo’s with the limp, trusting weight of a woman so deeply asleep that her body had relinquished its usual vigilance entirely—no flinch, no tension, no reflexive tightening of the muscles that a lifetime of being let down by the wrong people had trained into her waking posture. She was completely out. Still flushed. Still carrying the residual warmth of the heat’s first wave in her skin and in the sweet, complex signature that clung to her hair and her borrowed shirt. But peaceful.
Peaceful looks good on her. Looks right. Looks like the thing she’s been denied for two years and deserves for the rest of her life.
Renzo laid her on the bed with the economy of someone who had rehearsed the choreography. He arranged the pillows around her—one beneath her head, one along her side, a third tucked against her back—creating a nest-like configuration that I recognized as standard heat management: the physical containment of warmth and scent that helped regulate an Omega’s system during the rest phases between cycles. Then he walked to the en suite bathroom.
I heard water running. Watched him return with a shallow bowl filled with cold water and a washcloth, which he wrung once, folded into thirds, and placed acrossOctavia’s forehead with the practiced, clinical efficiency of a man administering a protocol he could execute in his sleep.
I couldn’t stop the eyebrow from rising.
“You’ve done this before.”
Not a question. An observation. Delivered with the analytical directness of a man who had just watched someone perform a task with a level of competence that casual experience didn’t produce.
Renzo didn’t answer immediately.
The silence wasn’t evasive—it was the specific, weighted kind that preceded a disclosure the speaker hadn’t planned on making. He adjusted the washcloth on Octavia’s forehead. Checked the temperature against her skin with the back of his fingers. Sat on the edge of the bed with the controlled, careful movements of someone managing their proximity to a sleeping Omega whose biology was still broadcasting at elevated frequencies.
His clean-zesty-mint scent shifted. Subtle. A darkening in the black-tea base note that I might not have caught if I hadn’t been watching for it—the olfactory equivalent of a cloud passing across an otherwise clear sky.
Not a topic he wants to talk about.
Which is fair. We all carried pasts. Mine included five years of cowardice and a hotel room in Stockholm that I’d never discussed with anyone except the woman who could read it on my face without being told. Everyone in this house had scars they didn’t display in common areas.
But then he spoke.
“We tried to have an Omega.” His voice was quiet. Even. Carrying the measured cadence of a man who had rehearsed this narrative internally enough times that the emotional charge had been partially—not fully, but partially—discharged. “Two and a half years ago. Kael was having…problems.”
He paused on the word. Let it sit in the room’s warm air with the deliberate ambiguity of someone who was providing context without providing detail—the outline of a situation rather than the rendering.
“It was interrupting a lot. Performance. Sleep. His ability to function as captain without biting someone’s head off every forty-five minutes.” A ghost of a smirk. Brief and bitter. “Doc said it was probably because we were Omega-less and all well into our early twenties. The biological imperative catches up, apparently. Your body stops asking and startsdemanding, and the demand doesn’t care about your schedule or your competitive season or the fact that you’re captaining a team that’s trying to qualify for the national program.”
I know that demand. Felt it myself. The restlessness that settles into your bones when the Alpha biology decides it’s been patient long enough and starts issuing ultimatums that no amount of training volume or ice time can satisfy.
“So we committed to an Omega,” Renzo continued. His gaze was fixed on Octavia’s sleeping face, but I could tell his focus was elsewhere—somewhere in the past, in the rooms and the conversations and the accumulation of decisions that had led the Ironcrest pack to this specific point. “Kael chose her. And we…went along with it. She was hisfavoriteat the time, I suppose. He’d met her through the federation circuit—she was a figure skater on the national development team, high profile, the kind of Omega that looked good in photographs and on registry documents.”
The annoyance that crossed his features was specific and deep—not the surface irritation of a man recounting aninconvenience but the structural, load-bearing frustration of someone who had watched a preventable disaster unfold from a position where his input had been solicited and then overridden.
“Long story short: she was a calculating, cheating piece of work.” The words were delivered without heat. Flat. The vocal equivalent of a coroner’s report—factual, clinical, the emotional content drained by repetition. “But the part that made it genuinely destructive was the drugs.”
I frowned. “Drugs?”
“She was taking hormonal accelerants. Synthetic compounds designed to increase heat frequency from the standard three or four times per year to…” He shook his head. The green hair shifting across his brow. “Monthly. Sometimes more. She was inducing heats on a schedule that her body was never meant to sustain, and she was doing it deliberately.”
