I nodded. Reached for a water bottle from the tray, cracked the seal, and drank half of it in three swallows—the cold flooding my overheated system with the merciful, clarifying relief of a body being given what it had been requesting for hours.
Then I set the bottle down, looked at Renzo with the steady, even gaze of a man who was about to share classified intelligence and expected it to be handled with the appropriate level of caution, and added:
“But be warned.”
Renzo paused at the doorway. Turned. One eyebrow raised.
“My diamond is a bit of a dominant freak with other Alphas.”
The smirk that spread across Renzo Viteri’s face was wide, delighted, and carried the bright, anticipatory energy of a man who had just been told the next chapter was going to be significantly more interesting than the last.
“Let’s see what she’s got.”
CHAPTER 18
Golden Boy
~RENZO~
“She wasn’t the kind of Omega who waited to be claimed.She was the kind who did the claiming.”
“You can’t handle this pussy, Viteri.”
Never—in twenty-four years of existence, in a decade and a half of competitive hockey, in an uncountable succession of Omega encounters that I’d navigated with the breezy, detached confidence of a man who considered himself fundamentally unshakeable—had I been turned on by a dominant woman.
The concept had existed in my awareness the way distant galaxies existed: theoretically real, scientifically documented, but occupying a sector of the universe so remote from my personal experience that it hadn’t warranted serious investigation. I was Renzo Viteri. The playboy. The charmer. The Alpha with the green hair and the easy smile and the infuriating ability to make every Omega in a five-mile radius feel like the only person in the room while simultaneously maintaining enough emotional distance to ensure that none ofthem got close enough to disrupt the carefully curated architecture of a man who preferred to lead, to direct, to be the one whose hands set the tempo.
I always played checkers and got away with it. Moved through encounters with a strategy so effortless it barely qualified as strategy—a wink here, a whispered compliment there, the specific combination of attentiveness and detachment that made Omegas lean in while I maintained the luxury of choosing when to close the distance. The cute looks. The universal attention. The comfortable, reliable knowledge that in any dynamic, I was the one in control.
And now.
Here I am.
Pinned to a bed by an Omega whose thighs were bracketing my hips with the muscular authority of a woman who had spent twenty years developing the lower-body strength to execute triple Salchows and was now deploying that strength to pin an Alpha to a mattress with a casual, devastating efficiency that suggested she considered my resistance a suggestion rather than an obstacle.
Her weight settled above my groin—not on it,aboveit, a deliberate, torturous positioning that placed the warm, slick heat of her directly over the base of my shaft without granting the friction my body was screaming for. The sensation was maddening. Electric. Her slick—warm, abundant, carrying the thick, sweet, intoxicating signature of an Omega in full heat—soaked through the thin fabric barrier between us and saturated the air with a concentration of pheromones so dense that the room had become less a bedroom and more a sensory chamber, the walls and the ceiling and the bedsheets all marinated in a scent that was doing things to my biology that my biology had not previously been aware it was capable of experiencing.
My cock twitched. Hardened. Not in the gradual, building way that arousal normally operated—in the instantaneous, three-seconds-flat, zero-to-full way that a body produced when every evolutionary circuit it possessed fired simultaneously and the result was less arousal than emergency mobilization.
Three seconds. She got me fully hard in three seconds. That’s not attraction. That’s a biological event.
It needed to be investigated. Studied. Published in a peer-reviewed journal under the heading “How an Empowering Omega Can Drive an Alpha’s Pheromone Output Through the Stratosphere and Render Him Functionally Useless in Under Five Seconds: A Case Study in Humility.” Because the pheromone response wasstaggering. My body was broadcasting at a volume and intensity that I could feel in the throb of my pulse and the heat in my skin and the specific, primal, designation-level awareness that every cell in my system was oriented toward the woman sitting on top of me with the gravitational focus of iron filings snapping to a magnet.
A woman like this could drive me wild.
And I’d fucking let her.
And that’s the revelation that’s rearranging the furniture in my head right now. Not the arousal—arousal is familiar, manageable, the standard operating condition of a healthy Alpha in proximity to an Omega in heat. The revelation is the LETTING. The willingness. The genuine, I-am-not-doing-this-for-show readiness to surrender the control I’ve spent my entire adult life maintaining, because the woman above me has demonstrated, in approximately forty-five seconds of physical contact, that the alternative is better.
And that’s rare. For me to admit that is rare enough that I need to sit with it later, when I’m not being straddled by a figure skater whose ass is rewriting my understanding of physics.
Her hands moved along my chest.
Slow. Exploratory. The fingertips trailing across the landscape of my pectorals with the deliberate, unhurried attention of a woman who was mapping new terrain and had decided that thoroughness was more interesting than speed. Her touch was electric—not metaphorically, not in the overused, romance-novel-adjacent sense of the word, but in the literal, physiological,I-can-feel-the-currentway that happened when an Omega in heat made skin-to-skin contact with a compatible Alpha and the scent chemistry between them converted the touch into a signal that traveled at nerve speed to every receptor in the body.
I can only imagine what this felt like for Luka. Hours of this. Hours of her hands, her mouth, her body moving against his with the heat-amplified intensity that turned every touch into a detonation. And Maddox—Christ, Maddox, who had excused himself twenty minutes ago with the rigid, controlled movements of a man whose composure was a dam with visible cracks—what would this do to him when his turn came?
Or Kael.
