“But I think that only applies to you.”
She grinned wider—the expression climbing to a wattage that could have powered the arena lights at Olympia’s main rink. She leaned down, slow, deliberate, until our lips were brushing—the lightest possible contact, the ghost of a kiss, the promise of pressure without its delivery.
“Hmmm.” The vibration of the sound traveled from herlips to mine and through my jaw into my skull. “You’re gonna make someone jealous.”
I smirked. Couldn’t help it—the reflex was too embedded in my social operating system to suppress, and the direction her comment pointed was too tempting to resist.
I looked to the corner of the room.
Luka Petrov occupied a beanbag chair that was approximately four sizes too small for his frame—the oversized, shapeless piece of furniture compressed beneath two hundred and ten pounds of post-heat goaltender into a configuration that looked less like seating and more like a hostage situation between a man and a textile. He was naked. Unselfconsciously, completely, the kind of casual nudity that came from hours of intimacy in an enclosed space where clothing had been deprioritized somewhere around hour two and hadn’t been revisited since.
The nudity did nothing for me. I was straight as a geometrically perfect line—same as Maddox, same as the vast majority of my sexual history, which was exclusively and enthusiastically populated by Omegas of various descriptions and zero Alphas. But thestrategicpotential of the visual was not lost on me. Specifically: the blackmail potential. Because somewhere upstairs, separated from this scene by approximately twelve feet of floorboard and a ventilation system that was essentially functioning as a pheromone delivery service, Kael Sørensen was lying in his bed pretending to be asleep while his rut blockers fought a losing battle against the scent of the Omega he’d sent a proxy to claim.
And Kael clearly had a thing with Luka that he was attempting to bury under approximately seventeen layers of denial and onehotel room in Stockholm that he’d never discussed and thought no one knew about.
Except everyone knew about it.
The tension between those two had been approximately as subtle as a foghorn since Luka had been introduced to the Ironcrest roster as the backup goaltender. The hallway encounters that lasted three seconds too long. The eye contact during team meetings that carried more data than the actual briefings. Kael’s jaw doing that micro-clench thing every time Luka’s name was mentioned in conversation, as if the syllables themselves were a physical stimulus he was managing through dental compression.
They have history. The kind that lives in hotel rooms and closed doors and the specific, charged silence that two people maintain when acknowledging what happened between them would require a level of vulnerability that one of them isn’t capable of and the other isn’t willing to demand.
But right now, the history was irrelevant, because Luka’s green eyes were locked on me with an intensity that transcended “jealous” and entered a territory that could only be described as “actively calculating the most efficient method of ending a human life and disposing of the evidence.”
His jaw was set. His arms crossed over his bare chest—the muscular, veined forearms of a goaltender creating a barrier that was less about comfort and more about restraining the hands attached to them from doing the thing they clearly wanted to do, which was remove me from his Omega’s vicinity with the kind of speed and force that made highlight reels.
If looks could kill, I’d be dead. Revived by paramedics. And then killed again, slowly, with a level of deliberate attention designed to ensure I fully appreciated the experience of my first death before being subjected to the second.
A cold sweat prickled down my spine. Not metaphorical—actual, physiological, my body’s autonomous response to the presence of a larger, territorial Alpha whose pheromone output was broadcastingthreatat a volume that my survival instincts were translating intorun. And maybe that was why Luka Petrov didn’t have a pack of his own—because the man was a dominating, possessive, venomous-when-provoked force of nature whose territorial instincts operated at a level that made coexistence with other Alphas a negotiation that most men weren’t equipped to survive.
“Think he’s planning my murder?” I asked.
The question came out with approximately thirty percent more genuine nervousness than I’d intended, the playboy composure I’d maintained for a decade developing a hairline crack under the sustained pressure of Luka’s death stare.
Octavia giggled.
The sound was warm, bright, carrying the heat-loosened, uninhibited frequency of a woman whose filter had been dissolved by hours of hormonal cycling and who found the dynamic between the two Alphas in her vicinity genuinely, delightfully entertaining. She leaned down—closer, her lips grazing my ear, her scent concentrating at the point of proximity into a sweetness so dense it made my vision blur at the edges.
“Probably,” she whispered. The word was amused, conspiratorial, delivered with the warm breath of a woman sharing a secret she found more funny than concerning. “But are you gonna chicken out because you’re a wimp?”
I had to swallow.
The lump in my throat was composed of approximately equal parts arousal, self-preservation instinct, and the specific, heady vertigo that her closeness produced—herscent, at this distance, bypassing my olfactory system entirely and delivering its payload directly to the reptilian sector of my brain where designation-level imperatives lived. She was soclose. Her lips at my ear. Her body warm above mine. Her aroma making me dizzy in a way that had nothing to do with the blood redistribution my body was performing in favor of the organ currently straining against the fabric between us and everything to do with the biochemical reality of an Omega in heat whose scent chemistry wascompatible. Genuinely, molecularly, pack-level compatible. The kind of match that the body recognized before the mind caught up.
And she smells so fucking good it’s driving me to a place I’ve never been. Not the standard, oh-an-Omega-in-heat level of appealing. A deeper channel. A frequency I didn’t know my receivers were tuned to until she broadcast on it.
She pulled back just far enough to face me. Her thumb traced a slow, deliberate path down my bottom lip—the pad dragging across the sensitive skin with a pressure that was less touch and moreinscription, as if she were writing her name on my mouth in a language my body could read and my brain was still learning.
Her storm-gray eyes held mine. Commanding. Patient. The gaze of a woman who had positioned herself exactly where she wanted to be and was now waiting to see if the man beneath her had the spine to stay in the game.
I’m desperate to taste her. To kiss her. To know what that red-lipstick mouth—long since smeared across Luka’s jaw and collar hours ago—tastes like when it’s pressed against mine with the same intensity I watched her deploy at that bar. I want her to ride me like she rode Luka for what had to be hours—the sounds, Christ, the sounds that had come through the walls, the rhythmic,escalating, competitive cadence of two athletes whose bodies operated at peak performance and who fucked the way they trained: with stamina, with precision, with the relentless, I-will-outlast-you mentality of people who did not know how to half-ass anything.
“I won’t chicken out,” I said.
The words were breathless. Rough at the edges. Carrying a vulnerability that the playboy version of me would have smoothed over with a grin and a deflection but that the version pinned to this bed by this woman’s thighs and this woman’s scent and this woman’s thumb on his lip didn’t have the resources to disguise.
She leaned in. Closer. Our lips brushing again—that torturous, barely-there contact that was less kiss and more dare.
“But you’re gonna have to prevent the murder from happening,” I murmured against her mouth, “if you want me to last long enough to give you what you deserve.”
