She grinned against my lips. The movement was tactile—I felt the shape of her smile more than I saw it, the curve of her mouth shifting against mine with a warmth that was both playful and predatory.
“What Ideserve, hmm?”
She sucked on my bottom lip.
A single, slow, deliberately devastating pull that drew my lower lip between hers and held it—the suction gentle but firm, the pressure just enough to send a cascade of sensation from my mouth to my chest to my abdomen to the aching, desperate, straining length that was currently being denied every form of contact it was requesting. The move was practiced. Confident. The specific, calibrated action of a woman who understood that the anticipation was the weapon andthe delivery was the mercy, and she was in no rush to grant the latter.
I had to breathe.
Deliberately. Consciously. The way you breathed when your body had forgotten how to do it automatically and required manual intervention. Becausefuck—just the kiss, just thatsingle, targeted, lip-claiming gesture was driving my body to a state of readiness that I’d never reached this quickly with any Omega, in any context, under any level of arousal. This was simply thebeginning. The overture. The first measure of a composition whose later movements I could only imagine, and the imagination alone was producing physiological effects that my professional athletic conditioning was not equipped to manage.
I’ve never had this experience with an Omega. Never had the opening act make me feel like the main event might genuinely exceed my capacity. And she’s TAUNTING me. Taking her time. Enjoying my unraveling the way a conductor enjoys the crescendo—because she’s the one controlling the tempo, and she knows it, and I’m thriving on it.
Even if it may lead to my early demise at the hands of a six-foot-two goaltender whose territorial expression has escalated from “murder” to “war crime.”
“You’re being patient, Octavia.”
I said her name slowly. Deliberately. Each syllable pronounced with the specific, vocal intention of a man who understood that names, spoken at the right frequency and the right speed, functioned as recall signals—pulling the attention of the person they belonged to from wherever it had drifted and focusing it, for one sharp, clarifying moment, on the man who’d spoken them.
It worked. Her smile shifted. The predatory, in-controlgrin softening by a degree into a different expression—curious, intrigued, the look of a woman who had been mid-performance and had just been surprised by something in the audience she hadn’t expected.
She took the lead in kissing me.
Slowly. The tempo downshifted from the urgent, heat-driven intensity of the preceding minutes into a different register entirely. Exploratory. The kiss of a woman who was encountering a new partner and had decided—despite the hormonal current pulling her toward speed and satisfaction—that this particular introduction warranted patience. Her lips moved against mine with a tenderness that I hadn’t anticipated and wasn’t prepared for. Not the hungry, consuming, Luka-caliber kisses I’d heard through the walls, but a quieter, more searching contact that asked questions instead of making demands.
My hand found the small of her back. The skin was warm—heat-warm, fever-warm, carrying the elevated temperature of a body in full biological mobilization—and smooth beneath my palm. I trailed upward, slowly, my fingers mapping the landscape of her spine with the same careful, unhurried attention she’d given the kiss. And I felt it—the shiver. Subtle, involuntary, traveling through her body from the point of contact outward like a ripple through still water.
She shivered at my touch.
Which means this is unfamiliar territory for her, too. New. Uncharted. She’s exploring me the way I’m exploring her—cautiously, with the heightened awareness of two people who don’t know each other’s rhythms yet but are discovering, in real time, that the rhythms might be compatible.
And maybe that’s why she’s taking it slow. Not because the heat is ebbing—I can feel it in her skin, in the urgency of her scent,in the slick that’s rendering my composure a war zone—but because I’m new to her and she wants the time to explore. To learn. To build the map before she navigates the territory at full speed.
“I’m gonna die of an aneurysm at this rate.”
Luka’s voice cut through the room from the beanbag with the strained, barely-controlled energy of a man whose patience had been stretched to its structural limit and was now producing sounds that indicated imminent failure. The growl was gone—replaced by a different kind of distress. The vocal equivalent of a goaltender watching the puck cross the line in slow motion: aware, suffering, unable to intervene.
Octavia broke the kiss. Giggled—the sound bright, mischievous, carrying the delighted, heat-loosened energy of a woman who understood exactly what she was doing to both men in this room and was deriving a truly indecent amount of pleasure from the chaos.
She cocked her head toward Luka. The movement was playful, regal—the tilt of a queen acknowledging a subject who had spoken out of turn but whose petition she was willing to consider.
“Then why not come and join us?” Her voice dropped. Lower. Warmer. Threaded with a frequency that I watched travel across the room and land on Luka’s body like a physical impact—his shoulders tightening, his jaw clenching, his hands gripping the sides of the beanbagas if preventing himself from launching out of it. “Or do you need more rest, Daddy?”
Daddy.
I watched Luka’s body respond to the word the way a circuit responded to a power surge.
His cock twitched. Visibly, unmistakably, the involuntary, designation-level response of an Alpha whose specific trigger had just been activated by an Omega who knewexactlywhich button she was pressing and had pressed it with the deliberate, surgical accuracy of a woman who had studied this man’s operating manual and had highlighted the relevant sections. The twitched lasted approximately one second, during which Luka’s expression transitioned from territorial suffering to the focused, predatory stillness of a man who had just received his starting signal.
He was up.
Silently. The beanbag didn’t make a sound—or if it did, the sound was absorbed by the speed and fluidity of the movement, the goaltender’s explosive, lateral-burst reflexes translated to a vertical context. One moment he was seated. The next he was crossing the room with the measured, purposeful stride of a man whose destination had been decided and whose pace was calibrated to communicate that the arrival was certain and the only variable was the intensity of what followed.
His hand found the front of her throat.
The grip was instant, familiar, practiced—the specific, possessive hold that I’d watched him deploy throughout the evening with the casual, intimate authority of a man who had spent months learning exactly how this woman wanted to be touched and retained the knowledge through years of absence. His fingers wrapped around the column of herneck, and he pulled her backward—gently, firmly, enough to tilt her away from my mouth and toward his.
He kissed her.
