One motion. Fluid. Effortless. The kind of casual, full-body lift that required significant upper-body strength deployed with deliberate nonchalance—the physical equivalent of a wink. His arms slid beneath her bare thighs and across her back, drawing her against his chest as he rose from the bed in a single, athletic ascent that made the maneuver look approximately as difficult as picking up a pillow. Her legs draped over his forearm. Her arms found his neck. Her damp curls fell against his shoulder, the purple-turquoise-platinum gradient catching the bedroom’s warm lighting and scattering it in fragments.
Show-off.
Renzo was, categorically and unapologetically, pulling every stop in the playboy repertoire. The carry. The eye contact maintained throughout the lift. The way his bare chest provided maximum skin-to-skin contact while hisstride toward the en suite bathroom carried the measured, unhurried confidence of a man who wanted every person in this room to understand that he was walking away with the prize and was in absolutely no rush about it.
And damn. I can’t deny the tad of jealousy sitting in the base of my chest like a stone I didn’t put there.
Not the territorial, designation-level jealousy that Luka operated from—the primal, Omega-is-mine, growl-at-anything-that-moves variety that had produced several memorable moments throughout the evening. This was quieter. More personal. The jealousy of a man who had spent years being the enforcer—the protector, the wall, the body that absorbed hits so that everyone else could play—and who was watching a teammate demonstrate an emotional fluidity, an intimate ease, that I’d never learned how to produce. Renzo made vulnerability look like a skill. Like a move you could practice until it became natural. And I wanted to learn it, but the coaching manual for that particular element hadn’t been written for men who’d been conditioned to absorb rather than express.
The bathroom door closed behind them. The sound of water followed seconds later—the hiss of the shower activating, the change in the room’s acoustics as steam began to fill the en suite and drift through the gap beneath the door, carrying with it the mingled scent of mint and Octavia’s heat signature in a combination that was simultaneously calming and agonizing.
I was tempted to join.
My legs were already tensing. The muscles in my thighs—the same ones that drove lateral movement on the ice, that powered the explosive gap-closing strides an enforcer needed to cut off attacking forwards—were coiling for apush-off that my brain hadn’t fully authorized. The body wanted to follow. Wanted to be in the warm, steam-filled space where Octavia’s scent was concentrating and where Renzo’s easy laughter was already filtering through the door alongside the sound of water hitting tile.
But I paused.
Because the sound that had stopped my forward motion wasn’t coming from the bathroom.
Kael huffed.
The exhalation was short, pressurized, carrying the specific tonal frequency of a man whose emotional regulation system had been processing inputs beyond its rated capacity for approximately eight hours and was now producing error messages in the form of petulant exhales.
“What, now she doesn’t want me?”
The question was directed at the room in general—at the bed where Octavia had been, at the closed bathroom door behind which she currently was, at the universe that had apparently failed to inform her that Kael Sørensen’s arrival should have been greeted with the enthusiasm and gratitude appropriate to a man who had saved her qualifying score twelve hours ago and was now being treated like an unwelcome houseguest.
The audacity of this man.
Luka chuckled.
The sound was low, rough, stripped bare by hours of exertion, and carrying a warmth that had absolutely nothing to do with sympathy. He was still on the bed—naked, unselfconscious, his dark navy-purple hair a disaster of post-sex tangles and his green eyes locked on Kael with the steady, patient, amused focus of a man who had been waiting for this moment and was planning to enjoy every second of it.
“I think,” Luka said, reaching for a water bottle from the tray Renzo had brought earlier and cracking the seal with the casual, unhurried movements of a man who knew his audience was captive, “you’re forgetting how our Octavia doesn’t easily forgive and forget.”
Our Octavia.
The possessive pronoun deployed with surgical precision. Not YOUR Octavia—not the Omega you claimed through a proxy while hiding in a hockey scrimmage. OUR. Shared. A collective noun that included Luka and excluded Kael from the group that had actually been present, actually done the work, actually earned the right to the possessive through sweat and vulnerability and the specific, unambiguous act of showing up.
The barb landed.
I could see it hit—the micro-flinch in Kael’s jaw, the barely perceptible tightening of his crossed arms, the way his pale eyes narrowed by a fraction that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent three years learning to read the minute variations in their captain’s composure the way a seismologist reads tremor data.
They were staring at each other.
Luka, on the bed. Kael, in the doorway. Green eyes and gray eyes locked across the width of the room with an intensity that had stopped being about Octavia approximately two sentences ago and was now operating on a frequency that belonged exclusively to them. The tension wasn’t new—it had been there since Luka’s first day on the Ironcrest roster, simmering beneath every team meeting and corridor encounter and the specific, charged silence that descended whenever they occupied the same room. But here, in the aftermath of a night that had stripped away the professionalcontexts and the public performances and the social buffers that normally modulated their interactions, the tension was naked. Exposed. Vibrating at a frequency that the other Alphas in the room could feel on their skin like static before a lightning strike.
I watched Kael’s gaze travel.
Not deliberately. Not with the conscious, controlled scan of a man conducting a tactical assessment. Involuntarily. The pale gray eyes dropped from Luka’s face and moved downward—across the broad, bare shoulders, down the muscular chest still slicked with residual sweat, along the ridged abdomen to the hip bones and the shadowed territory below, where Luka’s body was displayed with the unapologetic, unguarded openness of a man who had nothing to hide and no interest in providing coverage for anyone’s discomfort. The assessment lasted approximately three seconds.
Then Kael’s eyes snapped back up. Locked on Luka’s face. The jaw clenched harder—a structural event that I’m fairly certain I heard.
And if the tension between them had been high before, it was palpitating now. A living thing in the room, occupying physical space, pushing against the walls like a body of water testing a dam. The air between them was dense with competing scent signatures—Luka’s rain-soaked stone and clove and dark chocolate mixing with Kael’s frosted pine and cold steel and aged whiskey in a combination that was, from an olfactory perspective, beautiful. Harmonic. The kind of scent chemistry that didn’t clash but completed, each note finding its complementary frequency in the other’s composition the way instruments in an orchestra found their counterparts across the arrangement.
These two are a goddamn mess. A beautiful, tragic,complicated mess that’s been avoiding its own resolution for however many years they’ve been circling each other, and I am standing in the middle of it in nothing but my birthday suit at four-thirty in the morning wondering if I should intervene or sell tickets.
I chose option three.
