“So…” I said, the single syllable cutting through the tension with the deliberate, deescalating energy of an enforcer who had spent years learning to diffuse volatile situations by inserting himself into them with strategic calm. “I’m just gonna go join the shower. So if you two want to fuck it out—” I gestured between them with a hand that was unhurried, casual, calibrated to communicate that the suggestion was practical rather than provocative. “Here’s your chance.”
Kael’s glare hit me like a puck to the sternum.
Full force. No windscreen. The pale gray eyes delivering the kind of targeted, incandescent hostility that opposing forwards received when they crossed into Kael’s crease uninvited—the look that said you have made a tactical error and the consequences will be memorable. His frosted-pine scent spiked with the sharp, blade-like edge that his pheromones acquired when his territorial response activated, and the temperature in my vicinity dropped by what felt like a genuine, measurable degree.
Luka, meanwhile, rolled his eyes.
The gesture was full, committed, and carried the specific exasperation of a man who had been managing his emotional response to Kael Sørensen for longer than the rest of us realized and had developed the eye-roll as his primary coping mechanism. He rose from the bed with the fluid, unhurried movements of a man whose body had been builtfor explosive athleticism but who was choosing, in this moment, to move with the deliberate, controlled leisure of someone who understood that casualness, in Kael’s presence, was its own form of provocation.
“I’m gonna go shower myself.” He stretched—arms overhead, the full extension pulling every muscle group into visible definition in a display that was technically practical and strategically devastating. He looked at me. “Maddox. Can you put together a quick platter of finger food? She hasn’t had a proper meal, and I don’t want her dropping weight from this. It shows on her fast.”
I nodded. “No problem.”
The caretaker directive. Practical. Grounded. Luka’s way of cutting through the emotional chaos of the room with a task that required no negotiation and served the one person whose wellbeing was supposed to be the point of all of this. Feed her. That’s the job. The rest of this—the tension, the history, the unresolved everything between the two Alphas currently trying to out-composure each other in a bedroom that smelled like sex and heartbreak—the rest of it could wait.
Kael huffed.
The sound was louder this time. More pressurized. The exhale of a man whose carefully maintained composure was developing structural cracks and who was attempting to address those cracks through respiratory expression rather than verbal communication, which was his preferred method and also the method responsible for approximately ninety percent of his interpersonal problems.
“So we’re not going to discuss this shit?”
Luka shrugged.
The gesture was devastating in its indifference. A single,full-shouldered, unhurried lift-and-drop that communicated, with the elegant economy of a man who had mastered the vocabulary of nonverbal dismissal, that the subject raised did not merit the energy required to engage with it.
Then he turned. Faced Kael directly. Closed the distance between them with three strides that were measured, controlled, and carried the specific, confrontational energy of a man who had been waiting—patiently, strategically, with the goaltender’s understanding that timing was everything—for the right moment to deliver the shot he’d been holding.
He stopped less than two feet from Kael. Green eyes almost level with gray. Both men bare-chested—Luka fully naked, Kael in his wrinkled sweats—the contrast between exposed and concealed operating as its own metaphor for the dynamic between them.
“There’s nothing to confront.” Luka’s voice was calm. Level. Stripped of the banter and the charm and the playful energy he’d been deploying all evening, replaced by the raw, unarmored register that I’d only heard him use with Octavia—the voice beneath the voice. “If you’re going to be an ass and hide like a baby in your room on time-out, continue doing so.” He held Kael’s gaze without blinking. “I like to deal with real men. Not amateurs scared of manning up.”
The silence that followed was dense enough to qualify as a solid.
Kael’s jaw worked. The muscles along the side of his face contracting and releasing in a rhythm that suggested he was physically chewing on a response he’d decided not to swallow and not to spit out, trapping it between his teeth like a man biting down on a mouth guard before a face-off. His pale eyes burned—not with the cold, controlled intensity of his usual stare but with a heat that the frosted pine in hisscent couldn’t conceal. Anger. Hurt. The specific, devastating combination that occurred when someone identified the truth in an accusation and resented the person who’d identified it.
They glared at each other for five full seconds.
Then Luka turned.
Walked past Kael through the doorway. The movement was deliberate—close enough that their shoulders would have touched if either man had shifted an inch, close enough that the exchange of scent at that proximity was less a transfer and more a collision, the rain-soaked stone and the frosted pine crashing into each other in the narrow space between their bodies with an intensity that I felt from across the room.
He was halfway down the hall when his voice drifted back, casual, almost offhand, carrying the specific tone of a man delivering an afterthought that was anything but:
“I’m using your shower, by the way.”
Kael cursed.
The word was short, sharp, bitten off between clenched teeth—a single, explosive syllable that carried the compressed fury of a man who wanted to argue, wanted to shout, wanted to chase the goaltender down the hallway and engage in the kind of physical, verbal, designation-level confrontation that their dynamic had been building toward since the first day Luka Petrov had walked into Olympia Academy and looked at him across a locker room with green eyes that said I remember everything and I’m not going to make it easy for you.
But he stayed.
Rooted. His fists clenched at his sides, the knuckles white, the tendons in his forearms standing in sharp reliefbeneath the pale skin. He didn’t follow. Didn’t engage. Didn’t take the bait that Luka had dangled with the precision of a man who knew exactly which hooks still sat embedded in Kael’s emotional architecture and had chosen this particular one with surgical intent.
He stayed because following would mean admitting the confrontation matters. And admitting the confrontation matters means admitting Luka matters. And admitting Luka matters means admitting Stockholm happened, and whatever else happened before and after, and the cumulative weight of every charged silence and averted gaze and jealous glare that’s been building since the day Luka arrived at this academy and Kael’s carefully maintained composure started developing fault lines visible from the parking lot.
I waited.
Luka’s footsteps receded down the hallway—heavy, unhurried, the confident stride of a man who had landed his shot and was leaving the crease to let the scoreboard update. A door opened and closed somewhere on the second floor. The sound of a second shower activating filtered through the ceiling.
