Chapter 7 #2
Not a glance. Not a scan. A linger. Ten full seconds of unbroken, unblinking, gray-eyed contact that I felt in the lining of my stomach like a hand pressing against wet clay.
His expression was unreadable in the way that tectonic plates were unreadable from the surface—everything happening beneath, the pressure building along fault lines you couldn’t see until the ground cracked.
His jaw was set. His mouth a flat, neutral line.
But his eyes—those pale, calculating, miss-nothing eyes—were consuming information.
Cataloging every detail of my face the way his hockey mind cataloged opposing formations: rapidly, systematically, with the specific intent of identifying what had changed since the last scouting report.
Then his gaze lifted. Moved past me. Locked onto a point above and behind my left shoulder.
And I watched jealousy enter Kael S?rensen’s expression the way cold enters a room when a window breaks.
It was brief. Controlled. Immediately suppressed beneath the permafrost of his composure the way a dangerous fire is smothered before it can spread.
But I saw it. A flash of territorial fury in those arctic irises—a primal, designation-level response to the reality that another Alpha’s arm was wrapped around my waist, another Alpha’s chest was pressed against my back, and another Alpha’s scent was woven so deeply into the air around me that separating the two of us by smell alone would have required industrial-grade ventilation.
And layered beneath the jealousy—barely visible, half-buried, the kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t someone who’d once spent months studying this face at close range—was a flicker of pain.
Raw. Unprocessed. The micro-expression of a man who had walked through a door expecting an empty corridor and had instead been confronted with physical evidence that the world had continued without him.
Am I overthinking that?
Probably.
But I’ve never been wrong about reading Kael S?rensen’s face, and I’m not starting now.
I looked over my shoulder.
Luka’s expression was its own form of atmospheric data.
His green eyes were fixed on Kael with the flat, unwavering focus of a goaltender tracking a shooter during a power play—not hostile, not reactive, but reading.
Calculating angles and trajectories and probable outcomes with the quiet, analytical intensity that made him dangerous between the pipes.
But beneath the composure, displeasure radiated from him like heat from pavement.
The set of his jaw. The slight flare of his nostrils as Kael’s dominant scent invaded his airspace.
The arm around my waist that had tightened by approximately two degrees since the collision—a shift so subtle that only the woman enclosed within it would have registered the change.
They know each other.
They know each other, and they don’t like each other, and the way they’re staring at each other over my head has the specific, charged energy of a rivalry that predates this hallway by a significant margin.
Wonderful. Exactly the complication I needed at six-forty in the morning on audition day.
Kael spoke first.
His voice was exactly as I remembered—low, measured, carrying the faint, clipped cadence of someone who’d learned English as a second language and had perfected it with the same ruthless efficiency he applied to everything else.
Each word enunciated with the precision of a man who considered imprecise speech a personal failing.
“It’s far too early,” he said, his gray eyes still locked on Luka over the top of my head, “to deal with this fucker’s presence.”
Luka chuckled. The sound was relaxed, unbothered, carrying the easy warmth of a man who had precisely zero interest in being threatened and found the attempt more amusing than alarming. His arm hadn’t moved from my waist.
“Shouldn’t the captain,” he replied, his Irish-Canadian lilt thickening slightly the way it did when he was enjoying himself, “who’s praised and worshipped for being the cornerstone of this team’s first possible chance of entering the USA Winter Olympics—shouldn’t that man be spending his time wisely?
” He tilted his head, the gesture carrying the deliberate, slow-burn provocation of someone winding a clock.
“Instead of attempting to cruise in here knowing damn well this rink is relatively empty and not designed for bulky hockey players.”
Kael’s jaw ticked. A single, precise contraction of the masseter muscle that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t spent months learning the topography of that particular jawline.
“Look who’s talking.” His gaze dropped to Luka’s frame—a slow, deliberate assessment that carried the clinical disdain of a man evaluating equipment he’d already decided was substandard.
“Guess you gained some weight. What—going to join the summer Olympic games and pursue shot put? That’s about the only event I can envision with how bulky you’ve gotten. ”
Luka’s smirk widened. If the insult had landed, he’d absorbed it the way he absorbed slap shots—with his chest, without flinching, and with the quiet satisfaction of a man who knew that absorbing the impact was the first step toward controlling the rebound.
“I’m glad my physique is so much of your concern,” he said, and the warmth in his voice had dropped a register—lower, smoother, threaded with a subtext that was less defensive than intimate. “Funny, when you didn’t want anything to do with me all those years ago. Guess that’s changed?”
Wait.
What?
My brain—which had been operating at approximately forty percent capacity due to the dual-Alpha scent saturation, the sleep deprivation, the emotional wreckage of the morning, and the deeply unhelpful visual of being sandwiched between two men who collectively represented approximately thirteen feet and five hundred pounds of athletic Alpha—latched onto Luka’s phrasing with the sudden, laser-focused precision of a woman whose instincts had just detected a frequency worth investigating.
Kael’s response was immediate. A snarl—low, guttural, vibrating at a register that was less verbal than biological, the Alpha equivalent of a warning light flashing red.
“Nothing has changed.” His voice had dropped to the sub-bass range where statements stopped being conversational and started being territorial. “I still despise your delusional, weak as—”
“You two fucking each other?”
The words left my mouth with the casual, incendiary precision of a match being flicked into a room that everyone had agreed wasn’t flammable.
Silence.
Complete, crystalline, deafening silence.
Both pairs of eyes dropped to me simultaneously.
Green from behind. Gray from the front. Two Alpha gazes converging on my face with the synchronized intensity of spotlights finding a target, and the combined weight of their stares was a physical sensation—a pressure against my skin that was equal parts territorial confusion, scandalized disbelief, and the specific, arrested expression of men whose brains had just experienced a catastrophic input error and were rebooting in real time.
I crossed my arms over my chest. Shifted my weight onto one hip. Let the silence ferment for three additional seconds because timing, as any performer knew, was the difference between a joke that landed and a joke that fell flat.
“Hmm.” I tilted my head, studying them with the contemplative, slightly disappointed expression of a scientist whose hypothesis hadn’t been confirmed. “Maybe my instincts are off.”
Kael recovered first—barely.
“What,” he said, and his voice had ascended from sub-bass to a frequency that was entirely too loud for a corridor at six-forty in the morning, “in the fucking name got you to that conclusion?”
I rolled my eyes. A full, unhurried, orbital revolution that I allowed to complete its rotation before I deigned to respond, because Kael S?rensen’s indignation was a renewable energy source and I saw no reason not to harvest it.
“Well, I don’t know.” My tone was conversational.
Light. The vocal equivalent of a shrug. “Last time I checked, I clearly had flings with both of you, actually. Though Petrov had the longer streak.” I paused.
Smiled. The kind of smile that was less about warmth and more about watching someone’s blood pressure spike in real time. “Obviously.”
Kael repeated the word as if I’d handed him a live grenade and he was deciding which hand to hold it in. “Obviously?”
I dismissed the echo with a wave—the same hand-through-air gesture Candy employed when discarding information she deemed beneath her processing power—and continued.
“I know you two well enough to read you both like open books. The bickering. The body language. The fact that you just described Luka’s physique with more adjectives than a Harlequin cover blurb.
” I uncrossed my arms and planted both hands on my hips, settling into the stance that Angelo had once described as my “cross-examination posture” and that Candy had more accurately described as my “about to ruin someone’s whole day” posture. “So when did you start bending?”
I directed the question at Kael.
His mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. No sound emerged.
Kael S?rensen—the man who had captained hockey teams since the age of sixteen, who commanded locker rooms with a single glance, who had once silenced an entire press conference by raising one eyebrow—was standing in a corridor at six-forty-something in the morning, jaw ajar, rendered functionally mute by a five-foot-six Omega in practice leggings.
Speechless. Good. I’ve still got it.
Since the captain’s vocal cords had apparently filed for early retirement, I turned to Luka. Arched an eyebrow—the left one, my precision instrument, calibrated for maximum interrogative impact.
“Or are you doing the bending?”