Chapter 7 #3
Luka’s smirk was instantaneous. Devastating. The full deployment of that quarter-turn mouth combined with the softened green eyes and the relaxed jaw of a man who had decided that if the conversation was going to combust, he was going to enjoy the warmth.
“I’m initiating the bending,” he said. And winked.
I gawked.
Briefly, involuntarily, with the genuine, unfiltered surprise of a woman who had lobbed a grenade expecting it to land in neutral territory and instead watched it detonate directly on the target with a smile.
“I’m not surprised that you’re a top,” I said, and the words came out at a lower volume than intended—more murmured than declared, more directed at the floor than at either of the two Alphas currently bookending my personal space, “but I really did want you to be a bottom.”
Luka laughed. Full, rough, the sound bouncing off the corridor walls with the bright, percussive energy of a man who had just been handed exactly the response he’d been hoping for.
His eyes crinkled at the corners. His chest shook behind me—I could feel the vibration through the residual proximity of his body, which was still entirely too close for a conversation that had begun with a collision and evolved into a sexual-orientation interrogation.
He leaned forward. Not far. Just enough that his voice reached my ear at a volume designed for an audience of one.
“I’m only a bottom for you, Diamond.”
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Heat surged to my cheeks with the speed and subtlety of a forest fire in a drought.
I could feel the blush climbing—neck, jaw, cheekbones, the tips of my ears—a traitorous, full-body thermal event that my Omega biology produced in response to Alpha vocal frequencies delivered at close range and that absolutely no amount of willpower, breathing technique, or feminist theory could suppress.
I huffed. Turned my face away. Fixed my gaze on a particularly uninteresting section of corridor wall and pretended—with the conviction of someone who knew they were failing and had decided to commit to the performance regardless—that the warmth flooding my face was a temperature-regulation issue and not a physiological response to a man whispering about sexual positions in my ear while another man who’d once fucked me into multiple calendar weeks of recovery stood two feet away looking like winter had filed a noise complaint.
“I’m going to pretend,” I announced, addressing neither of them and both of them and possibly the fluorescent light fixture above, “that I didn’t clock any of this.
Because I can smell the drama a mile away, and I have neither the time nor the emotional bandwidth to unpack whatever the fuck is happening between you two. ”
Kael, who had apparently located his vocal cords in the rubble of his composure, straightened to his full height—which was excessive, unnecessary, and clearly designed to remind everyone present that he occupied more vertical space than the conversation warranted.
“I’m not fucking gay.”
The declaration was delivered with the rigid, over-enunciated emphasis of a man who had just been asked to deny a charge he found personally offensive, legally baseless, and factually irrelevant, and who was choosing to address it with the same energy he brought to disputed penalty calls: loud, definitive, and directed at no one in particular.
I rolled my eyes. Again. At this rate, my ocular muscles were going to qualify for their own Olympic event.
“No shit.” My tone was flat. Clinical. The verbal equivalent of reading a lab result aloud. “You’re bi. Because you totally don’t mind pussy, playboy.”
A growl. Low, rumbling, originating from a depth in his chest that was less vocal and more geological—the sound of tectonic frustration being processed through an Alpha’s larynx.
The frosted-pine note in his scent spiked, sharpening in the cold corridor air the way a blade sharpened on a whetstone—the automatic, pheromone-level response of an Alpha whose composure was being systematically dismantled by an Omega half his size.
“I’m not a playboy either.”
I shrugged. One shoulder. Minimal effort. The gestural equivalent of the word irrelevant.
“Not my business.” I met his gray eyes with a directness that I hoped communicated the full scope of my indifference, though the traitorous blush still lingering on my cheekbones was probably undermining the delivery. “Or my problem.”
Kael’s jaw tightened. The pale eyes narrowed to a gauge that would have made a lesser woman reconsider her life choices and a smarter woman take a step backward. I was neither.
“It could be your business,” he said, and his voice had dropped again—not to the sub-bass of territorial aggression but to a lower, more dangerous register that I recognized from years ago.
The frequency he used when he was being honest and hated himself for it.
“If you were a normal Omega and actually tried to be more submissive.”
Oh.
Oh, he did NOT.
I laughed.
Not the polite, diplomatic kind. The real kind—bright, sharp, carrying the serrated edge of a woman who had just been handed the most predictable, most boring, most taxonomically Alpha response available in the conversational playbook and was going to enjoy dismantling it the way a cat enjoyed dismantling a mouse that had made the catastrophic error of entering the wrong kitchen.
“The only one I’m being submissive to,” I said, and my voice was steady, clear, carrying the projection and diction of a woman who had spent twenty years performing to audiences of thousands and understood that the best lines demanded enunciation, “is an Alpha with actual commitment skills. And thus far—” I let my gaze travel from Kael to Luka and back, a deliberate, measured sweep that gave each of them equal time in my line of sight and equal space in the sentence that followed, “neither of you have mastered that particular skill. So have fun ranking yourselves up from your current score, which sits at a combined, cumulative, deeply embarrassing zero.”
I paused.
Looked at Kael.
“Actually—no. You’re negative one. Because you’re a douche.”
The sound that left Kael S?rensen’s mouth was not a word.
It was the vocal equivalent of a blue screen error—a strangled, half-formed exhalation that lived in the no-man’s-land between indignation and disbelief, accompanied by an expression so profoundly affronted that it could have been framed, mounted, and displayed in a gallery titled Alphas Receiving Unprecedented Feedback.
I didn’t wait for recovery.
“Now if you’ll excuse me.” I straightened my bag strap, lifted my chin, and stepped around Kael’s considerable frame with the practiced economy of a woman who had spent her career navigating around objects that were larger than her and thought they were more important. “I have shit to do.”
I made it four steps down the corridor before the addendum arrived.
I stopped. Turned. Pointed directly at Luka, who was leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed and an expression on his face that hovered somewhere between amused, awed, and mildly aroused—a combination I elected not to examine.
“Rink Two. Eight a.m.”
Three words. No elaboration. No negotiation. The verbal equivalent of a coordinates drop—a time and a place, delivered with the implicit understanding that failure to comply would result in consequences that did not require specification to be understood.
Luka nodded. A single, definitive dip of his chin.
Kael’s gaze snapped between us. The pale eyes tracked from Luka to me and back with the rapid, calculating precision of a center reading a developing play, and the questions forming behind those irises were so numerous and so visible they might as well have been printed on his forehead in block letters: What the fuck is happening?
Since when? Why him? What did I miss? And why does this bother me more than it should?
I didn’t answer any of them.
I turned on my heel and walked away.
The corridor stretched ahead of me—long, dimly lit, carrying the institutional scent of concrete and rubber and the distant, metallic tang of ice being resurfaced somewhere on the far side of the building.
My skate guards clicked against the floor in a rhythm that I forced myself to keep steady, measured, unhurried—the walk of a woman who had just detonated a conversational grenade between two Alphas and was departing the blast radius with her dignity intact and her pulse elevated for reasons she was not going to examine until she was behind a locked door.
Okay.
So that happened.
My brain, which had been operating in combat mode for the duration of that exchange—deploying verbal countermeasures, managing scent overload, maintaining eye contact with two Alphas simultaneously while projecting a confidence that my racing heart actively contradicted—began its post-engagement debrief with the enthusiasm of an intelligence analyst reviewing surveillance footage of a mission that had gone spectacularly, entertainingly sideways.
Point one: Kael S?rensen is at Olympia Academy. In the flesh. Smelling exactly like frozen forests and whiskey and every bad decision I’ve ever enjoyed. And he looked at me like—
No. Don’t finish that thought. That thought leads to a zip code you evacuated five years ago and the building has been condemned.
Point two: Luka Petrov has apparently had some form of prior relationship with Kael that involves mutual contempt and barely suppressed tension of a variety that my Omega instincts are categorizing as Not Entirely Platonic.
Point three: the idea of those two—SIX-FOOT-FOUR frozen tundra captain and SIX-FOOT-TWO dark-chocolate goaltender—having any type of sexual tension between each other should not, under any rational assessment, make me want to position myself directly in the center of that Alpha tension sandwich and luxuriate in the absolute chaos it would produce.
And yet.
My thighs pressed together as I walked. An involuntary, deeply inconvenient muscular response that I was choosing to attribute to post-training fatigue and absolutely, categorically, not to the mental image of being bracketed between Kael’s frosted-pine dominance and Luka’s dark-chocolate steadiness while both of them directed the full, concentrated force of their Alpha attention toward the single Omega occupying the space where their scents collided.
Nope. Not thinking about it. Not entertaining it. Filing it under “intrusive thoughts generated by sleep deprivation and pheromone exposure” and moving on.
I rounded the corner toward the Omega dormitory wing.
The familiar cocktail of softer scents greeted me—jasmine, vanilla, the clean citrus of someone’s morning skincare routine drifting from an open door.
The Alpha signatures faded behind me, thinning with every step until the corridor smelled like nothing more threatening than lavender detergent and the faint, sweet musk of resting Omegas.
I swiped my keycard. Pushed into my room. Dropped my bag. Leaned against the closed door and stared at the ceiling.
My reflection in the darkened window stared back—flushed cheeks, damp hair, the slightly unhinged expression of a woman who had just verbally eviscerated two ex-flings in a hallway at dawn and was now standing alone in her dorm room with an audition coming up and a body that was sending signals her brain had expressly forbidden.
I pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes.
Inhaled.
Exhaled.
And delivered, to the empty room, with the quiet, resigned conviction of a woman whose priorities were correct even if her hormones were staging a coup:
After this audition, get fucking laid. Because clearly you’re horny and missing too many dicks that are off limits.