Chapter 13 Merry-Go-Round
Merry-Go-Round
~LUKA~
“Some men worship at altars. I worshipped on dance floors and dirty frat house tiles.”
God, I’d beg for this woman again and again—on my knees, on camera, in front of stadiums and selection committees and every Alpha who’d ever looked at her twice—if it meant I got to grind against her like this on a packed dance floor with her body pressed against mine and her hips doing things to my groin that should be classified as a competitive sport.
We were in the middle of the floor.
Dead center. The epicenter of a mass of bodies that pulsed and moved and breathed as a single, bass-driven organism.
Two hundred athletes compressed into a space designed for maybe seventy, the air thick with heat and sweat and the layered, intoxicating cacophony of Alpha and Omega pheromones that the ventilation system had given up trying to manage approximately an hour ago.
The music was loud enough to live inside—a deep, rolling, hip-hop beat that vibrated through the hardwood and up through the soles of my feet and into the bones of my pelvis, where it merged with the rhythm Octavia was providing free of charge.
We were drenched.
Both of us. Sweat darkening the collar of my black shirt, slicking the skin of her shoulders, glistening on the brown expanse of her chest above the neckline of that criminal dress.
Her curls had loosened from their heat-set perfection into something wilder—damp at the roots, clinging to her temples and the curve of her neck, the purple and turquoise and platinum strands catching the strobe lights and throwing back colors like a prism held under water.
She looked feral. Radiant. Like a woman who had been released from a cage she’d built for herself and was discovering, in real time, that the world outside it had been waiting for her.
And we were drunk. Comprehensively, enthusiastically, five-shots-deep-and-counting drunk.
The tequila had long since stopped being a beverage and had become a state of being—a warm, golden, everything-is-magnificent haze that had dissolved the last of my inhibitions and most of my motor-planning capabilities and left behind a man whose entire operational framework had been reduced to three directives: keep standing, keep moving, and keep this woman’s body against mine for as long as physically possible.
How am I still upright?
Unclear. The answer probably involved some combination of goaltender’s balance, the structural support of the crowd pressing in from all sides, and the motivational power of Octavia Moreau’s ass, which was currently pressed against my groin with the deliberate, rhythmic, absolutely devastating precision of a woman who understood exactly what she was doing and was enjoying the results.
Her scent.
It was everywhere. Not in the background way that scent normally operated at parties—layered beneath the ambient noise of a hundred competing signatures, detectable but diluted.
Hers was oozing. Pouring off her skin and into the saturated air with a potency and a sweetness that I’d never encountered at this concentration before.
It wasn’t just present—it was performing.
Broadcasting. Perfuming the immediate radius around us with a signature so rich and so immersive that the other Alphas on the dance floor had been giving us an unconscious berth for the last twenty minutes, their bodies routing around us the way water routed around a stone in a current.
I couldn’t isolate the notes. Couldn’t break the composition into its individual layers the way I’d done with every other scent I’d encountered at this academy.
Her signature resisted dissection. It was unified.
Whole. A single, complex, devastating wave that hit my receptors as a totality rather than a sequence, and the effect was less olfactory than neurological—a full-system override that rerouted my cognitive processes from higher reasoning to the primal, designation-level circuitry that lived in the oldest, deepest architecture of the Alpha brain.
She has no idea.
No idea how seductive she was like this.
How electric. Not the composed, controlled, competition-day version of Octavia Moreau who channeled her power through choreography and discipline and the structured vocabulary of figure skating elements.
This was the unstructured version. The woman who had temporarily set down the weight of being the best and had picked up, in its place, the infinitely lighter burden of simply being alive.
Dancing. Moving her hips with the instinctive, music-drunk freedom of a body that had been denied pleasure for too long and was collecting its overdue interest with compound enthusiasm.
She doesn’t know that this is why I fell in love with her on first sight.
The memory surfaced through the tequila haze with a clarity that surprised me.
A bar in Halifax. Five years ago. A post-game celebration for some tournament I couldn’t remember the name of, in a city I’d visited for seventy-two hours and hadn’t thought about since.
I’d been at the bar—reserved, quiet, nursing a drink I didn’t want, performing the social obligation of attending a team event while internally calculating the hours until I could leave without it being remarked upon.
And then: a woman on the dance floor. Purple-and-turquoise hair catching the bar’s dim lighting.
Hips moving with a fluidity that spoke to a lifetime of body control applied to a context that was the opposite of controlled.
Laughing. Free. Generating a gravitational pull so strong that every body in the room had unconsciously reoriented toward her, and I’d watched from across the bar with the still, focused, patient intensity that I brought to every play and thought: Who is that?
And then her scent had reached me across twenty feet of crowded bar, and the question had changed from who to how.
How do I get close enough to breathe her in forever?
Five years later, the answer was apparently: beg on a frat house floor, transfer to her academy, learn figure skating in a week, and spend ninety minutes on an empty rink at five in the morning earning back the trust I’d squandered.
Efficient? No. Effective? Standing on a dance floor with her body pressed against mine and her scent rewiring my central nervous system: apparently, yes.
There’s watching her on the ice—immersed in a routine, focused, striving for the top of every scoreboard. That’s one kind of beauty. Precise, disciplined, the beauty of a weapon being wielded at the peak of its design.
But this.
Watching her FREE. Unscripted. Dancing like gravity forgot about her. Grinding against me like I’ve always been hers—like the five years between us were a layover and not a departure. Her scent wrapping around me like an anesthetic that I never want to wear off.
This is the addiction. The one I’ve been trying to replace for half a decade with every other Omega who crossed my path, and the reason none of them worked—none of them made the air taste different.
None of them made my chest feel like it contained more space than it had five minutes ago. None of them were her.
I didn’t know when my hand had found the front of her throat.
The placement was instinctive—Alpha possessive, the broad span of my palm settling against the column of her neck with a pressure that was firm without being restrictive, present without being punishing.
My thumb rested against the pulse point beneath her jaw, where her heartbeat kicked against my skin at a tempo that matched the bass line and exceeded the recommended rate for non-emergencies.
Her head was tilted back against my shoulder.
Her eyes half-closed. Her mouth open, breathing hard, the red lipstick smeared from our earlier exchange into a crimson geography that mapped every kiss and near-miss of the past hour.
I didn’t know how long we’d been kissing in the middle of this dance floor, either.
Time had stopped operating in a linear fashion approximately three drinks ago and was now functioning in a loop—kiss, dance, grind, kiss, dance, grind—each revolution indistinguishable from the last, each one burning hotter than the one before.
I could have my arms around her all night and die happy.
And that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the realization that’s been building since the moment I saw her crouched on the ice in a fetal position at five this morning.
I’ve been searching. For five years, I’ve been searching for some approximation of this—some replacement, some substitute, some woman whose scent and whose body and whose sharp, devastating, uncompromising mind could fill the space that Octavia carved into me the night we met in Halifax.
And the search produced nothing. An empty succession of interactions that I entered hoping they’d feel like this and exited knowing they never would.
No Omega came close.
Not one.
I caught his scent before my brain registered the source.
Frosted pine. Arriving through the party’s saturated atmosphere with the cutting, unmistakable clarity of a blade through silk.
Cold steel following—that surgical, temperature-less metallic note that I’d first encountered three years ago in a hotel room in Stockholm and hadn’t been able to scrub from my scent memory since, regardless of the distance I’d put between myself and its origin.
And beneath both, completing the signature with the quiet, devastating finish of an aged spirit meeting the tongue: whiskey.
The kind that had spent years in the dark becoming what it was.
Kael.
The name landed in my awareness with the blunt, complex weight of a puck hitting the back of the net—the play you saw developing, that you tracked through every phase, that your instincts told you would arrive at this exact trajectory, and that you still couldn’t stop.
I didn’t open my eyes.