Chapter 21 #2
Not in the desperate, begging way that Luka had knelt on a frat house floor twenty-four hours earlier.
In the quiet, deliberate, this-is-for-you way of a man who had identified a need and was addressing it without being asked.
His mouth finding the space between my thighs while the water cascaded over his shoulders and the steam turned the tiny ensuite bathroom into a cloud, and the sounds I’d made had probably been audible on adjacent floors because Renzo Viteri’s tongue was not merely good at what it did—it was devastating.
The man ate like I was the finest dessert he’d ever encountered and he intended to savor every component before requesting the recipe.
Okay. OKAY. Moving on. Moving aggressively on before my face melts off my skull.
I moved my hands from my face. Stared at the ceiling—a standard, plaster, non-judgmental ceiling that offered no opinions about the sexual archaeology I was conducting beneath it—and took a breath.
Then I looked left.
Maddox.
He was sleeping on his back. The default posture of a man whose frame was too broad to comfortably sleep in any other configuration—the shoulders requiring lateral real estate that side-sleeping couldn’t accommodate, the chest rising and falling with the deep, measured rhythm of a body in genuine rest. His arm was beneath me.
The right one, extended under the pillow my head was resting on, the forearm disappearing beneath my shoulders in a position he’d assumed at some point during the night and had maintained through the duration of his unconsciousness.
The poor man probably has arm paralysis. That limb hasn’t had circulation in hours. He’s going to wake up with pins and needles that last until next Tuesday and he won’t be able to grip a hockey stick for the morning session.
Guilt aside, he looked good in sleep. The severity that his waking expression carried—the enforcer’s default composure, the guarded stillness, the jaw that always seemed to be bracing for an impact that hadn’t arrived yet—had softened.
His dark-blue hair was mussed against the pillow, the jet-black highlights catching the faint, ambient light filtering through the curtains.
His features, relaxed, were handsome in a way that his conscious face obscured—the strong brow less stern, the jaw less set, the mouth—
His mouth is slightly open. Like a man who fell asleep mid-thought and forgot to close the hardware. It’s oddly endearing for someone whose waking presence communicates “I could bench-press your car.”
His scent was muted in sleep. The dark cedar still present—always present, the resinous, old-growth foundation that was as permanent as the man himself—but the charred-ember warmth and the storm-air electricity had banked to their resting states, producing a gentler, more ambient version of his signature.
Cozy. If a six-foot-three defensive enforcer could be described as cozy, Maddox Hale in sleep was the evidence.
I turned my head right.
Renzo.
He was the snuggler. Curled against my side with his arm draped across my waist and his face tucked into the space between my shoulder and my neck, his breath warm and rhythmic against my skin.
The proximity was intimate—not sexual, not possessive, but the natural, unconscious closeness of a body that sought warmth and contact in sleep and had found both in the Omega beside him.
His green hair was a riot against the white pillowcase—vivid, chaotic, the kind of color that refused to be ambient even in a dark room.
Why green?
The question surfaced with the idle, post-sleep curiosity of a mind that had been restored to full processing power after the heat’s enforced cognitive rationing.
In competitive athletics, personal aesthetics were negotiated territory.
Federations and governing bodies maintained appearance standards that ranged from conservative to draconian—hair color policies, grooming requirements, the implicit and sometimes explicit expectation that athletes present a “professional” image that translated, in practice, to a narrow, homogeneous visual identity that punished deviation.
I’d fought that battle myself. The purple-to-turquoise-to-platinum gradient that I’d maintained since my early competitive years had been a point of contention with every federation official, coaching staff, and selection committee I’d encountered.
The blonde tips with the blue were pushing it, according to every authority that had an opinion and a clipboard.
So what made him choose neon green? In hockey, where conformity is practically a roster requirement?
Where the locker room culture rewards sameness and punishes eccentricity?
Choosing that color—maintaining it, defending it, making it part of his visual identity on the ice—was a rebellion that required either profound confidence or profound indifference to consequences. Either way, I admire it.
He snored lightly. A soft, rhythmic buzz that was more white noise than disruption, the lullaby-grade output of a man whose sleep was deep and peaceful and carrying him somewhere his conscious mind couldn’t follow.
His clean-zesty-mint scent was gentle at this distance—the peppermint softened, the bergamot rounded, the black tea warm and ambient.
The missing note—the one I hadn’t been able to identify in the SUV—was there, hovering at the edge of my perception like a word on the tip of my tongue, present but unnameable.
I’ll figure it out. Eventually. My nose doesn’t leave puzzles unsolved.
And then I noticed the marks.
Hickeys.
Both of them. Maddox’s neck, Renzo’s shoulders, the exposed skin above their collarbones and along the cords of their throats—decorated with a constellation of red-purple bruises in various stages of bloom, each one a circular, capillary-burst souvenir of a mouth that had been applied with enthusiasm and maintained with suction and left behind evidence that would be visible above a jersey neckline for approximately five to seven business days.
One hundred percent my fault.
One HUNDRED percent. Those are mine. Every single one.
I marked these men like I was signing a contract with my teeth, and they are going to walk into the Ironcrest locker room tomorrow morning looking like they lost a fight with a vacuum cleaner and won a fight with an Omega who treats neck skin like a canvas.
I tried not to cringe. Failed. The cringe was full-body—a shuddering, eyes-squeezed-shut, shoulders-hunched contraction of a woman confronting the physical evidence of her heat-loosened inhibitions in the cold, sober light of post-cycle clarity.
Breathe. It happened. It was consensual, it was managed, it was the biological reality of an unsuppressed Omega in heat with compatible Alphas, and the marks will fade.
The memories, however, are going to live rent-free in the filing cabinet of my consciousness for the rest of my natural life.
File under: Things Octavia Did That Octaviana Would Be Proud Of.
I slipped out of Renzo’s hold.
Carefully. The way you extracted yourself from a spin’s exit edge—smoothly, with controlled momentum, avoiding any abrupt weight transfer that might disrupt the equilibrium of the system you were leaving.
His arm shifted as I withdrew, the grip loosening with the easy, unconscious adjustment of a body that registered the change without waking, and his face burrowed deeper into the pillow I’d vacated with the instinctive, warmth-seeking nuzzle of a man whose sleeping self was not ready to relinquish the thing it had been holding.
The bathroom was quiet. Clean. The shower stall still carried the faint, residual scent of steam and Renzo’s mint and the memory of water hitting tile and a mouth between my thighs that I was not going to think about right now because I had just gotten my face temperature under control.
I didn’t feel sticky. Which meant someone had cleaned me up before sleep—had wiped down my skin, changed the sheets, managed the post-heat logistics with a quiet, unglamorous care that the conscious mind rarely witnessed because it happened during the exhausted, vulnerable interstice between the cycle’s final wave and the crash into sleep.
Someone had taken care of me when I wasn’t awake to take care of myself.
That’s pack behavior. Real pack behavior. Not the paperwork-and-registration kind. The kind that happens at four in the morning with a washcloth and clean sheets and the decision to prioritize comfort over sleep.
A fresh set of clothes waited on the bathroom counter.
Folded. A soft gray t-shirt—men’s, oversized, carrying the faint, residual scent of detergent and cedar that identified it as Maddox’s.
Compression shorts. Clean socks. The essentials, assembled by someone who had anticipated that the Omega would wake before the Alphas and would need something to put on that wasn’t the criminal black dress currently crumpled in a corner somewhere.I changed.
Splashed water on my face. Examined my reflection in the mirror—flushed cheeks, heavy eyes, lips that were swollen in a way that had nothing to do with allergies and everything to do with hours of kissing multiple men with varying degrees of intensity.
My hair was a disaster. The curls had abandoned their heat-set architecture entirely, collapsing into a loose, tangled, post-sex mane that fell around my shoulders in waves that were less “styled” and more “survived.”
I look like a woman who has been comprehensively, thoroughly, enthusiastically handled by three Alphas for the better part of a day. Which is accurate. And somehow, despite the dishevelment, I look more alive than I have in years.
I crept from the bedroom on silent feet.