Chapter 30
Korbin
I tell myself I don’t care.
I’ve said it a hundred times today. Muttered it under my breath in the locker room. Repeated it in the weight room. I thought about it during drills. Lied to Milton. Lied to myself.
But the truth keeps popping up, trying to smack me into reality. And every time I blink, I see her.
Bayleigh Lennox.
Shaking. Brave. Back against a wall. Her mint and green tea scent hitting me and sliding down my throat like ice water.
And now—
Her sitting at that dinner table with my brother. Smiling. Hair soft around her face. Leaning toward him like he’s the safest place in the world.
My jaw ticks hard enough to crack teeth. It’s not really jealousy; more like envy. I don’t want to be there instead of him, but with them and Milton, too.
“This is fucking stupid,” I mutter to the empty room.
The TV blares some rerun of The Lost I’m not watching. My beer sits on the nightstand, untouched now that it’s warm.
I should be thinking of anything else.
Practice. Stats. Drills. The matchmaker meeting management keeps pushing. Our shitty record.
But all I can think about—
Is her.
That damn picture is everywhere. News accounts. Sports drama blogs. Fan pages.
Lincoln and Bayleigh, heads together in a restaurant booth like a fucking rom-com montage.
And I’m pissed.
Not because of the photo. Because of the way my stomach twisted when I saw it.
I grab the remote and flip through channels hard enough the buttons click loudly.
Doesn’t matter. She’s a Lennox. She’s your rival’s sister. Your brother is the one she wants.
I repeat it like a chant. None of it sticks.
But the memory of her scent does. Mint and green tea—cool, soft, steady. Wrapping around me the second I got close enough. Calming every sharp edge in me like she was designed for it.
The scent alone still pulls something primal out of me. Something I don’t want to look at too closely.
My phone buzzes on the table. I ignore it until it vibrates again—group chat.
Lincoln: Just checking in with an update.
Lincoln: I talked to Bayleigh. She’s okay. Just laying low tonight.
A second later:
Milton reacted
I don’t reply.
I toss the phone face down, grab the beer, and take a long swallow. The bitterness hits my tongue wrong, stomach twisting again. Like I’m punishing myself for something I didn’t do.
Or for something I want.
“Don’t be fucking stupid,” I tell myself, rubbing a hand over my face. “She’s not yours. You don’t even want her.”
Liar.
I lean back against my headboard, stare at the ceiling, and replay everything I’ve been trying to forget.
Her face when she realized someone was stepping in for her. The way she stared at me like she didn’t know whether to thank me or run. The little motion she signed afterward—fingers to lips, then out. Thank you.
I didn’t even know what it meant until Lincoln told me. And then—the softness behind it hit me like a blow.
I drag a hand over my jaw, exhaling hard.
This is adrenaline, I tell myself. Instinct. She was scared. You intervened. Anyone would’ve.
But it’s bullshit, and I know it. I’ve stopped fights before. Stepped between teammates and fans. Broken up bar brawls. Not once did it feel like this. Not once did I feel like my entire body decided on its own that the omega in front of me mattered more.
I grab a second beer from my mini-fridge, tap it against the side of the nightstand, and let my head fall back.
Her scent hit first.
Then those eyes.
Big. Wide. Dark with fear, then confusion, then—God help me—trust.
When I followed her down the street afterward, it wasn’t logic. It wasn’t duty. It was instinct.
A slow burn settles low in my stomach, and I swallow against it. I’m not a fucking teenager. I don’t get worked up over some omega I barely know—
Except apparently I do, because the minute I saw that picture of her smiling at Lincoln, my entire body reacted like I’d been shoved.
My fingers tighten around the bottle. I take another long drink, but it doesn’t dull anything.
The room is too quiet and still. Too full of every thought I don’t want to have.
I switch channels again. Sports. Cooking. News. Weather. Back to sports. None of it registers. All I see is her face when she looked up at me, hands trembling around that folder. All I hear—even without sound—is the little gasp she made when I stepped closer.
My stomach twists into knots. I’ve never been affected like this by an omega in my life. Never needed one. Never wanted one. Not even Gina. I mean, she was hot and an okay fuck, but I didn’t have this instinctive pull toward her. Especially not like this one.
Not my rival’s sister. Not my brother’s date. Not the omega who should be miles from us in every possible way.
So why the fuck can’t I stop replaying how I met her? The fight, her scent, her thank you, or her leaving without looking back.
Maybe that’s why it hits so hard. She didn’t cling, didn't fawn, didn’t even stay long enough for me to ask if she was okay. She just thanked me and walked away.
And I—I let her go.
But I didn’t want to.
“Fuck,” I breathe, slamming the beer down too hard. Foam spills over the edge. I brace my hands on my knees, squeezing my eyes shut.
This isn’t good, this isn’t smart, this isn’t me.
I hear my stepmother’s voice in my head—stern, disappointed.
No attachment. No weakness. No omegas. Not for you.
I hear my father, Todd—cold, clipped.
You’re a Brooks. You don’t break over someone you can’t have.
I hear myself—
I don’t care.
But then, I smell mint and green tea like it’s still clinging to my clothes. And I know. I care. I care way too fucking much.
My phone buzzes again. I ignore it. My pulse is too loud in my ears.
I stretch my legs out and try to get comfortable—but every inch of me is wired. My muscles feel too tight, my chest too full, and just my whole body too aware of something it shouldn’t be aware of. Something that doesn’t belong to me.
I think of Lincoln’s grin when he texted me that she said yes. I should be happy for him. I am… mostly.
But a part of me, some dark, stubborn, instinctive part, hates the idea of her choosing him without even considering…
I shut that thought down so fast it hurts.
She’s not for you. She’s not yours. She’ll never be yours.
I grab the remote, turn the volume up louder than necessary, and close my eyes. The noise helps. It drowns out the parts of me I don’t want to hear. But eventually even that fades. And when sleep drags me under, it’s not the scoreboard I see, the rink, or the asshole I put on the ground.
It’s her standing on the street, shaking but unbroken, looking brave and beautiful.
And the worst part? Even in sleep, the part of me that’s supposed to hate her…
doesn’t.
Not even a little.
I jerk awake to the sound of my phone buzzing against the table. I blink, throat dry, sleep sticking to my skin like sweat. And she’s the first thing in my head.
Again.
I scrub a hand over my face, groaning. “Fucking pathetic.”
The phone buzzes again. I reach for it before I can stop myself, half hoping, half dreading, that somehow she got my number and called to tell me to fuck off, put me out of my misery.
Lincoln: Milton told me what happened in the locker room. You good?
Milton: Yeah. You alive, or did you punch a hole in the drywall again?
I stare at the messages in our group thread, jaw clenching. I should ignore them, toss the phone across the room, and shake off whatever this feeling is inside of me.
Instead, I type.
Me: I’m fine.
Three seconds later.
Milton:
Lincoln’s typing bubble pops up immediately, then disappears, then pops up again, because he’s probably overthinking his words just like he overthinks every goddamn thing.
Lincoln: You sure? Milton said you were ready to kill Philips.
Me: He deserved it. End of story.
Milton’s typing bubble appears next.
Milton: You went quiet the rest of the day. And that’s weird even for you.
I grit my teeth. Of course he noticed. Milton notices everything.
He watches without looking like he’s watching, something that makes it impossible to breathe sometimes.
I have to get this under control. I have to shut this down before they sniff out the real reason I’m acting like a malfunctioning robot.
I force my thumb to type something easy. Something believable. Something safe.
Me: Just tired. Practice sucked. The team sucked. The coach sucked. Same old shit.
Milton reacts with a thumbs-up emoji, but it’s not a supportive thumbs-up. It’s the “I don’t believe your bullshit but I’m giving you room to dig your own grave” thumbs-up.
Lincoln doesn’t answer right away.
A full minute passes.
Lincoln: Look… if this is about the picture, we didn’t know anyone took it.
I slam my thumb down on the keyboard before he can finish.
Me: It’s not about the damn picture.
And it isn’t. Not really. It’s everything around it. Everything I don’t want to fucking feel but do, anyway.
Lincoln sends another message.
Lincoln: Okay. I’ll take your word for it. But if you ever want to talk…
Me: I don’t.
The typing bubble on their end freezes. Silence settles into the group chat.
Good.
That’s what I need. Silence, distance, space. Because if I don’t get a handle on this soon, it’s going to blow up in all our faces. And she—Bayleigh—doesn’t deserve to get caught in the blast radius of my screwed-up head.
I toss the phone onto the bed next to me just as it vibrates once against the blanket.
A separate notification flashes across the screen—a little symbol that I don’t recognize. I open and my heart stops beating, my stomach rolls, and I just know this is the end for me.
Bayleigh Lennox.
I stare at it as if the thing might explode. I shouldn’t open it. I shouldn’t even look. But my hand moves on its own. The message is just one word. One simple thing she typed, probably without thinking.
Bayleigh: Thanks.
That’s it.
No explanation, no context, no reason to send it to me.
Just…thanks. My chest tightens like someone tied a rope around it and pulled. And the worst part? I type back before I can stop myself.
Me: For what?
She replies almost instantly.
Bayleigh: Lincoln told me about the locker room. Players talk, and things get around the league. You know that. Also hope it’s okay I text. I maybe sweet talked your brother into letting me thank you myself.
I type slowly. Lying through my teeth with every word.
Me: Don’t worry about it. No one gets to talk shit about my brother. Not even Milton, and he’s our best friend.
Three dots appear. Then disappear. Then appear again.
Bayleigh: That makes you a good man, Korbin.
My pulse stutters.
I lock the phone before I do something stupid. Before I say something I can’t take back. Before I admit to her or to myself that this isn’t just adrenaline anymore.
I shove the device face down into the pillows and rake both hands through my hair.
“Get it together,” I breathe. “She’s not yours.”
The quiet house doesn’t answer.
Neither does the part of me that knows—that hates—that she could be.
And that’s the problem.