Chapter 6
SIX
Tuck
The axe-throwing range had been my idea, which meant whatever happened was on me.
“Stress relief,” I’d told them in the booth on Thursday.
“We get out of our heads, we throw sharp shit at wood until production stops screaming.” Cillian had lifted one pierced eyebrow, the look that meant he was filing it away to use against me later, and said nothing, which from Cillian counted as a yes.
Isobel had laughed. That alone was worth the booking fee.
Which was how we found ourselves at Blade & Barrel, a warehouse that somebody had paid a fortune to make look cheap.
The place hit me with sawdust first, raw and resinous, then stale beer and the cold tang of metal off the racks.
Bodies underneath that, warm, moving, a Saturday crowd of birthday groups and corporate teams pretending they didn’t want to bury an axe in each other.
My own scent, cedar and bourbon, settled into the room like it had a right to be there.
Alpha in a place built around sharp edges and controlled violence. Fitting.
Cillian had parked himself against the far wall, tablet already out, the silver ring in his ear catching the lights when he tipped his head.
He never threw. He just watched, dark eyes going target to thrower and back, running numbers I’d never see.
From here his scent was almost nothing, sandalwood and sage wound down tight, like the rest of him.
Isobel stood at lane seven with an axe that looked stupid in her hands, too big, like a kid holding a fire extinguisher.
She’d shoved her glasses up into her hair.
I’d told her that was a mistake. She’d waved me off.
Her bun was already sliding toward collapse, and the gray sweater ate her shoulders the way all of them did, and under it she looked small enough that some dumb part of me wanted to stand between her and the whole room.
Professional respect. That’s what I called it.
Years of working together built something, sure, but a work thing.
A colleague thing. The fact that I knew exactly what color her eyes went in low light, that I’d noticed how her whole face rearranged itself when she laughed, the way her breathing changed when she locked in on a take, none of that meant anything.
I noticed things. It was part of the job.
I came up beside her, kept a clean foot of space.
“First problem,” I said. “You’re holding it like it insulted your mum.”
“It’s an axe, Tuck.” She cut me a look, eyebrow up. “It doesn’t have opinions about my family.”
“It’s got opinions about your grip.” I reached over and moved her fingers on the handle without thinking. “Loose at the bottom, firm up top. You want control through the release, not a death grip the whole way.”
Her hands were smaller than I’d registered. Soft under my calluses, which didn’t square with the voices she pulled out of that throat, the snarling warlords, the queens who could stop a room. I held the contact a beat past anything the adjustment needed. Then a beat more.
Professional. This is professional.
“Stance now.” I stepped back and looked. Her feet were wrong, too close, weight loaded like she expected the axe to throw her instead. “Shoulder width. Lead foot up. You want to feel planted, yeah? Like nothing knocks you over.”
She shifted. Still off. Too careful. Too much head, not enough gut.
I moved without deciding to. Stepped in behind her, put my hands on her hips to walk them into line. My voice dropped into the flat, easy register I used for coaching falls.
“Here. Feel where the weight goes. Low and through the middle—”
Her scent hit me.
Like a wall. No. Like a wave, breaking over my head, warm and sweet and right, and the back of my skull came awake with a focus I hadn’t felt in years.
Chamomile. Fresh cream. Not the flat chemical version I’d been getting off her for years. The real thing. Living and warm and close, cooked up by heat and effort, and under it, under the notes I knew, something new. Steamed milk and honey and Omega.
I went still.
My hands were still on her hips. My chest was an inch off her back. My nose, fuck, my nose had gone into her hair without asking me, that auburn mess that was always coming loose, and I was breathing her in like the air had run out everywhere else.
Everything went simple. The instinct came up through me like a tide, no argument in it. Mine. Old and stupid and certain, didn’t give a single fuck about professionalism or distance or the fact that none of this made sense. This one. This scent. Mine.
Under my hands she’d stopped breathing.
I couldn’t move. I just stood there with her flooding my system, my head trying to staple two facts together that wouldn’t hold. The Beta I’d worked beside for years. The Omega I was currently inhaling like my life rode on it.
A hand landed on my shoulder.
Firm. Not rushed. It turned me off her with a steady pressure that didn’t leave room to argue. Cillian. His scent cut through the fog, sandalwood and sage, and it dragged me back from whatever ledge I’d walked out onto.
“Towel.” He already had one in his other hand, out toward her. “Spray’s in your bag. Front pocket.”
He was between us now. Just there. Made the gap and didn’t make a scene doing it. His eyes found mine, and what was in them wasn’t anger and wasn’t surprise. It was older than both.
It said, Not here. Not yet.
She took the towel. Her hands were shaking, I saw that. She pressed it to the back of her neck, then her wrists, fast, drilled. She’d done this before. A lot. In a lot of rooms where her scent had done something it wasn’t supposed to do.
The Beta Neutral came out of her bag. She sprayed it down with the ease of pure habit, and the chemical flatness dropped over everything like a door swinging shut.
The scent went. Honey and milk pulled back behind the fake curtain. The animal part of me howled about it, but the part that had spent years filing Isobel Gretan under colleague and friend and absolutely-not-someone-I-think-about-at-3-a.m. shoved itself back behind the wheel.
“Right.” My voice came out wrecked. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Right. Good. The, uh. Stance looked better. Before.”
She turned to face me. Glasses back on, sitting a little crooked, and behind them her eyes had gone dark and there was something moving down under the surface. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.
Cillian’s hand was still on my shoulder. Lighter now, but there. A leash. A reminder.
“I think,” he said, in the same even tenor he always used, not one thing about it shifted, “we take a break. Get water. Let the lanes clear.”
It wasn’t a suggestion. It came with the whole weight of how Cillian ran a room, quiet, unhurried, no opening to argue.
I made myself step back. Made myself let go of the last thread of tension holding me pointed at her like a compass at north. My own scent was doing something it hadn’t done in a decade. Sharpening at the edges. Taking on a note I’d spent ten years training out of myself.
Claiming. That was the note. The broadcast that said this one is mine and I’ll put anyone who says different on the floor.
I was not going to put that out in the middle of a recreational axe-throwing venue. I was a professional. A grown adult who’d spent years in rooms with Isobel Gretan without making it weird. I was—
I was completely, comprehensively fucked.
“Water sounds good,” I got out.
Cillian nodded. His hand finally came off my shoulder, but his eyes stayed on me one more beat, and that look hadn’t moved. He knew something. He knew something, and he’d known it long enough that this, this whole disaster of proximity and scent and biology coming online, wasn’t news to him.
How long? How long had he known?
I looked at her. She had the axe handle in both fists like it was the one solid thing left in a room that had gone to liquid, and her face was doing something that put an ache low in my gut.
I’d seen that face before. In the booth, deep in a session, in the dead air between takes when she thought nobody was looking.
Fear. That’s what it was.
Fear of being known.
“Come on.” Cillian was already moving toward the bar, that wiry frame slicing the crowd the way he sliced everything, clean, nothing wasted. “Session’s paid. No rush.”
She fell in step beside me. We didn’t touch. We didn’t talk. The spray was working now, that flat chemical wall locked in place, and if I hadn’t just had my face in her hair I’d never have known there was a thing under it.
But I had. And I did. And nothing, not the spray, not the distance, not years of careful fiction, was going to make me un-know it.
Cillian bought bottles of water at the bar and handed one to each of us with the same matter-of-fact he’d bring to setting a mic gain, then took a high table with a clean line on the lanes. Still watching. Still filing.
I drank half of mine and tried to drop my heart rate. The water was cold and did nothing for the heat still going through me, but it gave my hands a job that wasn’t reaching for her.
“So,” I said. My voice sounded wrong in my own ears. “That was—”
“Don’t.” Quiet. Controlled, and the control was costing her. “Not here. Please.”
The please landed somewhere soft. Somewhere I’d spent years swearing didn’t exist.
“Okay,” I said. “Not here.”
Cillian said nothing. He sat with his tablet, dragging his fingers across the screen in patterns that could’ve been work or could’ve been nothing, and he held the room steady just by being in it.
The lanes called us back after a while. We threw more axes. Her stance got better. Her aim stayed dogshite. I kept a full arm’s length, minimum, and kept my mouth to technical notes only. Cillian watched from the side, calm, still filing.
When we left, the late sun was coming through the cloud in the kind of light photographers chase. She pulled her sweater tighter around herself and said something about prepping for tomorrow’s rehearsal. Cillian offered to split a cab. I said I’d walk.
I walked. Through town, down toward the canal, past houseboats and joggers and couples shoving walking dogs.
My scent came down off the edge. The claiming note thinned out and went.
The reasonable part of my brain climbed back on top and started building, frameworks, explanations, all the reasons what just happened didn’t have to mean the thing it obviously meant.
None of them held.
I’d known. Some part of me had always known.
The pull I’d felt for years, my attention tracking her across a room without my say-so, the flat certainty that being in a space with Isobel Gretan was just different from being in a space with anyone else, I’d called it chemistry, respect, anything but the real name, because the real name meant my gut had been right the whole time and I’d spent years calling myself a liar to keep ignoring it.
Omega. She was an Omega. And every cell I had had been trying to tell me that since the day we met.
I stopped on a bridge over the canal and watched the water go.
A narrowboat slid under me, painted up in cheerful blue and yellow, some dog barking at nothing off the deck.
Normal life. Normal afternoon. A normal world that had not a single thing to do with the fact that my biology had been running a whole second track under my conscious mind for the better part of a decade.
My phone buzzed. Cillian.
She’s okay. Home safe. Talk tomorrow.
I looked at it for a long time.
I typed, How long have you known? Then deleted it. Typed it again. Deleted it again.
Some questions you don’t send by text.
I pocketed the phone and kept walking. The sun went down. The temperature dropped. I didn’t clock either one.
Tomorrow we’d be back in the booth. Tomorrow I’d be sitting fourteen inches from Isobel Gretan, breathing the same sealed air, acting like everything was the way it had always been.
Nothing was ever going to be the same again.