Chapter 13 Merry-Go-Round #2
Kept them closed. Kept my forehead pressed against the crown of Octavia’s head, her damp curls against my skin, her scent filling my lungs with every breath. Kept the moment sealed for one more second before the complication entered the frame and rearranged the emotional geometry of the evening.
I don’t know whether to groan in frustration or be fucking thrilled.
The ambivalence was the thing. The both.
The simultaneous, contradictory impulses firing in parallel—the territorial Alpha instinct that wanted this dance floor, this woman, this moment to remain a closed system; and the other instinct, the one I was less willing to name, that felt his presence in the room like a frequency my body was tuned to receive and couldn’t switch off.
Part of me wants him to see this. Wants him to stand at the edge of this crowd and watch me hold the woman he walked away from and feel, in his frozen, controlled, too-proud-to-bend chest, exactly what it feels like to be on the outside of a thing you discarded.
And part of me wants him closer.
Which is the part I don’t talk about.
I sensed his presence without opening my eyes.
The specific, atmospheric shift that Kael S?rensen produced when he entered a room—the temperature dropping a degree, the ambient energy tightening, the other Alphas in the vicinity unconsciously adjusting their posture and their volume the way lesser bodies adjusted when a larger gravitational force entered the system.
I couldn’t determine the distance. Couldn’t tell if he was watching from the perimeter of the dance floor with those pale, calculating, miss-nothing eyes, or if he was closer—near enough to count the drops of sweat on my collar, near enough to see the placement of my hand on Octavia’s throat, near enough to smell her on me and me on her and to understand, with the strategic mind that made him the most dangerous captain in this academy, exactly what that scent transfer signified.
Shouldn’t care.
We’re not a thing. Haven’t been. Weren’t, technically, ever—because a thing requires acknowledgment, and Kael S?rensen never acknowledged it.
Not publicly. Not privately. Not in the morning after Stockholm when I’d woken in his hotel room with his scent saturating the sheets and his side of the bed cold and the door closed and no note, no text, no indication that the previous night had been anything other than a controlled experiment he’d decided not to replicate.
The fucker didn’t have the courage to publicly be okay with bending both ways.
And that was a one-time thing. One night.
One hotel room. One series of decisions made in the dark that felt, at the time, like the most honest thing either of us had ever done—and that was reclassified, by morning, into the category of things that Kael S?rensen did not discuss, did not repeat, and did not permit to exist in the narrative of who he was.
Doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
His rejection. The silence afterward. The way he’d looked at me in the hallway at the next tournament—through me, past me, the pale gray eyes carrying the specific, controlled blankness of a man who had decided that the person in front of him didn’t exist because acknowledging their existence required acknowledging what had happened between them, and acknowledging what had happened required courage he didn’t have.
That hurt as bad as anything I’ve experienced on the ice. And maybe it makes me understand—with a clarity that the tequila has stripped of its usual defensive padding—exactly how much pain I must have caused Octavia, too.
Different mechanism. Same wound. Walking away from someone who trusted you with their body and their vulnerability and their unguarded, three-in-the-morning self, and choosing your own comfort over their pain.
Kael did it to me. I did it to her.
The math is ugly, and it’s mine to carry.
The realization settled into my chest with the weight of a verdict I’d been avoiding for years, and the tequila—which had been functioning, until this moment, as a pleasant, golden sedative—turned into a truth serum that I hadn’t consented to consume.
I broke the kiss.
Not sharply. Not with the abrupt, defensive jerk of a man fleeing vulnerability.
With the slow, measured separation of someone who needed to look at the person in front of them and say the thing that the moment required, because the alternative—continuing to kiss her while the weight of what I’d done sat unspoken between us—was a kind of dishonesty I was no longer willing to sustain.
Our noses touched. I was towering over her—the height differential exaggerated by her backward lean against my chest, her head tilted up, her gray eyes heavy-lidded and luminous in the strobe-fractured dark.
Her breathing was rapid. Her lips swollen, red, wrecked.
The scent pouring off her skin was almost unbearable in its intensity—sweet and complex and generating a heat in my lower abdomen that made coherent thought a negotiation rather than a given.
My back against her spine. Her body molded into the contours of mine with the fluid, trusting weight of a woman who had decided, for tonight, that leaning on someone was an option she’d permit.
I whispered against her lips.
“I never should have left.”
The words were rough. Tequila-stripped. Carrying the specific, raw timbre of a confession extracted under conditions the confessor hadn’t anticipated.
“It hurt you,” I said. Not a question. A statement delivered as an acknowledgment—the verbal equivalent of signing a document I’d been refusing to read. “Didn’t it.”
She smirked.
Even now. Even with her eyes glazed with desire and her body molten against mine and the bass vibrating through us both like a shared heartbeat—she smirked.
Because Octavia Moreau did not receive emotional vulnerability without processing it through the refinery of her intelligence first, and what came out the other side was never the raw material you’d sent in.
“You always get sentimental when he’s around.
” Her voice was a low, husky murmur that I felt more than heard, the vibration traveling through her throat and into the palm still resting against it.
Her storm-gray eyes—heavy, knowing, seeing too much as always—held mine with the steady, amused, devastating focus of a woman who had just read the sentence I hadn’t written. “You know that?”
One hundred percent accurate.
As fucking always.
She was the only Omega—the only person—who could read me like that.
Who could watch me kiss her on a crowded dance floor and sense, beneath the desire and the tequila and the five years of accumulated hunger, the secondary emotional frequency that Kael S?rensen’s proximity generated in my nervous system.
She didn’t know the full story. Didn’t know about Stockholm or the hotel room or the cold side of the bed.
But she didn’t need the details. She read the effect the way she read music—not note by note but as a whole composition, the emotional architecture revealed through the performer’s body rather than the score on the page.
I huffed. Leaned down. Pressed my forehead against hers—the contact warm, grounding, an anchor point in a night that was spinning faster than my ability to track it.
And that’s when I noticed.
We were both drenched in sweat—the dance floor was a furnace, the bodies around us generating a collective thermal output that the building’s Victorian-era insulation was entirely unequipped to manage.
Sweat was expected. Normal. The baseline state of any person who’d been moving at this intensity for this duration in this environment.
But Octavia was burning.
Not warm. Not dance-floor-hot. Burning. The heat radiating from her skin where my forehead touched hers was several degrees above what exertion and alcohol could account for.
Her cheeks were flushed—not the attractive, exercise-induced pink of a woman who’d been dancing, but a deeper, more saturated red that started at her cheekbones and spread toward her temples.
Her breathing had shifted: faster, shallower, carrying a slight, rapid tremor that wasn’t exertion but was instead the specific respiratory pattern that preceded a biological event I recognized from years of proximity to Omega physiology.
And her scent.
Her scent had changed.
The already-intense signature that had been radiating from her skin all night had undergone a tonal shift—subtle but unmistakable to an Alpha standing this close.
The base had deepened. Warmed. Acquired a richness, a density, that hadn’t been present an hour ago.
The sweetness had intensified, climbing from ambient to enveloping, and beneath it—threading through the composition like a new instrument joining an orchestra mid-movement—was a note I couldn’t name but recognized at the designation level.
A heat note. The pheromone signature that an Omega’s biology produced when the reproductive cycle initiated and the body began broadcasting its status to every Alpha within olfactory range.
I pulled back.
Abruptly enough that the space between us admitted cold air, which hit her overheated skin and produced a visible shiver. I arched an eyebrow at her.
“When was your last heat?”
She stared up at me.
The expression on her face was the precise combination of intoxication and confusion that resulted from a woman who was five shots deep and mid-grind receiving a clinical question about her reproductive biology.
Her storm-gray eyes blinked twice—slow, heavy, the deliberate, processing blinks of someone whose cognitive bandwidth was currently allocated to desire and alcohol and was being asked to reallocate to medical history on zero notice.
Then she smirked.