Chapter 13 Merry-Go-Round #4
Even now—flushed, overheated, swaying slightly in my grasp as the heat’s preliminary symptoms competed with the tequila for dominance over her motor functions—she stared directly into Kael S?rensen’s pale gray eyes with the unwavering, unapologetic, fuck-your-composure directness that made her the most dangerous Omega I’d ever met.
She was almost zoned out. Almost. The glazed, inward-focused quality that preceded a heat’s full onset, when the body began withdrawing resources from external awareness and redirecting them toward the biological cascade that was about to rewrite the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours.
I’ve seen her do this before. The zone. The drift. When the heat takes hold and the world contracts to the immediate—scent, touch, warmth, the Alpha signatures that her biology has flagged as compatible.
We caught it early. But is she going to be okay with them being involved? With Kael? With a pack she didn’t choose, didn’t authorize, that was assembled around her in four minutes of bureaucratic crisis and hasn’t been tested by anything more intimate than paperwork?
Kael took a step forward.
The movement was deliberate. Measured. Carrying the controlled, precise energy of a man who understood that the wrong approach at the wrong speed would produce the wrong result, and who was applying the same strategic patience he brought to face-offs and power plays to the act of closing the distance between himself and a woman whose biological clock had just started ticking.
His hand found her chin. Two fingers beneath her jaw, tilting her face upward—gently, carefully, with a tenderness that looked misplaced on a man whose default expression could have been used to chill champagne.
Her storm-gray eyes met his pale gray ones, and the look they shared was intense.
Dense. The kind of eye contact that contained entire conversations in compressed files that only the two parties involved had the decryption key for.
He leaned in. Whispered against her ear—close enough that his lips grazed the cartilage, close enough that the words were for her alone, delivered at a volume that the bass and the crowd and my proximity couldn’t penetrate.
I didn’t hear what he said.
But I watched the effect.
Octavia huffed. The sound was defiant, indignant, carrying the specific tonal frequency of a woman who had just been told a thing she agreed with and was morally opposed to admitting.
“If you think I miss your cock,” she muttered, her chin still tilted upward by his fingers, her gray eyes burning into his with a ferocity that the heat’s onset had amplified rather than diminished, “I don’t.”
Kael smirked.
It was the first smile I’d seen on his face in three years.
Small. Barely there. A micro-expression that lasted approximately one second and transformed the frozen geography of his features into a landscape that contained, briefly, the suggestion of warmth.
His hand shifted from her chin to the side of her neck—wrapping around the column of her throat with a grip that mirrored the one I’d held minutes ago, possessive and careful and claiming, and the two of them stared at each other with an intensity that made the air between them crackle.
She huffed again. Shorter this time. The resistance crumbling in real time beneath the combined weight of the heat’s biochemistry and the proximity of an Alpha whose scent her biology had been flagging as compatible since the moment she’d walked into his chest in a doorway that morning.
“Fine.” The word was clipped. Grudging. Wrapped in layers of pride she was shedding like armor. “But this is simply a favor. Nothing more.”
Kael nodded. Slowly. The nod of a man accepting terms he had no intention of honoring long-term but was willing to agree to for the immediate purpose of getting the woman in front of him to safety.
“Let’s go. Quick.”
His gaze lifted. Found mine over the top of Octavia’s head.
Gray on green. The loaded, dense, multilayered exchange of two Alphas who shared a history they’d never spoken about and were about to share a night that would make the silence afterward significantly more complicated.
“Her in the middle,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. The gesture was automatic, familiar, carrying the exasperated fondness of a man who was being told a thing he already knew by a man who assumed he needed reminding.
“I remember.”
Kael took her left side. I kept her right.
She walked between us—bracketed, protected, the Omega flanked by two Alphas whose bodies formed a corridor through the crowd that parted without being asked, because the combined scent output of Kael S?rensen and Luka Petrov at full territorial broadcast was the olfactory equivalent of a police escort.
We moved through the party. Past the dance floor.
Past the bar where the bartender tracked our departure with the resigned expression of a man whose generous pour had been definitively outbid.
Past the hockey players at the pool table who clocked our formation—two Alphas, one Omega, moving with coordinated urgency toward the exit—and communicated their assessment through a series of raised eyebrows and low whistles that we collectively ignored.
The night air hit us at the door. Cold. Clean.
Carrying the frost-edged bite of Vermont in the pre-winter months, and Octavia shivered between us—the temperature differential between the overheated interior and the outdoor cold producing a full-body tremor that both Kael and I responded to simultaneously, each pressing closer, each offering body heat through proximity with the instinctive, wordless synchronization of Alphas whose biology had been activated by the same Omega signal and whose bodies had decided, independent of their conscious minds, to cooperate.
A vehicle idled at the back of the house. A black SUV—Ironcrest’s team transport, its engine running, Maddox behind the wheel with Renzo in the passenger seat. The headlights cast long, yellow beams across the frost-dusted gravel.
We guided her toward it. One step, then another.
Her heels clicking against the cold ground, her body warm between ours, her scent filling the night air with a signature that was escalating by the minute—sweeter, denser, the heat note climbing from suggestion to insistence to the unmistakable, biological declaration that the cycle had begun and the clock was running.
This is happening.
We’re walking toward a car that belongs to a pack I was recruited into six hours ago, flanking an Omega who scored three perfect tens this morning and is now entering a heat she didn’t plan for, and the man on her other side is the Alpha who broke me in Stockholm and sent a proxy to claim her at an audition and is currently looking at both of us with an expression that suggests he’s already five moves ahead in a game I didn’t know we were playing.
And I don’t care.
Because whatever this is—messy, complicated, improvised, built on bureaucratic lies and half-truths and the fragile scaffolding of a pack that exists more on paper than in practice—it’s also the first thing that’s felt right in five years.
The first time my body and my instincts and the aching, stubborn, refuses-to-quit part of my chest have all agreed on the same directive at the same time.
Keep her safe. Stay close. Be here.
I opened the SUV’s rear door. Kael guided her in. I followed.
The door closed behind us with a definitive, mechanical click, and the vehicle pulled away from the frat house and into the dark Vermont night, carrying three people who had spent five years circling each other through separate orbits and were now, finally, catastrophically, inevitably converging—knowing we were about to walk into a merry-go-round of lustful heat with the woman we’d been craving for years.