Chapter 17 Saints And Sulkers #2
The silence wasn’t evasive—it was the specific, weighted kind that preceded a disclosure the speaker hadn’t planned on making.
He adjusted the washcloth on Octavia’s forehead.
Checked the temperature against her skin with the back of his fingers.
Sat on the edge of the bed with the controlled, careful movements of someone managing their proximity to a sleeping Omega whose biology was still broadcasting at elevated frequencies.
His clean-zesty-mint scent shifted. Subtle. A darkening in the black-tea base note that I might not have caught if I hadn’t been watching for it—the olfactory equivalent of a cloud passing across an otherwise clear sky.
Not a topic he wants to talk about.
Which is fair. We all carried pasts. Mine included five years of cowardice and a hotel room in Stockholm that I’d never discussed with anyone except the woman who could read it on my face without being told. Everyone in this house had scars they didn’t display in common areas.
But then he spoke.
“We tried to have an Omega.” His voice was quiet. Even. Carrying the measured cadence of a man who had rehearsed this narrative internally enough times that the emotional charge had been partially—not fully, but partially—discharged. “Two and a half years ago. Kael was having…problems.”
He paused on the word. Let it sit in the room’s warm air with the deliberate ambiguity of someone who was providing context without providing detail—the outline of a situation rather than the rendering.
“It was interrupting a lot. Performance. Sleep. His ability to function as captain without biting someone’s head off every forty-five minutes.
” A ghost of a smirk. Brief and bitter. “Doc said it was probably because we were Omega-less and all well into our early twenties. The biological imperative catches up, apparently. Your body stops asking and starts demanding, and the demand doesn’t care about your schedule or your competitive season or the fact that you’re captaining a team that’s trying to qualify for the national program. ”
I know that demand. Felt it myself. The restlessness that settles into your bones when the Alpha biology decides it’s been patient long enough and starts issuing ultimatums that no amount of training volume or ice time can satisfy.
“So we committed to an Omega,” Renzo continued.
His gaze was fixed on Octavia’s sleeping face, but I could tell his focus was elsewhere—somewhere in the past, in the rooms and the conversations and the accumulation of decisions that had led the Ironcrest pack to this specific point.
“Kael chose her. And we…went along with it. She was his favorite at the time, I suppose. He’d met her through the federation circuit—she was a figure skater on the national development team, high profile, the kind of Omega that looked good in photographs and on registry documents. ”
The annoyance that crossed his features was specific and deep—not the surface irritation of a man recounting an inconvenience but the structural, load-bearing frustration of someone who had watched a preventable disaster unfold from a position where his input had been solicited and then overridden.
“Long story short: she was a calculating, cheating piece of work.” The words were delivered without heat. Flat. The vocal equivalent of a coroner’s report—factual, clinical, the emotional content drained by repetition. “But the part that made it genuinely destructive was the drugs.”
I frowned. “Drugs?”
“She was taking hormonal accelerants. Synthetic compounds designed to increase heat frequency from the standard three or four times per year to…” He shook his head.
The green hair shifting across his brow.
“Monthly. Sometimes more. She was inducing heats on a schedule that her body was never meant to sustain, and she was doing it deliberately.”
My hand had found its way to myself during this conversation—massaging the base of my shaft where the knot sat swollen and aching, the residual, throbbing aftermath of hours spent with an Omega in heat.
Inappropriate, probably. Definitely not the setting for personal maintenance.
But the physical reality of a post-heat Alpha’s biology didn’t pause for narrative context, and my body was going to manage its requirements whether or not the timing was socially optimal.
Renzo didn’t spare it a glance. Didn’t acknowledge the adjustment.
The practiced non-reaction of a man who had lived in a pack long enough to understand that Alpha bodies did what Alpha bodies did, and commenting on it was neither necessary nor invited.
“Why the fuck would she induce heats on purpose?” I asked, genuinely baffled.
The question wasn’t rhetorical. Heats were consuming.
Debilitating. The kind of biological event that disrupted every other function—athletic, professional, cognitive—for the duration of its cycle.
Voluntarily increasing their frequency was the Omega equivalent of a goaltender deliberately taking slapshots to the mask during practice: technically survivable, but the motivation raised serious questions about the person’s judgment.
“Control.” Renzo’s response was immediate.
Simple. The single word carrying the dense, compressed weight of a conclusion he’d arrived at long ago and had refined through years of reflection.
“Frequent heats meant frequent dependence. Meant the pack was constantly in caretaker mode. Meant we were the ones orbiting her cycle instead of the other way around. Our training suffered. Our performance dropped. Kael’s captaincy was compromised because he was managing a pack that was perpetually in heat recovery instead of preparing for competition. ”
He met my eyes.
“It helped him momentarily. The immediate biological relief was real. But it’s never good to keep a cunning Omega around for too long.”
I frowned deeper. The assessment was harsh—cunning was a word that carried weight in designation dynamics, the descriptor reserved for Omegas who weaponized their biology rather than coexisted with it. “What—she was plotting against you?”
Renzo’s smirk returned. Sharper this time. Carrying an edge that could have scored glass.
“Plotting would be a kind word for someone who was trying to engineer the total destruction of your career, your pack, and your reputation.” He held my gaze with the steady, impenetrable composure of a man who had survived the demolition attempt and had filed the blueprints for future reference.
“But I guess Kael can give you the full debrief on that when he stops being a sulking ass.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Why the hell is he sulking?”
The question left my mouth before I could apply the filter that my sober self would have caught and my post-heat, tequila-residual self had apparently misplaced.
The concern embedded in the words was more transparent than I’d intended—a flash of genuine, unguarded interest in Kael S?rensen’s emotional state that I would have preferred to deliver wrapped in approximately three additional layers of indifference.
I have to stop the eye-rolling reflex when it comes to that man.
Because the eye-rolling is a mask, and the mask is getting thin, and what’s behind it is a level of caring that I don’t have the bandwidth to examine right now—not with an Omega asleep on the bed and a knot that needs another twenty minutes to fully subside and a man with green hair telling me things about Kael’s past that are rearranging the furniture in my chest.
It’s a dominance thing. The irritation. The impatience.
Two Alphas whose designation-level wiring classified each other as competitors before it classified them as anything else, and the friction that proximity produced was the natural, unavoidable consequence of two gravitational fields occupying the same space.
But beneath the friction—in the deeper, quieter, more honest stratum where the things I didn’t say lived—I still fucking cared about him.
Still wanted to know why his chest locked up at parties.
Still remembered the way his breathing changed in the dark in Stockholm, when the composure he wore like plate armor had been temporarily set aside and the man beneath it had been…
Stop.
Not now. Not here. File it. Come back to it when your knot isn’t throbbing and your diamond isn’t sleeping ten feet away.
Renzo glanced toward the door. The movement was quick, checking—the instinctive, security-sweep glance of a man who had been conditioned to verify the proximity of his captain before discussing his captain’s private business. Satisfied that the hallway was empty, he turned back to me.
His voice dropped.
“Kael’s on rut blockers.”
The sentence landed in my awareness with the clinical, devastating weight of a diagnosis delivered in a language you understood but wished you didn’t.
Rut blockers.
The pharmaceutical intervention designed to suppress the Alpha reproductive cycle—the hormonal mirror of Omega heat suppressants, engineered to reduce the frequency, intensity, and behavioral disruption of rut episodes by modulating testosterone production and pheromone output.
Standard medical practice for Alphas whose rut cycles interfered with professional function.
Also: a chemical cage. A biological muzzle.
The pharmaceutical equivalent of placing a governor on an engine to prevent it from reaching the speeds it was built to achieve.
“Without them,” Renzo continued, his voice maintaining the low, controlled volume of someone sharing information that had been classified until this moment, “it would be a pain in the ass to be around him. He’s been on them for the last two years, and it’s the reason he’s been able to function normally—captain the team, manage the pack, maintain the composure that everyone interprets as natural when it’s actually pharmaceutical. ”