Chapter 3
Benji
I’ve been pacing for twelve minutes, I’ve changed my shirt twice, and I look incredible.
Which isn’t the point. Except it is absolutely the point, because when I open this door and Knox Rivera sees the omega he ghosted standing here looking like the best thing he ever threw away, I want the image to ruin his life.
The apartment is empty. Shay’s at the library, Soren’s at a study group, and I made sure not to talk them out of it.
This is a solo operation. I don’t need witnesses for what I’m about to do.
The plan is clean: open the door, let him see my face, watch his cocky little hookup smirk fall apart, deliver the line I’ve been rehearsing for an hour—I haven’t settled on the exact wording yet, but it involves the phrase "you're a fucking joke" and ends with the door closing in his face—and then I’m done.
The catfish of the century, pulled off by an omega with a grudge, a fake profile, and exactly zero forgiveness.
I check the mirror one more time. Black skinny jeans, the ones that make my ass look like a weapon. My good band tee with the sleeves rolled up. The blue streak in my hair is fresh, my nose ring is catching the light, and I look like someone you’d kill to keep. Exactly the aesthetic I’m going for.
My pulse is running fast. I tell myself it’s adrenaline, not nerves. This is going to be good. This is going to be so fucking good.
The knock comes. Two sharp raps, and my heart slams against my ribs so hard my teeth ache.
I take a breath, fix my face into a deadpan glare, and walk to the door.
I pull it open. Knox is standing in my hallway.
Even though I planned this—engineered it, pulled every string to get him here—seeing him in person after six months hits me somewhere I wasn’t braced for.
He’s in a dark jacket and a beanie, his tattoos crawling up past his collar, taking up the entire doorframe the way he takes up every room he walks into.
My body reacts before my brain gets a vote.
Heat pools in my stomach. A heavy tug low in my gut. I shove it down. I’m not here for that.
His face does the thing I came for. That easy, insufferable hookup smile freezes, glitches, and crashes.
His dark eyes go wide. His mouth opens, but nothing comes out.
I watch the recognition land: confusion first, then the drop.
The exact moment he understands who he’s been messaging, who lured him here, who’s standing in this doorway with six months of rage behind his teeth.
"You—" he starts.
This is my moment. I open my mouth, the revenge line right there on my tongue, ready to go.
Then his scent hits me.
It doesn’t build. It doesn’t arrive gradually.
It crashes through the open door. I’ve smelled Knox before—months ago, in a packed bar, three drinks deep, his scent mixed with a hundred other people—and it was still the best thing I’d ever breathed.
But that was noise. This is a quiet hallway.
I’m stone-cold sober, there is nothing between us, and he smells like ink, metal, and pure, unfiltered alpha.
It gets into my lungs and my blood, and I can’t fucking think.
My knees go soft. My skin prickles everywhere at once.
Slick floods between my thighs so fast I gasp—hot, immediate, soaking into the cotton of my underwear in seconds.
My cock jerks hard against my zipper. My hands are trembling, and every part of me that I keep leashed and quiet goes completely feral.
Not purring. Screaming. And the word it’s screaming is mate.
I refuse to hear it.
Knox is staring at me. He looks as wrecked as I feel—pupils blown, chest heaving, his hand gripping the doorframe like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. The cockiest alpha I’ve ever met has nothing to say. His hookup script is as dead as mine.
The plan is gone. The line is gone. I’m standing in my own doorway, wet and unsteady, staring at the man who ghosted me while my body begs for him and my brain screams no.
I grab his jacket.
I don’t decide to do it. My fist just closes on the heavy canvas, and I haul him across the threshold. The door slams shut behind him, and I shove him back against the hallway wall hard enough to rattle the coatrack. His back hits the plaster with a thud, and I’m on him before he can breathe.
My mouth crashes into his. Teeth and tongue, angry and desperate.
I bite his lower lip hard enough to taste copper, and he groans into my mouth, this broken, ruined sound.
His hands find my hips like they never forgot the way there.
His fingers dig in, dragging me flush against him, and I hate how natural it feels.
I hate that my body arches into his like it’s been waiting months for this exact fucking thing.
Knox tries to flip us. His arm hooks around my waist, his weight pushing me back, and for half a second, I’m pinned. His solid body against the full length of mine, his thick thigh wedged between my legs, his face buried in my neck breathing me in. It feels so good I could scream.
Then I shove back, hard, palms flat on his chest, and slam him into the wall again. I’m not giving him that. He didn’t earn it.
His thigh slots back between my legs, and the grinding starts.
I don’t know who moves first, and it doesn’t matter.
It’s just desperate and rough. My cock aches against his thigh through the denim, the thick seam of my jeans dragging over the sensitive head with every jerky roll of my hips.
I can feel the shape of his cock, thick and hard against my hip, pressing through both layers of our clothes.
His hands slide down to my ass, his fingers pressing into the wet seam of my jeans.
The noise he makes is gutted. He can feel how soaked I am, the slick seeping through the denim, and the sound goes straight to my groin.
I’m dripping. My jeans are ruined. The friction of his thigh against my cock, the wet slide of slick, the pressure—it’s not enough, and it’s way too much.
I grind into him with everything I have.
My nails dig into his shoulders through his shirt.
His hands are bruise-tight on my waist. Our scents are mixing in this tiny hallway, thick and suffocating, making it impossible to remember why I’m supposed to hate this.
I do hate this. I hate him. I hate how good he smells, and I hate that my body is chasing this high like it’s oxygen.
Knox’s breath is ragged against my ear. His hips snap up into mine.
The composure is totally gone—he’s as desperate as I am, no smirk, no quips, just raw, filthy sounds pulled from somewhere he’d never normally let me hear.
"This doesn’t mean anything," I snarl into his neck.
And then I bite him. Right on the curve where his shoulder meets his throat, because my teeth need to be somewhere, and his skin is right there.
He gasps my name. "Ben—"
I kiss him to shut him up. I don’t want to hear my name in that voice.
That wrecked, desperate voice that sounds absolutely nothing like the cocky asshole who texted me an hour ago.
My tongue slides against his, tasting the blood from his split lip.
I’m close. I’m so fucking close, the heat building low and tight, the bond making every sensation cranked past what I can physically hold.
I come. Hard.
My teeth sink into his shoulder through his shirt, my whole body locking up.
The orgasm hits me in violent, shuddering waves.
My cock pulses against his thigh, feeling every throb through the soaked denim, the wet heat spreading between us.
Slick gushes out of me, a fresh flood that leaves my thighs shaking, and I fall apart against him, biting down on his collar.
Knox comes seconds later. His face drops into my neck, his nose pressing right where a claiming bite would go.
I feel his whole body shudder against mine, his cock pulsing thick against my hip, his hands gripping my waist hard enough to leave marks.
He’s trembling. His mouth is pressed to the skin over my pulse.
He doesn’t bite, but I can feel his teeth scraping my skin, and for one terrible second, I want him to do it.
We’re both gasping. The hallway is thick with the smell of sex, slick, and both our scents. My legs are shaking. His forehead rests heavily on my shoulder. We stay there for a few seconds, just breathing, and I can feel how big this is. I need it to stop.
I shove him.
Both hands flat on his chest, hard enough that he stumbles back.
My jeans are cold, wet, and disgusting. My lips are swollen, my jaw aches from biting him, and his scent is practically painted onto my skin.
I need him out. I need him out of this apartment before I do something even stupider than what I just did.
Knox catches himself against the opposite wall.
He looks destroyed. Lips swollen, hair a mess, eyes glazed.
A dark bite mark is blooming through a wet patch on his shirt.
He’s breathing hard, his hands unsteady.
There’s something on his face that’s trying to be the smirk—the cocky recovery, the version of himself that knows what to say to get out of anything.
It doesn’t come. The smirk twitches and dies. What’s left is just a guy leaning against my wall, looking like he got hit by a fucking truck.
"That was—"
"Get out." My voice comes out flat and cold. If it shakes on the second word, I will deny it for the rest of my life.
"Benji, we should—"
"We should nothing. Get out."
He stares at me. I can see him trying, the gears turning behind his dark eyes, searching for the right word or the right angle. He doesn’t find it. I stare at the wall past his shoulder and wait.
He pushes off the plaster, walks to the door, and pauses with his hand on the knob. His back is to me. His shoulders are tight. He opens his mouth one more time, and I watch the words die before they even make it out.
The door opens. He steps through. I slam it shut hard enough to rattle the frame and throw the deadbolt.
My legs give out about three seconds after the lock clicks.
I slide down the back of the door and hit the floor. I’m shaking. My jeans are a wet, sticky mess. My lips taste like Knox’s blood. The hallway reeks of us—his scent and mine tangled together, soaked into the walls, my clothes, my skin.
I was supposed to destroy him. That was the whole plan.
Open the door, deliver the line, slam it shut, walk away victorious.
Instead, I came in my pants in under a minute with my teeth in his shoulder, and now I know.
My body knows. The way Jude’s body knew, the way Milo’s body knew.
That thing that completely hijacked their lives.
The thing that made them look at their alphas like the rest of the world stopped existing.
My instincts are screaming it, and I refuse to say the word because saying it makes it real. Mine is Knox. The one alpha on this planet who already proved he’ll leave before sunrise.
My hands are trembling in my lap. I stare at them, willing them to stop.
They don’t. My body is still buzzing, oversensitive and wired, the orgasm aftershocks mixing with whatever the hell is happening to my nervous system.
The hallway won’t stop smelling like him—warm, dense, something my body keeps leaning toward even though he’s on the other side of a locked door.
I can still feel where his hands were on my waist, the bruise-pressure of his fingers.
I can still feel his mouth on my neck, the teeth that didn’t close.
And deep in my chest, there’s this low, satisfied hum that makes me want to punch a hole in the drywall, because absolutely nothing about this should feel satisfying.
My phone buzzes somewhere in the living room. I don’t get up.
I sit on the floor, smelling him on my own skin, and hate how much it feels like the exact thing I’ve been missing.