Page 17 of Altius (The Scent of Victory #2)

Ten

Morgan

“ W as that a comeback—or a bloodbath?” The sportscaster on the large-screen television in Pack Redmond’s living room had a booming voice. It didn’t bother me.

My head had been screaming for hours.

“Northport took full advantage of Garroway Forest’s quarterback going out with a broken leg—now confirmed to be a compound fracture of the tibia and fibula—and dominated the second half with three touchdowns and a field goal.

While the Narwhals’ defense leaves a lot to be desired, especially when it comes to sportsmanlike conduct, they’re almost unbeatable when their offense finds its rhythm.

And don’t forget about their ace kicker, Landon Choi, who leads the conference in field goals completed this season.

Next week, they’ll take on their bitter rivals, Wakeland State, for the conference championship. ”

“Turn it off.” Alijah sat at the opposite end of the couch, unconsciously mirroring my posture, slumped low on the cushions, holding a pillow against his chest.

He couldn’t stomach another slow-motion replay of the quarterback’s leg snapping in half, or how his lower calf dangled like a limp, boneless tube of meat.

Wyatt turned the television off just in time.

Then he shifted, turning to face me, resting his arm along the back of the couch behind my shoulders. “How bad is it?”

“It’s season-ending, but most players with similar injuries bounce back.”

Alijah sat forward to look at me, still green around the gills. “Define most .”

“I think it’s about ninety percent,” I said, trawling through my spotty mental archive for statistics. “But that’s not a guarantee. We don’t know if he suffered ligament damage or other injuries.”

“Very reassuring.” Alijah sank back onto the couch.

“How much longer do you think they’ll be?” Wyatt nodded at the closed double doors to the former omega suite, where Owen and Cal had been holed up for almost two hours, making calls and sending emails, laying the groundwork for executive-level retribution.

“Don’t know.”

Whatever action their efforts prompted, the university deserved it.

If Cal’s anger following the quarterback’s injury was vast and thunderous, like the sea before a storm, Owen’s was a cold void, a black hole of disappointment, with a dominating gravitational force that could eat you alive without any conscious effort on his part.

Folding my legs, I sandwiched the throw pillow between my knees and chest. I plucked at its decorative stitching. It was a mix of black leather and cobalt linen patches, an abysmal cuddle option by omega standards.

The only thing keeping me from grabbing a few superbly plump pillows from Beaufeather’s storeroom was the knowledge it would crush Alijah’s fledgling home decorator spirit.

“Are they going to want food—like real food, dinner portions?” Alijah asked in a tissue-thin voice, but his apparent lack of energy didn’t stop him from thinking out loud.

“Not sure I’ve got it in me to cook. Would Thanksgiving leftovers be all right?

No, wait, Joaquin took most of them for lunch.

Don’t have enough for a proper meal for six people.

Joaquin will be home soon. He always needs to eat after a dress rehearsal.

And I mean eat . Let’s order something.”

He took his phone from the end table and opened a food delivery app. “What do you guys want?”

The poor man couldn’t have asked two more apathetic people if he tried. Wyatt shrugged.

“Whatever’s easiest,” I demurred.

Alijah blinked at us repeatedly, knitting his brows tighter together each time, then threw his hands up.

“Forget it.” He got off the couch and headed toward the kitchen. “I don’t know why I bothered asking. This is why I don’t like holidays. They screw with my meal planning.”

While I debated whether to follow Alijah and help—despite my negative culinary skill level—a hand settled on my knee.

Wyatt pressed against my side. “Don’t suppose you want to share your Thanksgiving leftovers?”

Rather than try to dislodge him, I was tempted to jab my finger into the approximate location of his kidney. I could only tolerate so much boundary-pushing, even if my omega wished he’d be bolder, more foolish, more calculating—more, always wanting more when it came to Wyatt.

“Go scrounge in your pack’s kitchen,” I muttered, holding the pillow tighter.

“Not my pack.” The strength of Wyatt’s hold on my knee increased. Resting more of his body weight against me, his head dipped closer, causing a few strands of his hair to brush my shoulder. “At least, not yet.”

His blue eyes had taken on a misty, almost dreamlike quality—enchanted pools of desire.

The change wasn’t as noticeable as the molten gold that overtook Cal’s eyes when his alpha asserted itself, but it was equally enthralling.

I wanted to tell him to stop, to wait, not now, not here, that a truce didn’t involve making blatant overtures and acting on protective urges.

Only one useless word croaked out. “Wyatt…”

He leaned even closer and whispered, “Not without you.”

The brush of his cheek against mine was fleeting yet seared like a brand.

“There’s no pack for me without you.”

Ignoring the racing pulse clogging my throat, I tried to protest. “Why do you keep—”

Wyatt’s hand settled on the curve of my neck, thumb stroking the hinge of my jaw as he urged my head to tilt back and meet his gaze. “Because no one’s allowed to mistreat you. Or disrespect you. Not on my watch.”

My reflexive anger should have kicked in, letting me claw and seethe without guilt while I ground the resurgent presence of his overprotective alpha into the dirt. Allowing me to remain unaffected and comfortably numb within my well-medicated tower of spite.

But I was tapped out. Exhausted by my continual denial of our connection and confounded by the tentative possession of his touch.

Ten years is an inordinately long time to imagine your first kiss with someone.

Honestly, it was closer to twelve because I’d been drawn to Wyatt from the first time I saw him across a sports arena, warming up on the pommel horse.

Noting the direction of my gaze, Jacobi had leaned closer and whispered in my ear, telling me everything about the new alpha heartthrob.

But Jacobi’s information about Wyatt couldn’t have been more wrong.

He didn’t collect phone numbers for fun. It was easier to accept them than refuse. Something about his scent could make interested parties rather pushy when rejected, and Wyatt went out of his way to avoid confrontations.

The near-constant headphones—big noise-canceling ones that were impossible to miss—ensured no one bothered him with small talk.

And he wasn’t hyping himself up with diss tracks.

He was usually just soaking in the silence or replaying the audiobook of his favorite Teddy Roosevelt biography for a fresh dose of courage.

Wyatt’s gymnastics talent was learned through unforgiving repetition rather than an inherent gift. He just wanted a safe space to be an alpha, where his strength and power would be celebrated, and his short stature wouldn’t be a detriment, allowing him to win medals and make his mother proud.

But she never cared.

I was one of the trusted few who knew Tabitha paid for his gymnastics lessons and arranged a top-tier coach for him. He wouldn’t have been recruited on his merits alone, having started gymnastics a little too late, never quite flexible or consistent enough, and lacking natural finesse.

But he pushed through because, unlike his studies, Wyatt had physical potential.

So, he trained and trained, specializing in events that required upper body strength—still rings and parallel bars, but he was especially glorious on the horizontal bar—until his scores were so good on his specialty apparatuses that the national team had no choice but to promote him over some flashier all-around contenders.

I’d fantasized about kissing him a thousand times in random hotel stairwells, or sneaking him into my room to make out in the bathroom with the exhaust fan on.

There’d been plenty of prolonged daydreams about twining our bodies together beneath the Arizona sun, which had gradually taken on a pink glow in my imagination, a complete divorce from reality.

Not that my recent intrusive daydreams about pushing him down on the round ottoman in the lobby of my suite, or cornering him in a locker room somewhere on campus, were any more realistic.

But I’d never conceived of this moment—discovering that his full lower lip was even more pillowy than I’d imagined as our mouths melded together—while his beta almost-packmate, who had feelings for me, puttered in the kitchen, mumbling about the exorbitant price of takeout.

Furthermore, my boyfriend was in the next room, dealing with a legitimate pheromone crisis.

So was Wyatt’s perfectionist older brother, who would resent us for tainting his expensive new sofa with our corrupted scent signatures—slippery, wet boxwood and rusty orchid—a bouquet of decay, befitting our withered affection.

Except there was nothing half-hearted about Wyatt’s kiss.

The lips moving across mine were hot and pleading, determined to make me understand, to believe that he’d never stopped wanting me.

All it took was a tentative press of my lips, returning the merest fraction of his earnestness, to confirm that somehow, despite being separated by thousands of miles and a vast chasm of mutual regret, the spark of attraction we’d so carefully nurtured, long before we scented each other, had survived.

It was a tiny, flickering flame, sparkling like a precious jewel embedded in the depths of my heart—but it was there.

Wyatt was there. Now, still, always.

Just as the barest hint of unchecked thirst bled through, Wyatt pulled back, looking dazed.

His mouth hung open as he took deep, shuddering breaths—but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from his red, slightly swollen lips.

It wasn’t enough. I hadn’t tasted him . His pheromones. I’d expected to get drunk off them the first time we kissed.

If two kisses were enough for Cal—

No. Never compare partners, a myriad of voices echoed through my head: sex ed teachers, designation counselors, my parents, and even a few of Jacobi’s preferred advice blogs.

Packs don’t survive if you pit members against each other. Unintentionally or otherwise.

Pack. Did I want a pack—but more importantly, did Cal?

“Screw it, I’m ordering pizza,” Alijah proclaimed with the slam of a drawer… Or what would have been a slam if Jacobi hadn’t sprung for soft-close drawer slides.

His quick steps echoed across the dining room,

Wyatt flashed a parting wink before hightailing it toward the staircase.

Poor Alijah. He walked straight into a solid wall of our combined pheromones.

“What—oh, ugh.” His expression crumpled into one of distaste, trying to spit our corrupted scents out of his mouth, shooting daggers as he looked between the two of us. “On the new couch, are you fucking kidding me!”

Frozen halfway up the stairs, Wyatt’s head dropped between his shoulders. “Sorry, it—it just happened.”

“Oh, hush. I don’t want to hear excuses.” Alijah crossed to the entrance closet and pulled out a bottle of scent-canceling spray. “You’re responsible for cleaning up after yourself.”

He tossed the bottle to Wyatt, then turned to me, straightened the collar of his shirt, placed his hands on his hips, and exhaled, his ire inexplicably replaced by a hospitable smile.

“Do you want everything or meat lovers?”

There was a potent absurdity about the moment that was impossible to describe to someone who didn’t experience it in person.

It could have been the unintentionally suggestive phrasing of the pizza toppings.

Perhaps it was the stunned Wyatt on the stairs, clutching at the bottle of scent-canceling spray, thoroughly chastised by a plucky beta—or maybe it was said beta, looking at me as if I were blameless.

Like I’d been minding my own business instead of actively participating in the kiss, and my pheromones weren’t just as abhorrent as Wyatt’s.

Joaquin chose that moment to open the front door. He paused on the threshold, surveying our peculiar standoff. “Uh, everything okay?”

“No,” Wyatt said absently. “Everything or meat lovers.”

That did me in. The words tumbled out before I could stop myself. “What’s the difference when it comes to you guys?”

Joaquin’s laugh started low in his abdomen, a tight, wicked chortle that gained strength until it filled the foyer and the hallway between our lofts, prompting a similar reaction from Wyatt—and then me. I couldn’t help it.

Only poor Alijah remained unfazed, looking at us like we’d lost our minds.

We probably had, at least for the moment.

The door to Owen’s suite swung open.

Cal emerged first, giving me an unobstructed view of the black sweater I’d been eyeing during the game, which made his broad shoulders and dense chest look so tempting that my teeth ached.

“What’s so funny?” he asked, raising a brow in my direction first, then looking toward Alijah.

The beta shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Owen crossed his arms. The silver cufflinks on his dress shirt caught the late afternoon sunlight, unexpectedly prompting Joaquin to shut the front door and come clean.

Or as close to clean as his mouth seemed to get.

“Pretty sure I just walked in on Alijah propositioning Morgan and Wyatt.”

“Liar!” Whipping around, Alijah crossed to his mate and gave his arm an ineffectual slap. “Take that back. I did no such thing.”

“You kind of did, man,” Wyatt said, still standing on the same step, holding the bottle of scent-canceling spray.

“I did not!”

“Babe, come on. Everything ,” Joaquin said, gesturing to the assembled crowd, “or meat lovers ?”

A tattooed finger tapped Alijah’s sternum before Joaquin pointed back at his own leering face.

Color suffused the back of Alijah’s neck, darkening his brown skin, cheeks puffed out with indignation. “I was talking about pizza!”

“With extra cheese?” Wyatt snarked.

“You.” Joaquin’s finger zeroed in on Wyatt. “Don’t you have a living room to spray down?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Wyatt plodded back down the stairs, aiming the first spritz into the mated pair’s airspace.

After that display of pettiness, he crossed the living room, starting at the opposite end of the couch from where I was sitting.

That was my cue to leave.

I got to my feet and picked up my bag, only managing a few steps before Owen’s voice arrested my progress.

“Stay for dinner.”

And that was the end of Alijah.

“ What dinner? You know what, I don’t care. I’m eating leftover stuffing and tamales. Order your own damn pizza.”