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She realised Oscar wasn’t wearing a headset and spotted Bellamy off to the side, surrounded by his own friends and scowling at their group.

“He fell off,” Theodore explained.

“Sorry,” she mouthed to Bellamy when he glanced at her.

He rolled his eyes and turned away, but she could tell there was a smile already trying to curve the edges of his mouth.

“I should have dropped him harder.” Oscar’s gravelled voice was right by her ear as he curved behind her, following her line of sight. She tried to elbow him, but he moved away too quickly.

As soon as Ed Jones declared them the winners of the game, the cameras were switched off and they were free to go.

It was already late, but Oscar, Moses, and Theodore split from the group to return to the studio and Niko grabbed his gym bag that he had left by the door to the building, waving absently as he jogged away.

The precious hours around midnight were the only that they had “free” in the day, though they absolutely should have been using them to sleep.

Most of the guys stayed up working on their projects or trying to spend time with her if she wasn’t also working on something .

Elijah and Gabriel were already walking off together, but since they hadn’t brought gym bags with them, they likely weren’t planning on heading to the fitness centre.

“Where are you guys going?” she asked Cian and Kilian, who fell into step on either side of her, matching her slower pace as they meandered down the road between Ironside Row buildings.

Most of the other students stayed to get screen time.

Once the live cameras were turned off and the crews packed up, general surveillance for the show would resume.

Kilian shrugged. “Haven’t done a live in a few days. Want to dance?” And then, through the bond, he continued, addressing both of them.

Should we try something a little more mature?

Cian and Isobel both agreed, and Isobel spent the rest of the walk swiping through her playlist, trying to find a song they had already learned a dance to.

The fans might have thought that they could just turn on a song and dance to anything, but the reality was that it took a lot of work.

The guys put in endless hours in the training room just to make it look effortless.

It helped that Kalen and Mikel kept them in peak physical form and that they had their own charisma they brought to dance.

Theodore, Moses, and Gabriel had a natural athleticism that really made them magnetic to watch, while Cian had a sensuality that he seemed to be able to turn into dripping sexuality at will, which wasn’t an easy skill at all.

Being sexy while dancing didn’t always land the way it was intended, but Cian always managed to control his micro-movements and expressions in just the right way, making it all look totally unintentional.

It was something even Isobel couldn’t do to such a masterful degree.

Kilian, on the other hand, had a beautiful and almost delicate grace to him.

Any choreographer would have counted themselves amongst the luckiest in the industry to work with someone like him since he had a way of moving his body that couldn’t be trained into a person.

Opposite to Kilian, Oscar offered a very different vibe.

Always intense, always sharp. He was the least skilled of the dancers and the least expressive, but his stage presence made up for it.

Elijah and Niko were on a level just slightly higher than the others, which was why they were the main dancers under Isobel, along with Theodore.

They were the only Alphas who were able to freestyle to any degree, though Theodore didn’t freestyle so much as he craftily reappropriated other dances he had been taught.

She needed a song that Cian and Kilian already knew since they couldn’t freestyle.

Something she could turn sexual with a few changes.

She paused, her finger hovering over one of the songs in her playlist. She had created choreography for it as a “joke” one afternoon because she was bored, and Kilian and Cian had both joined in to copy her movements, laughing the whole time.

The movements had been sexy, but that was what made it funny.

She never did overtly sexy choreography—especially not in the middle of the afternoon in baggy, oversized clothing, her music competing with Gabriel and Elijah’s as they worked on something at the other end of the room.

“The ‘Touching Yourself’ song,” she said, suddenly laughing.

They both immediately chuckled at the memory, knowing exactly what she was talking about, and then they seemed to realise why she was talking about it.

“Oh,” Cian sobered, a thoughtful expression dropping over his handsome face. “You want to do it seriously?”

“Think we can get through it without laughing?” she pondered.

“Doll.” Cian sighed dramatically. “If anyone can make that dance sexy, it’s?—”

Kilian hit him. Hard .

“Me,” he wheezed.

They were laughing again as they reached their practice room, likely still high on the adrenaline of winning at Ironside Row. Kilian only turned on the chandelier in the centre of the room, dimming it to a soft gold that scattered pinpricks of light across the entire room.

“Good?” he asked Cian, who always had an eye for what would work on camera. All of the light-hearted playfulness had dropped from Kilian’s tone. Their private room wasn’t filmed, so he didn’t have to pretend this wasn’t a planned publicity stunt.

Cian nodded. “Let’s put the fans in front of the mirror. The air stirring our clothes and hair will look nice. Fluttering the curtains too. What were you thinking for the dance, Illy?”

“You guys should order food and alcohol from the dining hall—we can leave it up against the wall there so it doesn’t look like we were in here for an hour practising, and we can act a little tipsy.”

“Why act?” Kilian smiled a small, soft smile as he pulled out his phone. “I haven’t had a drink in months. What do we want?”

“Maybe just light beers,” Cian answered. “Mikki will probably watch the livestream. Last time he caught me with a full-calorie beer, he made me do two hundred push-ups on the spot. I almost threw up.”

“You almost threw up because you were drunk,” Kilian said.

“And why are you telling us this story like we weren’t all there?” Isobel added.

“That’s how drunk he was,” Kilian said.

She started the song and slowly ran through the choreography with Cian while Kilian ordered their food.

She wore tight black exercise shorts, white socks, white trainers and a baggy, oversized navy sweater that was cropped at her waist, leaving a thin stretch of skin between the hem of her sweater and the waistline of her shorts.

The outfit was comfortable and easy to compete in at Ironside Row, but she couldn’t pretend the items weren’t of the highest quality with designer tags attached.

The guys were also dressed in designer clothing, courtesy of her father, though they often mixed in older items with the new.

Both Cian and Kilian were wearing black pants that weren’t tight but still somehow showed off their muscled thighs, so the material must have had some stretch to it, though they could also pass as formal.

Kilian wore brown boots, Cian wore black, and both of them had layered T-shirts beneath outerwear.

They had a very similar sense of fashion, just like Moses and Oscar did, and Elijah and Gabriel.

Cian shrugged off his loose sweater and Kilian tossed off his jacket after finishing with his phone.

“How does this go again?” Kilian asked, all seriousness.

She restarted the song, running through the choreography, but only thirty seconds later, they were already rolling on the floor laughing.

“Stop it!” She tried to whack at Cian’s chest, but he easily rolled away from her, and they all climbed back to their feet.

The third time, they managed to get all the way through the song, but not without laughing, and their momentum was broken when their food arrived.

They brought up the Ironside Show on Isobel’s phone, only half paying attention to it as they ate, talked, and drank.

“What was the food theme?” she asked, as Kilian held out a small slice of lobster dipped in creamy sauce, hovering it over her lips. She opened, accepting the morsel, his eyes hard on her lips. They were already a few light beers deep and starting to lose focus.

“No idea,” he muttered, eyelids flickering as she licked sauce from the corner of her lip.

“It was obviously seafood.” Cian, never one to be outdone, suddenly loomed over her, curving his whole body to eclipse hers, where she leaned against the wall. He picked up her beer bottle and pressed the rim of it to her lips.

He tipped the bottle up as soon as she parted her lips, spilling the cold liquid across her tongue. His attention dropped to her throat as she swallowed and then drifted lower, over her collarbones.

“We should dance,” he said, voice husky.

She nodded, and he set her beer aside, helping her to her feet. She giggled as soon as she was standing. “Take off your shirts.”

“You take off your shirt,” Kilian shot back, though he was already pulling his over his head. He tossed it aside and then kicked off his boots.

Cian did the same, and she shrugged, gripping the hem of her sweater.

“Didn’t mean it.” Kilian was before her in an instant, his hands gently pushing hers away from the fabric before wrapping her sides, his skin warm against the strip of her exposed waist. “This is sexy enough.”

She gazed up at him, her stomach flipping. “You’re going to have to turn that down, Kili.”

He ducked his head, tugging her against his body, her toes dragging off the ground. “I wish I was with you tonight,” he whispered against her ear.