MY BULLY STEPBROTHER IS A HOCKEY ALPHA

The bar went silent the way a room goes silent when something dangerous happens. Not all at once. In a wave, starting closest to us and rolling outward until even the music felt distant.

Every wolf in that room felt it. I didn't have a wolf, or so everyone always said, but even I felt the pressure of it. That invisible weight that dropped into the air around him like a warning. Like standing too close to a storm.

Alpha aura.

His hand was still locked around my wrist. His eyes were still glowing that furious green, and they hadn't moved off my face. He was reading me the way predators read things they didn't understand yet.

"Answer me." His voice was low. Controlled in the way that things are controlled when they have to work at it. "Who are you?"

"I'm nobody." My voice came out steadier than I had any right to feel. "I go to Mooncrest. I'm new. I just.." I stopped. "I'm sorry. That was stupid. I don't do things like that."

A guy two stools down stood up slowly, both hands slightly visible, the way wolves moved around Alphas when they didn't want to be misread. "Jaxon, man. She came out of nowhere. I didn't see her.."

Jaxon.

Even drunk, the name registered like cold water. Jaxon Blackwood. Hockey captain. Future Alpha of the Blackwood Pack. The name that got whispered like a warning before new students even stepped on campus.

I had kissed him.

"Oh no," I breathed.

Something shifted in his expression. The fury was still there but something else had moved in underneath it. He tilted his head slightly and his nostrils flared, just barely, the way wolves did when a scent caught them off guard.

His grip on my wrist didn't loosen. But his eyes changed. The heat in them shifted from anger into something I didn't have a name for. Something searching.

"You're not scared," he said. It wasn't a question.

"I am scared," I told him honestly. "I'm also very drunk. So it's hard to tell which one is winning right now."

He stared at me for a long moment. Whatever he was doing behind those eyes, he didn't share it.

Then I felt it. That heavy pull behind my eyes, the floor tilting under me, gravity making a very aggressive argument.

"Okay," I said quietly. "I think I'm about to.."

I went sideways.

Fast, No warning. Just the floor coming up to meet me. He caught me before I hit anything. Both hands, one on my arm and one at my back, pulling me upright against his chest before I even understood I was falling. I ended up with my face near his collarbone and I registered, somewhere below coherent thought, that he smelled like pine and cold air and something deeper underneath that my body responded to before my brain could weigh in.

His arms tensed, Just slightly. Like he was going to step back and didn't. Then everything went dark.

I woke up to a ceiling I didn't recognize. Clean and white.A glass of water on the nightstand with two aspirin beside it, placed there deliberately by someone who had thought about it.

I sat up too fast and immediately regretted it. The night assembled itself in pieces, Damien, Bianca. The drive. The bar. The stranger whose hand had closed around my wrist like he had every right to.

Jaxon Blackwood.

I pressed my face into the pillow and stayed there.

My phone was on the nightstand. Fourteen missed calls from my mother. I called her back.

She picked up on the first ring. "Selene. I've been calling you since last night. Where are you?"

"I'm okay. I stayed at a friend's. I'm sorry I didn't text." I kept my voice even. "What's wrong?"

She exhaled. Long and slow, the kind that carries a whole night of sitting up worrying inside it. "The divorce finalized yesterday. The papers went through." A pause that had weight to it. "And there's something else. I've been seeing someone. For about eight months now. I didn't want to tell you until I was sure."

I sat up straighter. "Eight months."

"I know. I know it's a lot." Her voice was careful. Rehearsed. "But he's a good man. And sweetheart, we're getting married."

"Married." I couldn't keep up with the pace of the morning. My head was pounding, my cheek was still sore from crying, and now my mother was telling me she was getting married to a man I'd never heard of. "When?"

"Soon. He has a home here. There's room for all of us. I need us to move tomorrow."

"Tomorrow." I said it back slowly like repeating it would make it make more sense.

"His name is Victor." She said it gently. Softly. The way you say something you've been holding onto for a while. "Victor Blackwood."

The room went absolutely still.

I sat there on the edge of a bed I didn't recognize, in a room that smelled faintly of pine and cold air, holding a phone that had just said the word Blackwood.

My eyes moved slowly around the room.

Blackwood.

The same last name. The same green eyes. The same boy whose bed I had apparently been asleep in all night.

The same Blackwood..