7

Marco sat down next to him, uninvited, and pulled a cookie from a paper bag. "You've checked your wrist five times since I got back. You're not even trying to hide it."

"I sent Emma a text. That's it."

"And?"

"And nothing." Kai tugged his collar up. His face was doing the thing it always did  broadcasting everything while he said nothing. "Drop it."

Marco ate the cookie in one go and chewed slowly, watching him. Then: "Alex is back."

Kai's head turned before he could stop it.

Marco grinned.

"When?" The word was already out. Kai pressed his lips together, too late.

"Found out at the party. He was actually there that night." Marco's grin faded into something less fun. "He's the one who texted me. Said you'd gone upstairs drunk and to go check on you."

Kai sat with that. Alex had been in the same building. I had seen enough to get worried. And had still chosen to send Marco instead of walking up the stairs himself.

"His contract training ended," Marco continued. "He's probably on leave because a rut is coming. You know what that means."

It meant a week. Maybe slightly more. Then gone again  back to place, back to missions, back to a life that had no room in it for anything permanent.

Melbourne Clan agents didn't get to build things. Their mates either uprooted themselves and moved to place or stayed home and built a life around waiting. Kai had known since he was seventeen what choosing Alex would actually look like.

He'd chosen not to think about it. It had never stopped feeling like a choice.

"He didn't even come find me himself," Kai said.

"No." Marco didn't dress it up. "He didn't."

A silence.

"You could have anyone on this campus," Marco said. "I mean that literally. I've watched people trip over themselves around you for three years. Why you've stayed hung up on my brother is genuinely beyond me."

Kai didn't answer that. There wasn't an answer that didn't sound pathetic out loud.

"New plan," Marco said, crumpling the bag. "Wild Hunt. Berlin. You and me. I already bought the tickets."

"Those aren't for months."

"I know. I've been sitting on this for a while." Marco looked completely unashamed. "Non-refundable, by the way."

"Then you wasted your money."

"Kai. When was the last time you did something that wasn't calculated three steps ahead?"

"I'm not going to Berlin to get chased through the woods."

"It's not woods, it's"

"I know what it is."

He did. The Hunt ran annually on Berlin  open to both planets, application required, and explicit about what it involved. Omegas signed away refusal rights at the start. Alphas pursued. It had been designed to address Berlin's birth rate collapse, which was real and worsening, but in practice, the event had become something else entirely: a legal container for instincts people spent the rest of the year pretending they didn't have.

Four years ago the concept had genuinely disgusted Kai.

Something about that disgust felt less clean now, and he refused to look directly at why.

"Take Jade," he said.

"She'd sooner die." Marco's multislate lit up. He checked it and his expression shifted. "Ace." He pointed at Kai like a threat. "This isn't over." Then he walked away to take the call.

Kai got in line at the nearest drinks booth.

He was almost at the front when someone across the street screamed his name.

Emma came running over  full sprint, arm waving like she was flagging down a vehicle. No self-consciousness whatsoever. All energy, all enthusiasm, completely unconcerned with how it looked.

Kai made himself smile.

Marco thought Emma was performing. But watching that run, that wave, the total lack of filter  Kai wasn't sure performance could look that specific kind of ridiculous.

He accepted the hug when Emma reached him and turned his face briefly toward the curve of their neck. Careful. 

Just enough to register the scent. Polite in the context of a courtship discussion, potentially strange otherwise. He pulled back quickly and checked Emma's expression.

Still smiling. No offense.

"I was on the opposite end of the parade," Emma said, steadying Kai forward as the line moved. "Saw your text and came straight over."

"Glad you did." He meant about sixty percent of that.

They reached the front. Emma paid before Kai could object, tapping the scanner like it was nothing.

"Thanks, I" His voice cut off.

Something hit him through the cinna-cider sweetness  underneath it, past it, older than it. Teakwood and black pepper and something that reminded him of dried roses left in a warm room.

Kai had memorized that scent at seventeen without meaning to, catching it in the Kim house hallway, in Marco's room, on a jacket left hanging by the door. It had always been faint. Present but untouchable, because its source was never actually there.

It was not faint now.

His body reacted before his brain had finished identifying the scent. Something pulled taut low in his stomach and his feet shifted, turning him without a conscious decision.

Alex Kim was cutting through the far end of the marketplace crowd. Hands in his pockets. Taller than Kai remembered, or maybe just carrying himself differently  there was a weight to the way he moved that hadn't been there before. He was smiling at something ahead of him, but the smile didn't reach his eyes at all.

The wind changed.

Kai inhaled without meaning to.