DEAR EX-BEST FRIEND, KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF MY HOCKEY ALPHA

THE MARK

~Katherine~

Zander's deadline sat in my gut like a stone I'd swallowed.

By tomorrow, I was supposed to get a man who'd rejected me publicly, slept with me as a weapon, and announced his engagement at a formal dinner to put his permanent mark on my skin.

I lay on the bed in Zander's spare room for two hours thinking about how that was supposed to work.

Then I got up and went to find Xavier.

Zander had built a file on his brother over years — schedules, habits, patterns, all catalogued with patience because he intended to use every piece of it eventually.

Xavier trained alone on Friday evenings. East hall. Six until eight. No partners, no observers. Just him and whatever he was working through.

I arrived at seven forty with something he actually needed.

He had his back to the door when I walked in. Shirt off, earphones in, working the bag with the complete focus that the world around him ceased to exist.

I stood in the doorway for a moment and then walked in before I could talk myself out of it.

He pulled one earphone free without turning around first, then turned.

"The door wasn't locked," I said, before he could ask.

"It's a private session."

"I know. I have something you need to hear tonight."

He went still at once, like he was trying to decide whether this was worth his time or not. Then he grabbed his water and sat on the bench.

"Talk."

I told him what I knew. Not everything. I told him that his brother, Zander, secretly hated him but I didn't tell him my role in what was coming.

Just the shape of the threat and a pattern he'd missed, two details that could only have come from someone with genuine inside access.

I watched his expression move through skepticism, then settle into an incredulous look.

"Where is this coming from?" he asked.

"I've been paying attention."

"That's not an answer, Katherine."

"It's the one I have available." I sat beside him on the bench. Closer than necessary. Close enough that the bond did its thing — that quiet warmth, like a fire that refused to go out no matter what the weather did. "I'm telling you because you deserve to know what's coming. Not for any other reason."

He looked at me sideways. "You still don't trust me."

"Not remotely. But you're my mate whether either of us finds that convenient, and that means something even when I'd prefer it didn't."

The word hit him and he let it sit this time instead of walking away from it.

Outside, wind moved through the trees. The hall was quiet. Xavier set his water down and turned to face me fully, and the amber was already bleeding into the edges of his eyes. His wolf was close to the surface, pushing at the boundary.

"Katherine."

"Skip the speech," I said. "I know it by heart. The ring, Eleanor, all the valid reasons. You don't need to recite it."

"Then why are you here?"

I told him the truth. Which was the mistake.

"Because Nyx is fading."

For just a moment, I let myself become vulnerable with Alpha Xavier Blackburn.

"She's been going quiet since the rejection. Every day a little more. She used to feel like a storm inside me. She was loud, real and present. Now she's like hearing a song you love playing from three rooms away. You can tell what it is but you can't feel it properly." I looked at him. "I'm losing her. And I'm frightened."

Something happened to his face. He was softening.

He reached out and moved my hair back from my neck with two fingers. Unhurried and careful. His touch so light it barely registered as pressure.

"I feel it," he said quietly. "Through the bond. Every day I feel what it's doing to you."

"Then you understand why I came."

"I do." He exhaled long and slow, like someone setting down a load they'd carried too long. "I haven't told anyone this, but my own strength has been dropping since the rejection. The bond runs both ways. If the threat you're describing is real, I need my full strength to fight Zander off when he eventually takes off his mask and hates me publicly."

His wolf was right at the surface. I could see it in the full amber of his eyes, feel it in the heat coming off his skin. Weeks of holding it back had carved something tired into the lines of his face.

He leaned in. His breath was warm against the side of my neck.

"This doesn't fix what I did," he said.

"I know."

"It doesn't change anything."

"Xavier." I tilted my head and gave him the access he was already asking for. "I know."

When his teeth found the curve of my neck the breath left my body completely. The mark burned, sharp and immediate, going deeper than skin, and then the bond broke open like a dam giving way.

Everything came through at once.

Him. All of him. Not just the physical — his hands holding my waist, his chest against my shoulder — but the interior of him. The exhaustion of weeks spent caging his wolf.

The guilt about the dinner that he'd carried alone without speaking to anyone. The conflict that had been eating at him since the cafeteria, layer upon layer of it, going all the way down.

And underneath all of it, at the very bottom, buried so deep he probably hadn't put a name to it himself, relief. It was pure and real. The relief of something that had been clenched for a very long time finally letting go.

Then he pulled back sharply, like something had burned him. The silence that came after was the heaviest I'd ever sat inside.

Xavier crossed the hall and put the full width of it between us, pressing both palms flat against the far wall with his back to me. He stayed there, head down, breathing unsteadily for a long moment.

I touched the mark with my fingertips.

Nyx came back slowly. Not in a rush, not all at once, but steadily, the way warmth returns to something that's been cold too long.

My senses sharpened. The air in the room felt different. And Nyx pressed against my ribs fully, completely, more present than she'd been in a week, and the relief of it made my eyes sting.

I had what I came for.

That thought arrived with immediate company, a sickness low in my stomach that had nothing to do with the mark and everything to do with what I was eventually going to do with the information it would get me.

Xavier turned around. Whatever had cracked open was sealed again. The composure was back and the Alpha was back in place where the man had briefly been.

"Nobody must hear about what just happened right here. This room. That's where this stays."

"Understood."

He picked up his shirt and left without looking back.

I sat alone in the empty hall with my palm against the mark on my neck and told myself this was the plan working. This was exactly what was supposed to happen. This was a good night.

****

~Eleanor~

Xavier came back at nine and I knew before he was fully through the door.

It didn't show in his face, his face gave me nothing, the way it always did. It also didn't show in how he moved or held himself.

I knew because I could smell it.

I went to him and kissed him and he kissed me back like it was something he was completing rather than feeling. I could tell that while his body was with me, his attention was somewhere else entirely.

I stepped back and looked at him.

Then I did what he couldn't, I inhaled slowly, reading the air the way wolves read everything, sorting through the layers of information embedded in it.

And what I found made the ground go out from under my world so quietly and completely that I almost didn't notice it happening.

Kitty's scent, woven through his.

Not surface residue. Not the kind proximity left behind. The deep and permanent kind. The kind that lived at the cellular level and didn't wash out in the shower and didn't fade over time.

I knew that signature. Every wolf raised inside pack culture knew it. A mating mark changed the chemistry of both people in a way that nothing undid.

He had marked her.

I couldn't believe it. He had actually marked her while still being engaged to me. The haunting thoughts of my past friendship with Kitty returned.

The years of being introduced as Kitty's friend at parties, never by my own name. The invisibility of standing next to someone the room was watching.

The slow understanding that what I'd called companionship was actually a long process of disappearing.

Two years ago, I'd given back every word I'd spent years swallowing. She'd looked at me with a gentle, pitying expression I found more insulting than fury would have been, and then she'd cut me out cleanly and moved on without apparent difficulty.

She had expected me to collapse without her light to stand in. I grew instead.

I got into Moonstone. I became someone in my own right. I built something with no one else's shadow falling across it. Until today.

The room moved. My vision narrowed and sharpened the way it did when the blood hunger started climbing.

The cold spread outward from my chest through my arms, into my hands, into my fingertips. I needed my tonic and I needed it now.

But more urgently than that, I needed Xavier to see absolutely nothing on my face. Not a flinch. Not a tremor. Not a single thing.

So, I smiled.

I told him I was exhausted and turning in early. I kissed his cheek.

I listened to him move through the room and then the bathroom door clicked shut and the shower came on, and I picked up my phone with hands that were completely, perfectly still.

My mother answered on the second ring.

"Xavier marked Katherine Thorne tonight," I said abruptly. "I need her removed. She must be expelled and sent off this campus before Monday."

The pause on the other end was long enough to crawl under my skin.

"Is that right," my mother said.

"I don't care how you arrange it. Just do it."

Another pause. Longer. I could hear my mother breathing slowly on the line, like she always did when she was thinking about something she had no intention of sharing with me.

When she spoke again her voice had gone soft and gentle. The version of my mother that had always frightened me most.

"No," she said. "Not yet."

"Mother—"

"A marked she-wolf carrying Lycan bond chemistry." She paused. "Do you have any idea what that blood is worth to the right people, Eleanor? You know how bad your condition is. Even if you don't realize it yet, you need her here.”

The shower was still running down the hall. I stood in the dark bedroom with my phone pressed to my ear and the cold spreading through my stomach like ink through water.

"Don't touch her," my mother said. "Leave her exactly where she is. Let her believe she's safe. Do you understand me?"

The line went dead and I lowered my phone.

My mother had called Katherine Thorne worth something.

I had called to have her removed and my mother had called her an asset.

Standing in the dark with my boyfriend's shower running down the hall, I understood for the first time, with a clarity that made my hands cold that whatever my mother had been building inside the walls of this school, I had not been told the full shape of it.

And that realization made my stomach churn.

Katherine wasn't the only one who needed to be afraid of what happened next. I was starting to think I did too.