MasukDECLAN'S POV
There are lies we tell ourselves sometimes that make even us laugh. Because of how outrageous they were.
This was one of them.
She was simply breathtaking. Her silver hair fell around her face in soft waves right now, and she had done the most subtle makeup. It brought out the gold in her brown eyes.
The only better place she would belong in was my arms. But that could wait.
And those eyes were staring daggers at me.
“What the hell did you say to me?”
“I said you don’t belong here, omega.”
Her eyes widened in shock. So, I was right. She was using suppressants to hide her designation. But why? I was proud to be alpha. I expected everyone else to feel that way. So why was she hiding it?
“What the fuck? How did you know?”
“I can smell your sweetness under all that suppressant, sweet omega.”
She scoffed at me, and it brought a smile to my face. I loved my women with bite.
“What the hell are you laughing at? And don’t call me sweet omega. Or any type of omega actually. Who the hell do you thank you are?”
“Declan Hayes at your service.” I gave a little bow.
She watched me with narrow eyes, as if she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like I was going to spring on her and take a bite. She wouldn’t be wrong to be cautious. I wanted to take a bite of her.
I hated the fact that she was here in a frat house partying. Omegas should know better.
“You really don’t belong here, you know.”
“Here you go again with the bullshit. Just get out and leave me alone.”
I snarled and walked towards here. Her eyes grew bigger, and she unconsciously scrambled backwards until her back hit the counter. I placed my hands on both sides of her body and trapped her within them.
Her scent was even more potent this up close. It clung to my nose, and my brain and body drank it in hungrily. I wanted to run my nose all over her neck, lick the skin there and taste her sweetness. But I didn’t want to scare her away. I could be patient.
“You’re really starting to get on my nerve, Declan.” The sound of my name on her lips made me suck in a breath. Goosebumps rose on my skin. I was so cooked.
“Do you know what happens to little omegas who don’t stay safe?” I asked and held her eyes in my gaze.
“Looks like you’re itching to tell me.”
“Damn right I am. They get hurt by the big bad alphas>”
“Aren’t you an alpha? Are you threatening to hurt me?” She laughed, a cold dark noise that promised terrible things. I wanted her to do it again. “The nerve on you Declan. Now get away from me before I make you.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. “And exactly how are you going to do that?”
Before I could blink, her knee caught me in the stomach, and the pain made me bend over. My hands dropped away from the counter, and she escaped my hold.
“Shit. That hurt.” I stood and smirked at her. She was tough, and I could feel my cock hardening. I loved a woman who could put me in my place.
“That was the point. Now get away from me.”
“But I don’t want to.”
“Oh my god! Why the hell are you tormenting me? What do you want from me?”
I leaned against the counter and just started at her. Her eyes dropped lower, and I looked down to see what she was staring at. I was wearing a tank top, and my arms were bare and folded across my chest. It made my biceps bulge, and that was what she was looking at with the hungry look in her eyes. Good to know that the attraction was mutual.
“I want you to leave the party.”
“Not a chance in hell!” She snapped at me. “You’re just an ordinary student like me. You don’t get to boss me around.”
“Well, there you are wrong. I'm captain of the football team too.”
“Should have known only a jock would have the audacity to be all up in my business.”
“I’m just trying to keep you safe.”
“You don't even know my name! Now leave me alone.”
“I don’t want to. And you can easily tell me your name.”
She got up in my face and pushed my chest with a finger. “That’s not happening jock-face. Now leave me the fuck alone.”
She walked out of the kitchen, and I didn’t follow after her immediately. I watched her ass sway, unable to resist.
She was making me act out of character. This wasn’t me, but I’d heard that mates would do that to you.
I wasn’t even sure that was what she was to me, but the signs were pretty damning. Did she feel the same things I did? Did my scent make her go all crazy? If it did, she was great at hiding it.
I hated that she was here. Too many alphas. Too many other scents in the air that my brain only interpreted as competition I had to dispatch to keep my omega safe from prying hands.
I sighed and got up from the counter. Her scent was like a train in the air. It made it easy to follow her. The moment I stepped out of the kitchen, the noise of the house enveloped me.
Bodies were everywhere. Rubbing up against themselves, kissing and touching. Doing all the things they hadn’t been able to do under their parents’ roofs. College was like that. It gave you freedom. It gave you the opportunity to make a new life for yourself. Many tried and succeeded, and others failed. That was the game. It respected no one.
I caught the scent of the omega and turned around. My breath seized in my throat. There she was. She was on the dance floor, and the people had parted to give a circle of space to her. As if they knew she was their better.
The music seemed like something alive that she was caught under its trance. Her waist swayed, and I was caught under its hypnosis.
I badly wanted to go forward and hold her in my embrace, but I held myself back.
She already had me on a leash, and she didn’t even know it.
Maeve's POVShe called me into her office right at the tail end of the day, which was a clear indicator that Morrison wanted a substantive conversation rather than a routine professional interaction. I walked down the carpeted corridor, my heels clicking softly against the floor, and stepped into her chambers. I took a seat across from her massive wooden desk in the chair that was deliberately, noticeably slightly lower than hers—a psychological positioning I was certain she utilized with every clerk, counsel, and petitioner who entered her orbit.I settled into the lower seat, smoothed the fabric of my skirt, and waited.She did not speak immediately. Instead, she adjusted her posture, leaned back slightly, and looked at me over the rim of her glasses for a long, measuring moment. The silence in the room was heavy, dense with the accumulated weight of decades of constitutional history and the quiet scrutiny of a Supreme Court justice who missed precisely nothing."Are you bonded?" sh
Maeve's POVThe clerkship started on a Tuesday, and by Friday I had completely forgotten what it felt like to leave before nine PM.Morrison's chambers ran on a schedule that operated entirely under the assumption that you had no other obligations, no other life, and no physical needs outside of consuming coffee and staring at legal text. That assumption was technically accurate in the sense that I had cleared my calendar of everything except Declan's calls.And even those were now happening at eleven at night, when I finally got back to the apartment, kicked off my heels, and sat directly on the cold kitchen floor because sitting on the floor felt somehow more honest than the couch.The work, however, was extraordinary.That was the thing I had not fully prepared for, the part that caught me off guard—that it would be this relentlessly, breathtakingly good. We were handling real cases at the highest possible level. This was the tier where a single turn of phrase in a drafted brief co
Declan’s POV I managed to hold my composure together completely through the entire napkin conversation, through the remainder of our dinner, and through the rest of the quiet evening. We sat together on the living room couch doing the exact thing we always did—her immersed in her legal files and me reviewing the team playbooks, neither of us offering a single word regarding the massive professional agreement we had just reached. I held the composure together right up until the moment she finally fell asleep against my shoulder. She fell asleep the exact way she always did whenever she was utterly exhausted—rapidly and completely, like an internal switch had been flipped to off. Her face went entirely still and soft against my chest, losing that rigid, controlled quality she always maintained when she was actively managing her environment. I lay there in the dark with her physical weight pressed firmly against my side, the bond delivering the slow, rhythmic cadence of her breathing
Maeve’s POV Carter had summoned me into her corner office at precisely four-thirty in the afternoon, which was late enough in the programmatic day that the rest of the floor had gone remarkably quiet around our desks. She had taken her seat across the massive mahogany desk, folded her hands over a legal pad, and looked at me with the exact expression she utilized when evaluating a case she had already reached a definitive consensus on. "I am going to be entirely direct with you, Collins," Carter said, her sharp eyes locking onto mine. "Please do," I replied, bracing my shoulders. "You are, without a single doubt, the most exceptional summer intern this firm has taken on in the past three years," she stated. From a woman of Carter's clinical disposition, that sentence was the structural equivalent of any other human being telling you that you were the most remarkable mind they had ever encountered. "We want to formally extend an offer for a permanent position. A full associate slot
Declan’s POV The temporary sublet apartment Maeve had rented was roughly the exact physical size of an NHL penalty box. It cost approximately three times the monthly financial amount it should have by any logical standard of real estate, and the old bathroom shower possessed only two distinct operational settings: absolute freezing ice or skin-scalding steam. Despite those architectural flaws, I woke up every single morning on that cramped mattress next to her and knew with absolute certainty that I would have gladly paid twice the rental price for the sheer privilege of the location. That arrangement defined our entire summer in the capital. It consisted of six remarkable weeks of something I had not experienced since our early days in the Providence apartment—having her present as a daily, undeniable fact of my existence rather than an event on a calendar that occurred twice a month. She departed the sublet for her law firm promptly at eight o'clock every morning, which left me
Maeve’s POV I was standing in the center of Carter's corner office, mid-sentence into a highly detailed explanation regarding a complex jurisdictional conflict between the state and federal courts, when the bond suddenly ignited. It was not the familiar, low-grade distance warmth that I had been carrying around in my chest for the past six weeks of the summer. This was something entirely different. This was the close version. This was the full, unyielding, heavy biological presence of my alpha, the specific chemical heat that only occurred when he was occupying the exact same geographic zip code. The sensation hit my physical systems mid-sentence with enough concentrated force that the words caught in my throat. I completely lost the logical thread of the legal argument I was making, stumbling over a simple statutory definition, and I had to physically grip the edge of her mahogany desk to steady myself while Carter looked up at me with a single eyebrow raised in silent evaluation.
MAEVE'S POVThe music was an electric current on my body. I always loved to dance, and right now, it was taking my mind off that arrogant jerk of an alpha. Declan Hayes. Even right now, I could feel his eyes on me. I could feel his hungry gaze devouring me through the clothing. Or maybe I was
MAEVE'S POVFirst day on the campus and my time here was already off to a bad start. But all of that was thrust to the back of my mind the moment I met my new roommate, Alana. Right now, she was currently trying her best to wrestle me off the bed. “It’s our first day on campus! I forbid you fr
DECLAN'S POVOne minute, my teammates and I were standing off to the side bitching about the freshers, the next, a scent slapped me in the face with the wave of a thousand punches. Omega, the alpha inside me growled. “Hey Dec. What's up? You zoned out.” “Give me a minute. Need to check somethi
MAEVE'S POV“Hey! Watch it!” I said when my bag fell to the floor because a girl bumped into me. She was surrounded by two other girls, and I knew they thought they looked put together to themselves, but they just looked like a hot mess to me with their cakey makeup and tacky clothing. The main g







