2

Present day

Kai lasted thirty seconds inside before he wanted to leave.

The bass rattled his chest. Fake fog covered the floor knee-deep, and the air was so thick with mixed scents it felt like trying to breathe through a wet cloth.

"This is terrible," he said.

Marco walked ahead like he hadn't heard.

Kai followed anyway, weaving through the crowd. Bodies everywhere. Drinks everywhere. Lights cutting across faces in colors that made everyone look slightly ill.

He hadn't bothered with a costume. Black shirt, dark jeans. He'd figured that was enough effort for a party he hadn't wanted to attend.

Moonbeam day.

He despised Moonbeam day.

Every year the whole campus lost its mind for a week house parties, street parties, people in costumes stumbling between addresses like it was a sport. Everyone treated it like a celebration.

For Kai, it was a reminder.

Four years ago, at a party exactly like this one, everything had gone wrong.

His heat had come without warning. A masked alpha he still couldn't identify. A night that existed now only in fragments and even those fragments, he wished he could erase.

He'd avoided Moonbeam day entirely his first year. Didn't leave his room, didn't answer the door, didn't explain why to anyone. Marco had mocked him for weeks. Kai had let him. The alternative was telling the truth, and that was never happening.

"Last one," Marco said, appearing beside him. "After this we graduate and it's over. Can you at least pretend to enjoy yourself?"

"I'm here. That's my contribution."

"You look miserable."

"I look normal."

"Same thing, for you." Marco grabbed two cups from a passing tray, pushed one into Kai's hand. "Relax. Nothing bad is going to happen."

Kai said nothing.

Then Marco froze.

Cup halfway to his mouth, eyes fixed on something across the room.

"She's here."

Kai didn't need to ask. Four months of daily updates had made him an unwilling expert on the subject.

"Then go talk to her," Kai said.

"You go."

Kai stared at him. "You're serious."

"Just start a conversation. I'll come over after."

"Marco. She doesn't know me. She knows you."

"That's the problem."

"That's supposed to be the advantage  "

"Kai." Marco grabbed his sleeve. "Please."

Kai looked at Aiden across the room. Then back at Marco, whose confidence usually irritating in its abundance had completely abandoned him.

He almost felt sorry for him.

"You owe me," Kai said, and started toward her.

He'd taken four steps when the front door opened.

The music didn't stop. The lights didn't change. Nothing dramatic happened.

But the room did.

Conversations dropped off mid-sentence. Movement slowed. People turned not all at once, but in a ripple, the way a crowd shifts when something worth watching walks in.

Kai stopped.

The air pressure in the room had changed. He could feel it physically something heavier, something that made the back of his neck prickle.

He turned toward the door.

And every rational thought he had shut off at once.

"Ask her yourself." Kai cut him off before he even finished. "I'm not doing this."

"You don't understand." Marco grabbed his arm. "She actually talks to you."

"She talks to everyone."

"She smiles at you."

Kai pulled free. That wasn't an argument. That was a problem Marco needed to solve without him.

He'd spent enough years being someone else's excuse.

Four years ago, he would've been on Marco's side of this tongue-tied, overthinking, circling the same person from a safe distance and calling it patience. He knew exactly how that ended.

Alex Kim had walked out of his life without a single backward glance.

No goodbye. No explanation. One day there, the next gone. Off to the Academy, onto something bigger, leaving Kai standing there holding feelings that had nowhere to go.

Ancient history. He killed the thought.

The party pressed in around him bodies, noise, music vibrating through the floor. He hated these things. Always had. But it was worse here, at a Murphy celebration, in a house that looked exactly like the one where everything went wrong.

His presentation night.

The alpha in the mask.

The moment he'd spent four years pretending didn't exist.

Kai rolled his shoulders and kept moving.

Aiden crashed into him before he reached her group. Arms around his neck, full momentum.

"You actually came!"

"Blame Marco."

She pulled back laughing then spotted Marco frozen six feet away, visibly rehearsing something in his head. "Wait, do we have them together?"

Marco's brain short-circuited in real time. "Third row. Left side. I sit behind the girl with the red bag."

Why. Kai pressed his lips together.

But Aiden didn't flinch. She lit up. Within sixty seconds they were bonding over a shared hatred of their professor, and Kai was invisible.

Good. He stepped back.

"Don't look now," Sophia said at his shoulder, "but Emma's been locked onto you since you walked in."

He looked.

Emma caught his gaze and smiled slow, deliberate.

He raised a hand. Polite. Neutral. Done.

Sophia shoved him so hard he lurched forward.

He didn't recover in time. Emma was already there, hand braced against his chest, steadying him before he ate the floor.

"Easy." She didn't step back. "You good?"

"Fine." His face was hot. "Sorry."

"Don't be." Her hand dropped to his waist instead. Light. Comfortable. Like she'd earned the right. "You look miserable. Let me fix that."

"I'm not"

"Drink. With me. Now." She held out her hand.

And Kai almost said yes.

He was this close to saying yes to letting go, moving on, burying Alex Kim somewhere he'd never have to dig him up again

The door opened.

Silence fell like a blade.

Kai's hand never reached Emma's. His blood went cold.

He almost smiled at how stupid he'd been.

Princes didn't exist. And even if they did, Alex Kim wouldn't waste one second looking at him.

That man had never shared a single thing in his life. At twelve, he'd walked into school with a split lip and bruised knuckles because someone borrowed his stylus. Borrowed. Alex had beaten the kid bloody over a stylus.

So what did that make what happened to Kai?

Not borrowed.

Stolen.

He should have hated every second of it.

He hadn't.

That was the part he couldn't live with four years later and it still ate at him. The weight of a stranger's hand. Hot breath against the back of his neck. The way his newly presented omega body had responded like it had been waiting for exactly that.

His instincts had betrayed him completely.

What would Alex say if he ever found out?

The thought made his skin crawl. He could already picture the look contempt, maybe pity. Either one would destroy him.

He pushed it down and focused on the room around him.

"Kai. Hey."

He turned. Emma stood at the drinks table, bottle already in hand, eyebrows raised.

The kitchen was chaos wall-to-wall people, music so loud he felt it in his teeth, alcohol covering every surface.

"You're staring at nothing," Emma said. "Pick something to drink."

"Anything strong."

Emma didn't hesitate. Grabbed a blue bottle, popped the cap with the edge of the counter, slid it across. Then, without missing a beat

"I'm going to flirt with you tonight. I figured you should know upfront. I don't want you drunk before I try."