Eight weeks.

That's how long Bartosz's been gone, and it's exactly how long Osip Corbet has been circling you — patient at first, then not, and these last couple weeks not even pretending. Right now he's got you backed against the lockers, tall and golden, one arm braced by your head so you can't step away, and he leans in and drags his nose slow up the side of your throat — scenting you, unhurried, like it's already decided.

he breathes against your skin.

Then the whole corridor turns at once, and the noise hits like a wave.

A cheerleader gets to him first — Saskia, all legs and glitter and confidence, hooking both hands around his bicep and physically hanging off it.

She drags a palm down his chest, shameless.

Peri's already on his other side, fingers curling into his sleeve.

Saskia purrs, going up on her toes to say it against his jaw,

Another girl just watches from under a teammate's arm, biting her lip, waiting her turn. There's a whole knot of them now, hands and laughter, a linebacker the size of a vending machine pounding his shoulders —

— and Bartosz, a head taller than all of it, black hair swept off a face gone hard and sharp, that heavy almost-right scent rolling out ahead of him and turning every head it touches.

He doesn't feel a single one of their hands.

His eyes cut over the top of the crowd, searching — and land on you. On Corbet's mouth at your throat.

Everything in him goes still.

Wrong

-still.

Saskia, still clinging, feels the change in him and doesn't understand it.

He peels her off his arm without looking, sets her aside like a coat, and comes down the corridor fast. The crowd parts for him — the new part, the part nobody's ready for. Saskia actually stumbles, mouth open.

Corbet pushes off the lockers, unbothered, grinning up at all the new mass of him.

Bartosz hits him.

No wind-up, no words — a short brutal cross that cracks across Corbet's jaw, snaps his head sideways, and drops him into the lockers with a sound like a dropped drum. The girls scream. Saskia's hands fly to her mouth — "oh my GOD—" — and someone behind her breathes, "that was kind of hot, actually," and someone else is already filming.

Corbet slides down the metal, stunned, blood at his lip, staring up like the floor moved.

Bartosz's voice is flat and quiet and awful, fist still clenched, knuckles split, the portrait tattoo smeared red.

Rhys Tallow shoves off the wall, ginger and freckled, delighted.

Kaito Imazato hasn't moved, lean, wire frames catching the light, watching Bartosz's face instead of Corbet's.

Sasha Yamagishi, pale and severe at the back, barely audible.

Only Nadir Sakakibara steps in, warm-eyed, a hand flat to Bartosz's heaving chest.

Bartosz doesn't hear him. The rage drains out of his shoulders the instant he turns and finds your face — the danger folding away so fast you'd swear you imagined it — and then there's only him. Too tall. Too warm. Close enough the scent presses the whole shrieking corridor into silence.

Saskia is still gaping somewhere behind him. He has already forgotten she exists.

he breathes, like his knuckles aren't split, like Corbet isn't groaning on the floor between you. His bloodied hand lifts toward you, then curls in, ashamed of itself.

The red thread in his eye is brighter now, his voice dropping, only for you, cracking at the bottom.

He stops. Swallows.

A voice cracks down the corridor like a dropped tray. Dean Harlan — greying, thick-necked, a beta with thirty years of not being impressed by a single alpha in this building — shoulders straight through the parting crowd, and the crowd parts for him faster than it parted for Bartosz. He takes it in at a glance: Corbet bleeding on the floor, Bartosz’s split knuckles, the dozen phones still up. His jaw works.

a blunt finger at Bartosz, then at Corbet,

He jerks his head toward the door.

Bartosz doesn’t move. His eyes are still on you, jaw tight, the whole coiled weight of him refusing to be steered — one more second, just one, like if he can hold your gaze long enough the rest of it won’t matter.

Harlan again, flat.