Chapter 7 Peppermint

Olivia's POV

Back at my desk, I opened the laptop they'd issued me that morning, typed Jace Foster into the search bar, and started reading.

Twenty-three years old. Alpha. Middleweight. The media had given him the nickname "The Rocket," which I understood immediately after watching thirty seconds of his last fight — not because he was fast, though he was, but because once he started, the pressure didn't let up. Eight and one, the one loss a split decision he'd vocally disputed in a post-fight interview that someone had clipped and reposted approximately four thousand times.

The commercial record was more interesting than the fight record.

Two documented training camp incidents, both flagged but not formally sanctioned. One mid-interview walkout that had cost a broadcast partner a segment and a formal letter of complaint. One brand partnership — athletic wear, mid-tier — terminated at the six-month mark for conduct inconsistent with brand values, which was the corporate way of saying he said something in a sponsored post comment section that we cannot explain away.

I pulled up the interview still someone had screenshotted and made into a meme. He was looking directly at the camera with the particular expression of someone who knows exactly what they're doing and has decided they don't care. Mouth guard dangling from two fingers. Half a smirk.

Aggressive. Unstable.

I wrote both words on the legal pad.

Then, underneath them: Potential.

Double underline.

The office cleared for lunch around me. Voices angled away, and laughter began just beyond my desk. No one slowed on the way to the elevators.

I didn't lift my head.

When the floor went quiet enough that I could hear the ventilation system, I finally leaned back, rolled my neck until it cracked once, and stood up. The tea water was going to take two minutes. I had a lot more files to get through this afternoon.

The break room was at the end of the hall, door half-open, no overhead light on. Just the gray November light coming through the window in the back wall, laying a pale stripe across the floor.

I pushed the door open and stopped.

He was sitting on the bench along the wall — Ryder Brooks, in a black hoodie, hood down, hands laced together, elbows on his knees, head bowed. The posture of someone holding something very heavy from the inside. He wasn't asleep. His shoulders were too tense for sleep, the specific tension of a body that is still working even when it looks like it's stopped.

Ethan had looked like that once, after a loss. Sat on the locker room bench with his hands in his hair for twenty minutes before he could move.

This was different. This was heavier.

I didn't announce myself. I walked to the water dispenser, took a paper cup from the stack, and pressed the hot water lever. The water came out with a soft rush — the loudest sound in the room.

I felt him register it. The change in his shoulders was small, a fractional tightening, then a release. He'd heard me. He didn't move.

I wrapped both hands around the paper cup and stood there while the steam rose in a thin curl. The water was too hot to drink. I waited.

The silence stretched between us. I let it.

Then he lifted his head.

His eyes moved to the floor first, the way they do when someone's coming back from somewhere inside themselves. Then they came up, slow, and settled on me. Gray-blue. The same eyes I'd clocked across a cage in a basement two nights ago, except then they'd been locked in and calculating, and now they looked like something else entirely — not soft, not open, just tired, in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

There was a flicker of something when he recognized me. Not surprise. More like the expression of a person who has been sitting in the dark and has just noticed a light they didn't turn on.

I met his eyes.

I didn't say anything.

Neither did he.

That was the whole of it, for about four seconds — his gray-blue eyes on mine, the paper cup warm between my palms, the break room sitting in its gray November quiet like it had agreed to stay out of whatever this was. Then I turned back toward the window and looked at my cup.

It was still too hot.

Behind me, Ryder hadn't moved. The bench didn't creak. His breathing was steady — the controlled kind, not the relaxed kind. A body that even at rest was still managing something.

My hand moved before I'd consciously decided on it.

I was already reaching into my jacket pocket, fingers finding the cellophane wrapper by texture. I carry a few of them always — peppermint, the kind that comes in the plain white tin from the drugstore on my block. Not for any particular reason. Just habit, the kind you pick up without noticing.

I walked over and set it on the bench beside him. Not in his hand. On the bench, with an inch of space between us.

"I looked it up once," I said. My voice came out even. "High-intensity training — when the stress load stays elevated post-session, it can manifest as tension headaches. Peppermint's not a fix, but the menthol does something with the blood vessels. Takes the edge off."

I didn't look at him directly. Didn't wait for a response.

I turned and walked back to the water dispenser, refilled my cup halfway, and stood at the window. The light outside was flat and gray. The kind of sky that can't decide whether it wants to do something about itself.

Two seconds of silence.

Then the soft, precise sound of cellophane being lifted from the bench.

My finger pressed against the rim of the paper cup, just once. I didn't turn around.

"You smell like something."

I went still for half a breath. Then I turned my head.

He was in the same position — elbows on knees, the peppermint candy sitting in his fingers, still wrapped. He was looking at me. Not the assessing look from two nights ago, when he'd been reading Ethan for weak points in the third round. Something slower than that. Something that didn't have a name I could find quickly.

"What kind of something?" I asked.

"Different." A beat. "Not like the usual ones in here."

I held his gaze for a second and let the pieces click into place.

"That's probably not actual pheromones," I said. My voice stayed flat, the way I'd trained it to go flat on this particular subject. "I'm a weak Omega. Underdeveloped gland function — my pheromone output is around a tenth of the standard range. Most scent-detection equipment needs direct proximity to register it. Most people don't pick it up at all."

I said it the way I say everything I've had to say too many times — accurately, without apology, without the particular flavor of embarrassment that other people seem to expect from me when the subject comes up. The flatness wasn't coldness. It was just practice.

Ryder didn't say anything.

He kept looking at me. I knew pity and the polished that's unfortunate expression from across a conference table. This was neither. He seemed to be turning over a fact that had landed somewhere he hadn't expected.

Then he put the peppermint in his mouth, stood up, and walked past me to the door.

He didn't say anything else.

The door opened. Closed.

I stood there holding my paper cup.

He smelled it.

At that distance, with my level of output, it shouldn't have been possible. Not even for an Alpha.

But Ryder had smelled me.