I kissed him. It wasn't a soft kiss. It was a stamp of approval. A seal on the document. He tasted like adrenaline and relief.
"Good boy," I murmured against his mouth.
Alfie let out a whimper that vibrated against my lips. He slumped into me, burying his face in my neck, his arms wrapping around my waist to lift me off the floor.
"Reviewing the playback," Euan announced, his voice aggressively neutral, though I saw the flush on his ears. "I will begin the mix-down immediately. We can have the stems ready for a leak within the hour."
"Upload it to the dead-end server first," Kit suggested, his voice rough. He walked over and placed a heavy hand on Alfie’s back, grounding him, grounding us both. "Let the Reddit detectives find it. Don't hand it to them on a plate."
"Agreed," I said, untangling myself from Alfie, though I kept a hand on his arm. "Make them work for the manifesto."
I sat back down at the "desk," wincing slightly as my sore muscles adjusted.
"Right," I said, pulling up a new document. "That handles the PR crisis. Now we handle the internal logistics."
"Logistics?" Alfie asked, flopping onto the banquette next to Kit, looking boneless and happy.
"The Rider," I said. "My rider. The one we just shredded into confetti last night."
The air in the room shifted. The comfortable, post-creative glow cooled slightly.
"It changes the things,” I said, tapping the trackpad. "It doesn't change the need for structure. In fact, it makes structure more important. We have a triple match. We have three Alphas and one Omega in a tin can doing sixty down the M1."
I looked at them.
"If we don't write down the rules, we're going to burn out. I'm going to burn out."
Euan pulled up a chair, sitting opposite me. His "systems" face was on. "Define the failure points."
"Intimacy," I said. "Last night was... a lot. It was everything. But if we try to do that every night? If I have to manage three Alphas vying for attention without a schedule? I'll be overwhelmed."
"Schedule," Euan repeated. He pulled out his own tablet. "Rotation?"
"Maybe." I looked at Kit. "And triggers. I discovered something during the burn incident. And again in the green room."
Kit’s eyes darkened. He knew exactly where I was going.
"Voice," he rumbled.
"Your voice," I clarified. "When you go into that 'instructional' mode... when you narrate... my brain shuts off. It's a safety trigger. But it's also a vulnerability."
I typed a header: VOICE PROTOCOL.
"I need to test it," I said, looking at the screen so I didn't have to look at Kit. "I need to know the range. Is it just medical? Is it sexual? Is it command-based?"
"You want to run diagnostics on my voice?" Kit asked, a slow smile spreading across his face. "Like a sound check?"
"Like a safety check," I said. "And I need Euan to map the data. And Alfie..."
I looked at the golden retriever currently vibrating on the sofa.
"I need to know how much praise you actually need before you overload," I said. "Because 'Good Boy' seems to be a functional kill-switch for you."
Alfie turned bright red. "It's not a kill-switch. It's motivational."
"It made your knees buckle," I pointed out.
"We need a whiteboard," Euan decided, standing up. "A physical one. Digital is too ephemeral for this level of negotiation."
