I open my mouth.
"Don't argue," he says, and there's something under his voice now, a depth that reverberates in a place I don't want to think about. "You're alive right now because I'm choosing to let you be alive. That can change. It won't change tonight, but it can change. Do you understand?"
"I understand," I say.
He stands. He walks to the door and opens it and Viktor is right there.
"Put him in the suite on twenty-two," Novikov says. "Lock it. Guard the door. No phone access. No outside communication."
Viktor's expression says everything his mouth doesn't.
Novikov looks back at me. One last look, and I feel it land on my skin and stay there.
"You have until morning to decide what you're going to tell me,” he says. "I'd suggest you make it convincing."
4. Dom
His scent is still on my clothes. I should shower. I should change. I should do the things a rational man does when he's been compromised and knows it.
I don't move. The doors close behind me. I stand in my office and breathe.
It doesn't help. He’s everywhere. It's on my suit, my hands, the air in my lungs. It’s so sharp and clean and so deeply, fundamentally right that my body hasn't stopped responding since I walked into that room twenty minutes ago.
I cross to the bar in the corner and pour a measure of scotch. The glass is cold against my palm. I don't drink it. I don’t remember the last time anything knocked me this far off balance.
The door opens. Viktor doesn't knock. He never has.
"He’s settled," he says. "Guard on the door. No phone, no laptop. I’ve taken his car keys." A pause. "I’ve sent someone out to his motel to retrieve his things. We can take a look through what he’s got."
"Good."
Viktor comes in and stands where he always stands, between the desk and the window, the position that gives him a sightline to both the door and the room. He watches me for a long moment and I don’t want to have the discussion that’s coming.
"You froze," he says.
I don’t argue. It felt like the world had rearranged itself when I’d walked in that room.
"He's my prime match," I say.
Viktor's expression doesn't change, which means he’d already worked it out.
Of course he did. He was standing behind me. He would have seen it in my body before I'd processed it myself.
"The omega who ran."
"Yes."
Viktor absorbs this without visible reaction, filing it away for later use. He crosses to the desk and lowers himself into the chair across from mine. His knees crack. He ignores them.
"That changes things," he says.
"It doesn't change anything."
"Dom." His voice is flat. "This is a problem."
"I know.” If Theo had been anyone else, he wouldn’t be sitting in a suite at my expense right now. He’d have been banned at the minimum, but more likely I’d have had Viktor threaten him until we got what we wanted.
He wasn’t going to end up dead in a ditch. We don’t actually do that, but by God, he would have thought giving up his bosses was his only real choice.
