"For how long?"
"Until we're ready to move. I need every name. The people above Stokes, the people running the phone, the ones who walk into daycares. All of it."
"And Stokes? Beck? Janine?"
"They don't know you've spoken to me. Keep it that way. When we move, we move on all of them at once. Nobody gets warning."
She nods. She wipes her face with the back of her hand. She touches her hair where it's come loose from the clip, tucking the strands back with fingers that are still trembling.
She pulls herself together in front of me, piece by piece, with the discipline of a woman who has spent decades managing a casino floor full of drunks and cheats who think the rules don'tapply to them. By the time she reaches the door she looks almost like herself.
"Dom," she says. Then, quieter: "There’s something else.”
“Anything we can do.”
“Not for me. For you.” She nods at me. “They know about him. I’m sure of it. I don’t know if they have his name but I overheard Stokes talking about ‘Novikov’s omega’. Be careful.”
Beside me, Theo goes pale.
“Thanks, Cath.”
Viktor opens the door. She walks through. He follows. The corridor swallows their footsteps.
Theo hasn't moved from his chair against the wall. “I can’t leave, can I?”
I shake my head. This is the safest place for him, whether he likes it or not.
15. Theo
The nausea wakes me at six the next morning. It's been waking me earlier and earlier but today it hits before I've even opened my eyes, a rolling wave that starts in my stomach and climbs into my throat. I press my face into the sofa cushion and breathe through it. The leather smells like Dom. Everything smells like Dom. The entire suite is saturated with him and it's been a month and I still can't filter it out.
He leaves the bedroom door open every night and I lie there in the dark and listen to him breathe.
The pull is almost physical, a gravity in my chest that gets worse instead of better. Last night, I had to stand up and walk to the bathroom just to break the pattern of lying still and wanting. I run the tap and splash cold water on my face and look at myself in the mirror and remind myself who I am and where I am and why.
The sofa is too short for me. My feet hang off the end if I stretch out and the cushions have a dip in the middle that my hip sinks into, and every morning I wake up with a knot in my lower back.
It's getting harder.
The man I thought I knew is not the man I'm living with. I thought had him mapped out: brutal, territorial, dangerous. The kind of alpha who runs on intimidation and violence.
But Cath Beresford looked at Dom across Viktor's desk with tears running down her face and he just hugged her. When shewas done, he promised to protect her grandchild and I could smell that he meant it.
And the ditch. Viktor's ditch comment, the one that's lived in my head since the first night, the one I've replayed every time I needed to remind myself that this man is dangerous. Turns out the danger is real but the method is theatre. They don't kill people.
Of course, he has still stopped me from leaving. That’s coercion and kidnapping and maybe a hundred other things, but he’s not going to kill me. I no longer believe that. It doesn't change the locked door or the ankle monitor. I don't know what to do with that.
The nausea passes. I sit up slowly. The blanket has slid to the floor again.
I know what’s happening. I've known for weeks. The math is simple and the math doesn't lie.
Five days of heat with a prime match and no protection. The probability of pregnancy is so high that not being pregnant would be the statistical anomaly.
But knowing and confirming are different things. I hear his bedroom door open. His footsteps in the hallway, bare feet on hardwood, the particular rhythm of his stride. He walks the way he does everything, unhurried, certain. The footsteps come into the living room and stop.
He's in boxers, no shirt. His chest is broad, dark hair tapering down his sternum. His hair is damp from the shower and the scent rolling off him is fresh and warm.
He's holding a white paper bag. He crosses the room and sets it on the cushion beside me. Then he sits on the arm of the sofa, one foot on the floor, and watches me.
