This omega ismine.
Eight years ago, I got a Bureau notification. Prime match. Ninety-seven-point four percent. I never got to meet him. The omega vanished. The Bureau assigned a caseworker who couldn't find him, and eventually a woman with a tired voice called to say they were closing the file.
The omega’s name was Theo Holland and right now his scent is still filling the room. I don’t have proof that it’s him, but it has to be. No one else could stop me in my tracks like this.
I am still holding the door frame. Behind me, Viktor has gone very quiet, which means he's noticed the fact that I haven't moved or spoken in what is now an unreasonable amount of time.
I look at this omega —myomega — sitting at my table in my casino with my chips in his pocket and a fake name on his ID, and the fury arrives right behind the want.
He ran and now he's here. In my building. Stealing from me.
Whether that's coincidence or the worst decision he's ever made is a question I'll deal with later.
Right now, I need to do something about the fact that I am standing in a doorway like a man who's forgotten how to walk.
I let go of the frame. I make myself let go. The effort it takes is absurd. My fingers don't want to release. My body has decided that the only safe option is to remain anchored to something solid.
I step inside.
The omega at the table looks up at me and I watch his pupils dilate. It's involuntary. He can't help it any more than I can help the fact that my heart rate has doubled. Every nerve I own is oriented directly toward him.
"Everyone out," I say. My voice is level. I am unreasonably proud of this. "Viktor stays."
The two security men leave. The door closes.
Mine. I can feel it in every nerve I have. My entire body is orientated toward him.
I pull out the chair across from him and sit down, and the distance between us shrinks to four feet of table and a silence so dense I can hear him breathing. His hands are flat on the table. Steady. His chin is up, though, and there's something in the set of his jaw that isn't fear. Defiance. My omega, sitting in my security room, looking at me like he's calculating whether he can get past me to the door.
He can't. But the fact that he's thinking about it does something to me I wasn't expecting.
I pick up his ID and turn it over. The photo doesn't do him justice.
I set it down and look at him. He's watching me carefully, but I can smell the way his body has responded to me. He knows who I am, just as I know who he is, but I can see that there is still hope in his eyes that I don’t know everything.
Maybe he’s hoping I’m a different alpha. That maybe it’s just a scent match and not the prime match that we both know we are.
"Nice to meet you, Theo Holland," I say. Not Garnett. I use his real name, the one on a Bureau file I read eight years ago in an office that used to belong to my father.
His face goes deadly pale, confirming that I am right.
3. Theo
I smell him before I see him.
My body responds before my brain catches up: pulse spiking, a flush of heat starting at the base of my spine and radiating outward in a slow, terrible wave. Between my legs, the first treacherous hint of slick.
No. No, no, no.
I know what this is. I know it the way you know a fire alarm, not because you've studied the sound but because your body was built to react to it.
The alpha in the doorway has stopped moving. He's gripping the frame with one hand and he's not coming in and for one irrational second, I think maybe he'll turn around and leave and I'll be able to breathe again.
But he doesn't. He stands there and I watch his knuckles go white against the wood. What's happening to me is happening to him too.
Then he steps inside and I get my first proper look at him and the calm, clinical part of my brain goes quiet.
He's tall. That's the first thing. He’s tall and broad across the shoulders in a way that makes the room shrink, that makes the air feel like there's less of it. He has dark hair, cut short and a jaw that could have been designed to make omegas stupid. My eyes go to his mouth and then away very quickly because looking at his mouth is doing things to my heart rate that I do not have the capacity to manage right now.
