Father looked at the woman the way he looks at a useful acquisition, but his attention kept returning to Mattaniah.
And that was different.
It wasn't the way a man looks at an inconvenience he's tolerating. It wasn't even the cold assessment he turns on people he's deciding whether to keep or discard. It was more attentive than either of those things, more focused, the kind of look that means someone has been filed away as significant before they've done anything to earn that designation. The corrections weren't just discipline. They were something else — testing, maybe, or cataloguing. Watching how the Omega responds under pressure, what he does when he's cornered, what sounds he makes when his control slips.
I don't know yet what that means. I'm not going to pretend I do when I don't have enough pieces.
But I know it can't be a good sign. And I know that whatever Father's angle is, it involves Mattaniah in a way that goes beyond tolerating an inconvenient stepson under his roof.
That's the part I need to understand before Father decides to act on it.
The soft sound of footsteps makes me look up. Amos appears in the doorway, his jacket gone and his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal the tattoos covering his forearms. The sight of him settles something restless in my chest the way it always does.
"He's cleaning," Amos says, answering the question I didn't ask. "Crying while he does it, but cleaning."
"Crying."
"Silently. Trying to hide it." Amos crosses the room and stops beside my chair, close enough that I can smell him properly. "I don't think he knows how to do anything else other than hide, I mean. Everything about him is locked down so tight it's a miracle he can function."
I set my glass on the table and look up at him. "You noticed it too."
"Hard not to." Amos perches on the edge of the table, his thigh inches from my shoulder as I let my hand drift up to rest on his knee. The movement is automatic, a comfort I've allowed myself for years. "His scent is wrong, Dom. Muted. Like there's a wall between what he's actually feeling and what he's letting out."
"Blockers," I confirm. "Strong ones, and a lot of them. I could smell the chemicals underneath the coconut when he first walked in. He must have been taking them regularly for a long time."
"Why would an Omega suppress that heavily? Most of them want to be noticed."
It's a fair question. Omega scents are designed to attract, to communicate, and to form connections. Blocking them serves no biological purpose. If anything it works against every instinct an Omega has.
Unless those instincts have been trained out of them.
I think about the way Mattaniah has moved through the house since he arrived earlier. Even when Father was at his worst, cracking that Omega's hands until they must be throbbing, Mattaniah only broke once. One small whine, immediately followed by a flood of shame so strong I could smell it across the table.
That's not natural. That's not how Omegas work.
That's conditioning and someone put a significant amount of effort into it.
"Someone trained him to suppress every natural instinct he has," I say, the pieces clicking together. "Taught him that responding genuinely was dangerous, that his own biology was a liability. That kind of conditioning doesn't happen by accident."
Amos' expression darkens. "You think it was his mother."
"I know it was his mother. Did you see how she reacted when his scent went sour at dinner? There wasn't a shred of concern on her face. She looked disappointed, like he'd failed an audition by letting his distress show."
"That's a specific kind of cruelty, Dom."
"It's strategy." I recognize the architecture of it even without knowing the full purpose yet. The deliberate suppression, the trained shame response, the performance of availability without the reality of it. "I don't know exactly what she's been using him for, but whatever it is, it requires him to be appealing without being attainable. She needs him to draw Alphas in without forming real connections. The moment he actually responds to someone, genuinely responds, he will stop being useful to her."
Amos is quiet for a moment. "And she brought him here anyway, into a house with three unmated Alphas."
"Which is the part I can't figure out yet." I lean back in my chair, turning the thought over. "Father doesn't bring chaos into this house. He doesn't make moves he hasn't thought through. So either he doesn't know what Mattaniah actually isunderneath all those blockers, or he knows exactly what he is and that's precisely why he's here."
"You think Father wants him."
"I think Father's attention at dinner wasn't the attention of a man tolerating his new Omega’s son. There's something there I need to understand before it becomes a problem I can't solve." I look at Amos. "And I think we need to know what we're working with before we decide how to move."
Amos holds my gaze. "So we get close to him."
"We get close to him. But carefully. He's going to run every time his instincts break through and the shame hits. We saw that already. We need him to feel safe enough to stop running before we can understand what's actually happening in this house."
