I nod before the fear can catch up.
The smile that crosses his face is deviant, telling me that even though he’s giving me something I need, I shouldn’t trust him. It should terrify me; instead it sends heat pooling low and liquid in my belly, a fresh wave of slick dampening the sheets beneath me.
"Good boy."
The praise slams into me, my cock twitching against my stomach. I've been called plenty of things by Alphas over the years, compliant, appealing, useful, but nobody has ever said those two words like they were proud of me for choosing to stay instead of running.
Dominic catches the tear that slides down my cheek and presses his lips to the damp trail it leaves on my skin. "There you go," he murmurs. "Just like that."
His mouth finds my throat first, pressing hot, open kisses along the column of my neck, and I tip my head back on instinct, offering access I've never given anyone voluntarily. The sound of approval he makes vibrates against my pulse and sends sparks cascading through my nervous system.
His hands move with a deliberate kind of patience, mapping the planes of my body like he intends to memorize me, lingering at the spots that make me jolt and returning to the ones that make my back arch off the mattress. He's building a languageof my responses, cataloguing every gasp and shiver, and the thoroughness of his attention makes the backs of my eyes burn because nobody has ever cared enough to learn what I like.
By the time his mouth reaches my stomach, the arousal has rebuilt itself, a pressure so immense I can feel it in my teeth. My cock is leaking steadily, my hips rolling in small, involuntary motions I can't control, and every breath I take is saturated with his scent until the air itself feels like his hands on me.
"Please," I whisper, the rule about silence forgotten entirely.
He looks up from the soft skin below my navel, his chin resting against my belly, his pupils so wide his eyes look black. "Please what, firefly? Tell me what you need."
I don't have words for it. I've never been allowed to develop a vocabulary for wanting. So I roll my hips upward in a wordless plea and trust him to translate.
"I've got you." He presses his mouth to my hip bone, then trails lower, his stubble scraping against the sensitive skin of my inner thigh, and the friction alone nearly unravels me. "Just lie there and let me take care of you."
His mouth closes over me a moment later, hot and wet and so shockingly, perfectly good that I have to shove my fist against my teeth to catch the sound that tears out of my chest. Everything is perfect from the heat of his tongue, the tight ring of his lips, to the way his hands pin my hips flat so I can't thrust upward or set the pace or do anything except take what he's giving.
He swallows me deep and draws back slowly, building the pleasure in overlapping waves, each crest higher than the one before, and I am shaking apart beneath him because this is nothing like my own hand or the useless toy or the clinical service of a rent-an-Alpha during a scheduled heat. This is someone paying attention.
"That's it," he murmurs against my skin, pulling off just long enough to speak, his breath warm and damp over my cock. "You're doing so well. Let go for me, firefly. You're safe."
The word safe reaches past the arousal and the desperation and the knotted mess of training and trauma and finds the terrified creature at the center of me that's been running since it was nineteen years old, and holds it still.
I let go.
The orgasm rips through me like nothing I've ever experienced, whiting out my vision and bowing my spine off the bed and pulling a sound from my throat that's raw and wrecked and utterly beyond my control.
Dominic holds my hips steady and works me through every shuddering wave, until the aftershocks fade to tremors and the tremors fade to a boneless, floating stillness that feels like sinking into warm water. He moves up the bed and settles beside me with his hand on my stomach, tracing slow patterns on my skin while I remember how to breathe.
"Is that what it's supposed to feel like?" My voice comes out wrecked.
"Every time." His lips brush my temple. "And it gets better."
I brace for the shame, for the crash that always follows, but it doesn't come. There's just the warmth of his palm and a quiet in my head I don't recognize. My body feels wrung out and loose and settled in a way that scares me almost as much as the desperation that preceded it, because Dominic now knows exactly what I sound like when I stop fighting.
He knows what praise does to me, how fast I go under, every crack in the armor I've spent four years welding shut. I've given him a map to one of the biggest weaknesses I have, and I can't take it back.
After a while, he shifts toward the edge of the bed as my hand moves toward him before I can stop it. "Where are you going?"
"My room." He stands and rolls his sleeves down, his composure reassembling in seconds. At the broken door he pauses and looks back at me, the softness in his expression folding into something darker. "Sleep well, firefly. And don't bother putting your walls back up tonight." The corner of his mouth lifts. "I'll just take them down again tomorrow."
Then he's gone as I press my face into the pillow where his scent is already fading, and the last thing I feel before sleep pulls me under is the warmth of his hand on my stomach and the cold understanding that I've just shown a man exactly how to ruin me and he smiled like I'd given him a gift.
Amos
Thequarterlyprojectionsforthe Southeast division are inflated by at least twelve percent, and I've been staring at the same column of figures for twenty minutes without making progress. Normally a discrepancy like this would have my full attention, because pulling apart Father's financial fabrications is one of the few genuine pleasures available to me in this house.
Tonight the spreadsheet keeps losing to the memory of Mattaniah collapsing against my chest in the kitchen, the way his whole body went soft and trusting for three seconds before the horror caught up and he tore himself away.
My laptop screen blurs. I take my glasses off, rub the bridge of my nose, and put them back on. The numbers haven't changed. Neither has the faint but persistent ghost of coconut clinging to my collar, despite changing my shirt.
