The bedroom door opens and Dominic walks in carrying an energy I haven't seen before. I know every version of his stride, and this one is new. There's a satisfaction in his shoulders, a looseness in his jaw, and the body language of a man who just got exactly what he wanted and is still savoring it.
Then his scent reaches me, and I stop thinking about spreadsheets. Leather and smoke at his baseline, but underneath, threaded into his shirt and his skin is the unmistakable sweetness of Omega slick.
I close my laptop. "You smell like him."
Dominic drops into the armchair by the window and stretches his legs out. "He threw a dildo at my head."
The laugh hits me so hard I have to press my hand over my mouth to muffle it. "He did what?"
"Hurled it across the room. It hit the door right as I was opening it and landed at my feet. If his aim had been three inches higher, we'd be having a very different conversation." His mouth curves into something between a smile and a smirk. "Technically, I should be offended."
"I think I'm in love with him already." I'm still laughing, wiping my eyes behind my glasses. The image is too good: the terrified Omega from the kitchen launching sex toys in a fit of sexual frustration. There's fire in him. Buried and beaten down, but burning. "Tell me everything. And don't leave anything out."
"He was naked when I walked in. Sweating, flushed from his chest to his hairline, and the room smelled like slick so thick I could taste it on the air." Dominic leans his head back against the chair. "He'd been trying to get himself off for a while. Hand first, then the toy, and nothing was working. His body wouldn't let him finish and apparently, he’d rather fuck himself raw than ask anyone for help."
"So you helped."
He shrugs. "I offered. He accepted." His gaze holds mine, because we don't omit. "I talked him through it, told him to stay quiet, and gave him something to focus on besides the guilt that was obviously eating him alive."
"How fast did he go under?" Dominic always has a way with his targets, the Alpha pulling even the most stubborn to their knees by the time he’s done with them.
"I told him good boy and he basically melted, like the praise short-circuited something in him that nobody's ever touched before." Something shifts behind Dominic's expression. "I don't think anyone has ever said that to him and meant it as anything other than a reward for being compliant."
I sit up against the headboard, my mind already working through what Dominic's brought back, fitting it against what I saw in the kitchen and at dinner. An Omega on enough blockers to flatten a horse whose body is still breaking through. A flinch at raised voices that speaks to years of bracing for impact. A submission response so instantaneous that the first crack in his wall brings the whole structure down.
"Someone trained him to be afraid of his own instincts," I say, still fitting the edges together. "And his mother wasn't concerned when his scent went sour at dinner. She was disappointed, Dom. The way Father gets disappointed when we embarrass him at a board meeting. That wasn't a motherwatching her son struggle. That was someone watching an employee underperform."
Dominic fiddles with the dial of his watch before slipping the metal off his wrist and laying it on the table beside him. "I ran her after dinner. Lydia Watts, maiden name Lydia Okafor. Seven previous relationships in the last ten years, all with Alphas whose net worth starts at eight figures." His gaze moves to the window overlooking the street just beyond the front gate. "First one was a venture capitalist in Boston who ended up settling a harassment claim six months after she left. Second was a real estate developer in Chicago, same pattern, short relationship followed by a financial settlement that doesn't show up in court records but does show up in his credit history. Third one I couldn't find the ending to, but the relationship overlaps with Mattaniah turning nineteen, which is around the time the blocker prescriptions on his medical file start."
"You pulled his medical records?"
"I pulled everything I could access in ninety minutes with a laptop and Father's corporate database credentials." He stretches his legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankle with the ease of a man settling into a problem he intends to solve. "The blocker dosage alone tells a story. He's been on prescription-grade suppressants since nineteen, at levels that would flatten most Omegas entirely, and based on tonight they're not working on him anymore."
I set my laptop on the nightstand, pulling my glasses off to rub the bridge of my nose. The pattern doesn't need narrating. A mother who moves through wealthy Alphas and leaves financial damage behind her. A son who started heavy suppressants right around the age he'd have become useful in that kind of operation. A level of trained shame that only makes sense if genuine responses were treated as a failure.
"And Father's interest at dinner wasn't paternal," I push out, hating the image this is starting to form.
"Father looked at him the way he looks at companies he's about to acquire." Dominic's jaw tightens, as his scent sharpens at the edges, leather going acrid for a moment before he pulls it back under control. "He doesn't bring people into this house without a reason. The mother must be here because Mattaniah is here, not the other way around."
Shit."So we have a father who wants an Omega he can control, a mother who's been controlling that same Omega for years, and Mattaniah sitting between them with no idea what either of them is planning." I lean back against the headboard and pull my knees up against my chest. "If Father moves on him before we can establish something of our own, we lose any ability to intervene."
"Then we don't let Father move first." Dominic stands and crosses to the bed, sitting on the edge near my feet. His hand finds my ankle through the sheets, his thumb pressing against the bone with the absent possessiveness of long habit. "If Mattaniah falls for us publicly, Father can't touch him without creating exactly the kind of scandal he'd burn this family to the ground to avoid."
A smile spreads across my lips at what Dominic is insinuating. "A visible relationship between his sons and his new stepson forces him to choose between the brand and whatever he's planning." Father has always valued the company's image above everything. "He'd cut the mother loose before he'd let that story get out."
"So we stay in Mattaniah's space. We give him what his body is already desperate for, and we make it visible enough that Father can't look away."
The room falls quiet for a moment. Dominic's thumb traces a slow circle against my ankle and my body responds tothe rhythm despite the weight of the conversation, warmth spreading up my calf.
"And then what?" The question has been pressing since the kitchen, harder with every detail he's brought back tonight. "After we've used him. After it works. What happens to him?"
"What do you mean, what happens to him?" Dominic’s brows folds, genuine confusion filling his expression. As much as I love the Alpha, he can be quite dense that people are still in fact…people.
"I mean we'd be doing exactly what everyone else in his life does." I sit forward, pulling my ankle out of his grip so the contact stops clouding my thoughts. "You told me he cried when you praised him and asked what you wanted in return like it was a fucking transaction."
"Father will destroy him either way." The edge in Dominic's voice means the decision is made. That tone makes most people yield. It has never worked on me. "At least with us he gets something genuine while we figure out the rest."
"Something genuine that we're engineering for a purpose."
