Dominic doesn't flinch. "Something genuine that's already happening whether we engineer it or not." He shifts up the bed toward me, his hand bracing against the headboard beside my head. His scent thickens in the space between us, his pupils still wider than normal from whatever happened in Mattaniah's room. "You felt it in the kitchen. The moment you touched him, your scent changed. You wanted him before the word scheme ever entered the conversation."
He's not wrong. The memory of Mattaniah going soft against my chest, resistance dissolving at a single point of contact, hits me somewhere that strategy can't reach.
"We'll figure it out." Dominic's voice drops into the register that means the discussion is ending whether I agree or not. "Wekeep him safe, we draw him in, we deal with Father. And when it's done, we figure out what comes next."
“That's not a plan, Dom."
"It's the best I've got." His mouth hovers close enough that I can feel his breath against my lips, and underneath it there's still the faint sweetness of Mattaniah lingering on his tongue. "Are you in or not?"
Everything in me says push harder. Demand a real answer about the Omega sleeping three doors down whose trust we're planning to leverage.
"I'm in."
Dom closes the distance and his mouth is on mine, that sweetness on his tongue sending heat rolling down my spine.
The kiss isn't a transition out of the conversation. It's Dominic making it clear the talking was the obstacle and this is what he's been waiting for, his hand fisting in my hair, angling my head where he wants it, his other hand shoving my laptop off the nightstand. My body does what it always does with Dominic, yielding to his Alpha as I let myself melt beneath him.
"Tell me what you did to him." The words come out between kisses as he pushes me flat and settles his weight over me, his hips grinding mine into the mattress. "All of it."
His teeth close on the tendon of my neck and my hips jerk up against him. "Jealous?"
"Wildly. Tell me anyway."
His hands pull my shirt up and off, his mouth following the same path down my chest that I now realize he traced on Mattaniah's skin an hour ago, the same route, the same deliberate pace, his lips mapping territory they've already learned on someone else tonight.
"I called him firefly and he asked me why." His voice is low against my sternum, his breath warm on my skin as he works lower. "I told him he keeps trying to hide his light. His whole facechanged, Amos. Like nobody had ever told him he had anything worth seeing."
My eyes close at the image of Dominic kneeling on that cold bed and Mattaniah beneath him, those dark eyes going soft as someone finally saw past the performance.
Dominic's mouth reaches my stomach. His hands work my pants open, pull them down, and his fingers wrap around my cock with a grip that makes me groan and push up into his fist. "He submitted so beautifully." His voice has dropped into the register that undoes me, the one that makes my skin prickle and my thoughts dissolve. "No performance. Just genuine surrender, and his whole body shook with the relief of it."
His hand twists on the upstroke and my spine bows off the mattress, a sound leaving me that I don't try to contain. He watches my face while he strokes me, reading every response the way he probably read Mattaniah's, cataloguing what makes me gasp and what makes me arch and adjusting with the same focused precision.
"Once we have him where we want him, we could have him like this." He lowers his mouth to my hip bone, biting down just hard enough to leave a mark, his hand never stopping its rhythm. "Between us. That pretty mouth on you while I'm inside him. All that need he's been burying, and we'd be the ones who finally let him have it."
"Dom." My hand finds his hair and grips, pulling him up toward me because I need his mouth. He comes willingly, stripping off his own shirt in one motion and pressing against me, the hard length of him grinding against my cock with a friction that makes my vision blur.
"You've been thinking about that since the kitchen," he says against my throat, his hips rolling into mine.
"Since the foyer." The words come out on a groan as his hand slides between us and wraps around both of us together, the slickheat of his cock pressed against mine in his fist. "When his scent hit me, I wanted to put him on his knees and tell him he never had to be scared again."
"That's not tactical." He bites the hinge of my jaw and strokes us both together, his thumb dragging through the wetness gathering at my tip.
"No. It's not."
"Good." He kisses me hard enough that my lip stings. "Because you can't fake what we already feel, and that's what's going to make this work."
His hand tightens and his pace picks up and I stop thinking about the scheme and the Omega across the hall and the moral calculus of what we're planning. Dominic's weight pins me to the mattress, his hand relentless and his mouth on my neck sucking a bruise into the skin below my ear as my hips snap up into his grip chasing the friction.
"Think about him watching us." His voice is wrecked against my ear, his own breathing ragged as he fucks into his fist alongside me. "Those dark eyes watching you come apart for me. Think about what he'd sound like, what he'd smell like, and how wet he'd get just from seeing you like this."
My hands dig into his back hard enough to mark him as the image floods through me.
"He'd be so sweet for us, Amos." His forehead drops against mine, Dominic picking up his pace. "Think about what he sounds like when someone gives him permission to want."
My knot starts to swell, almost painfully without an Omega to lock into, a pain I enjoy as it reminds me exactly what I have with Dominic. My orgasm hits without warning, crashing through me in a wave that locks every muscle in my body and spills hot over Dominic's fist and onto my stomach. Dominic follows two strokes later, groaning against my mouth, his cock pulsingagainst mine in his grip as we come together in a slick mess that neither of us moves to clean up.
His forehead stays pressed to mine while we catch out breaths, his hand loosening as we both soften in his palm.
