"Sorry, I don't mean to, I know it's not my—"
"Don't apologize." Something sharpens behind his glasses, a wicked smile forming on the Alpha’s lips. "You caught that in thirty seconds. It took me ninety minutes."
I try to curl in on myself, but any of the training I should be following falls to the wayside.He praised me.Clearing my throat, I bite back the excitement that comes with being right about something and brush off my accomplishment. "It's just pattern recognition. My, um, my actual concentration was forensic accounting." The words tumble out the way they always do when someone's attention makes me nervous. "The technicalterm is fraud detection. The fabrication isn't subtle if you know the markers."
He walks me through the rest and I forget to keep my guard up. The data pulls me in because I love this work, and Amos feeds that love with questions that treat my intelligence as worth engaging. He asks what I think and waits for the answer. He builds on my responses instead of dismissing them. My scent sweetens as my guard drops because my stupid body can't tell the difference between an Alpha who respects my brain and one who's using my brain as bait.
Amos' nostrils flare at the shift. He leans closer to point at a figure on screen, his breath grazing my ear. He doesn't need to be this close, and we both know it.
"This routing number here. What does that tell you?"
My head turns to answer, the movement baring my throat. I don't register the Omega response until Amos' fingers are already there, tracing the line of my neck from jaw to collarbone. The whimper that escapes me would be humiliating if I had any dignity left to protect.
His fingers settle against my pulse as he turns my chin toward him, his thumb stroking my cheekbone before he presses his mouth to mine.
The kiss is soft, barely there, my body answering before my brain gets a vote. My lips part and my hand finds the front of his jacket because the warmth of him fills something hollow in my chest that I've been pretending doesn't exist. He tastes like coffee and pine and something underneath that makes me want to crawl into his lap and never leave.
He pulls back just enough to break the contact, his thumb still moving against my skin. "You don't have to fight so hard, Niah. Not with us."
Thatushits me like ice water. It means this isn't just Amos. It's both of them, both of my stepbrothers, and I just kissedone twelve hours after the other made me come apart in the dark. I push away from him and to my feet, immediately putting distance between us. "I need to get back, thank you for the, um, the coffee and the spreadsheets."
Amos catches my wrist as I turn. His thumb finds my pulse and presses against the hammering there for two seconds before he lets go. "The offer stands, Niah. Anytime you need somewhere quieter."
I make it two steps out into the hallway before the woman this morning leads me to the executive floor. “You’ll be over here, Mattaniah. Should Mr. Hale need you again, he’ll call you on your desk phone.” She points to the item in the corner. “Mr. Hale had me place some documents on your desk to sort but if you need anything, please let me know. I’m sitting a few cubicles over.”
She disappears and I plop into my seat, ignoring the bland work I’ve been given just so Mr. Hale can keep an eye on me. That’s all this is. I press my hands flat on the desk until the shaking stops.
"You okay?" The woman from the break room perches against the neighboring partition with a manila folder giving her an excuse to linger. Now that she’s so close, I can pick up her muted scent, the Beta faintly smelling like a floral shop.
"I'm fine, just settling in."
She checks the hallway and drops her voice. "You were with Amos Hale. I saw you leave the break room together."
"He was showing me some company reports."
"I'm sure he was." There's no malice in it, but the weight behind the words tightens my skin. "Look, this is none of my business. You seem decent and I know they’re family but someone should probably tell you."
My hands go still on the desk.
"Dominic Hale will ruin your life and won't lose a minute of sleep over it. He doesn't get close to people, he acquires them. Anyone who's thought otherwise has walked away with their career in pieces." She watches my face as that lands, then continues. "But Amos is the one you really need to watch, because Dominic at least looks dangerous, so you can see him coming. Amos will make you feel like you're the most interesting person in the building, and by the time you figure out what's happening, you're too deep to climb out. Those Alphas arebadnews."
She taps her folder against the partition and walks away. She's probably right about all of them, and Mom would definitely agree. But two of those Alphas touched me this week without once making me feel like existing was an inconvenience, and I don't know what to do with that.
Dominic
Theafternoondepartmentmeetingruns from two to three thirty, and I spend most of it watching my father's hand on Mattaniah's shoulder instead of the revenue projections on the screen.
It's a calculated touch. Father doesn't do anything without calculation, a trait I inherited and resent in equal measure. His palm rests against the back of Mattaniah's neck while the Omegastands beside his chair taking notes, his thumb pressing against the top knob of the spine.
To anyone else in the conference room it looks like a CEO keeping his assistant close or at the very least providing some comfort to his new stepson. To me it looks like a man testing how much weight a shelf can bear before it buckles, measuring how much pressure it takes to make the posture curve inward, how long he can hold the contact before the scent shifts.
I recognize the technique because I've used versions of it myself. I've never had the stomach for the patience Father brings to this kind of work, though. He treats it like a hobby he can tinker with over weeks until the subject can't remember what it felt like to have boundaries.
Mattaniah stands perfectly still beneath the weight of Father's hand with his face arranged in blank compliance that would fool anyone who wasn't looking for the cracks. His nostrils flare with each breath and his pen grip tightens every time Father's thumb shifts. Fear is threading through his muted scent, pushing against whatever chemical wall he's put up today.
Then Father reaches across Mattaniah to grab a report from the table, and the Omega flinches. It's subtle, a micro-movement that no one else seems to catch, but it draws my gaze to his hands and what I see there makes my pen creak in my fist.
His knuckles are red. Pink lines are striped across the backs of both hands, the kind that come from repeated strikes to the same spot, and I know exactly what made those marks because I wore the same ones when I was twelve years old.
