"Sit down, Mattaniah."
"No." The word echoes down the stairwell louder than I intend and my mother's eyes widen a fraction. My body is shaking but I stay on my feet, gripping the banister hard enough that my knuckles go white.
"Sit. Down." She doesn't have an Alpha voice but the command in her tone hits the trained nerve anyway. My knees buckle and I catch myself on the railing before they give out completely.
"End it with the sons." She stands over me, her robe gathered around her. "Today. End it, go back to your blockers, and let Richard do what I brought you here for. The allowance yourstepbrothers offered me is insulting. What Richard's estate is worth makes five thousand a month look like pocket change."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I tell Richard about the honey trap operations, about Marcus, about every mark I've ever run. I burn it all, including you." Her eyes are flat. "Those Alphas know exactly who you are,all three of themand I can guarantee the two you’re sweet on are using you. You’re just too desperate to see it.”
A cramp rolls through my abdomen so hard I double over on the step. The stress spike punches through my blocker and my scent floods the stairwell with sour fear that makes my mother step back.
"Get that under control," she says. "Richard's staff can smell you from the kitchen."
She walks down the stairs without looking back. Her heels click against the marble and the sound follows me as I press my forehead against the banister and try to breathe through the cramp and the nausea and the feeling that the ground beneath my entire life just opened up and swallowed everything I thought I understood about my own history.
"She's lying," I mutter into the wood. "She has to be lying."
But the pieces fit. Every piece fits because my mother doesn't lie about strategy. She lies about love and intention and how much she cares about me, but when it comes to the mechanics of an operation she is brutally honest. The blockers since nineteen. The four years locked in that apartment. Every warning about staying compliant and keeping my head down. None of it was about making me strong. It was about keeping me available.
I was the operation. I've always been the operation.
The spike passes in five minutes but it leaves me wrung out on the stairs with my vision blurry and my slick panties doing their job beneath my work pants. I push myself up and walk to thebathroom and splash cold water on my face and stare at the red mark on my cheek where my mother's hand landed.
"Just get through the day," I tell my reflection. "Get through the day and figure it out tonight."
The day is impossible. I sit at my desk on the executive floor and type correspondence with shaking hands while Richard's voice floats from his office and my mother's words play on a loop in the register she trained into me at sixteen. Submission is weakness. Needing is how you get destroyed. An Omega who gives away control gives away everything.
Except she wasn't trying to make me strong. She was keeping me compliant, blank and blocker-fogged and available for the highest bidder.
Tamsin asks me if I'm okay at ten and I say yes. She asks again at eleven with enough concern that I snap at her to leave it alone, and the hurt on her face makes me want to apologize but I can't open my mouth without the whole thing spilling out.
My phone buzzes with a text from Amos at noon. Just a simple "lunch?" that I stare at for two full minutes while my thumb hovers over the keyboard and my chest aches with how badly I want to type yes.
I type "can't today, busy" and put my phone face down on my desk.
The response comes immediately. "Everything okay?"
I don't answer. If I answer I'll crack, and if I crack I'll end up on the twelfth floor with my face in his chest and his scent in my lungs and the armor my mother spent twenty minutes rebuilding will come apart.
Dominic texts at one. "Firefly. Amos says you're off today."
I turn my phone off.
Another spike hits at three, sharp enough that I have to grip my desk through it while Tamsin watches from behind the partition. I wave her off and breathe through it, the slick pantiescatching what my body produces. Refusing to do anything about it, I sit in my own warmth and think about my mother's words when she said"you were always meant to be his."
By five o'clock I've made my decision. Even if my mother is lying about the grooming, which the evidence suggests she isn't, the exposure threat is real. Richard would throw us both out if he knew everything, or worse, and I'd be on the street with no job and no money and two Alphas who might not want me once they learn what I was trained to be.
And if Richard is truly making arrangements, if his patience is ending the way my mother says it is, then every day I spend with Dominic and Amos is a day I'm not preparing for what's coming.
The safe play is to end it. Cut the connection before it costs me everything. Lock the armor back into place, increase the blockers, and return to the compliance my mother built me for. It worked for four years after Marcus. It can work again. Except... I’m not sure that’s what I want, the indecision undercutting the one I just made.
Mattaniah
Irehearsethespeechfour times in the bathroom mirror before I go. Keep the tone dead. Don't let emotion leak into the delivery. Present the decision as already made. If they push back, repeat the conclusion without offering new information. If they get tender, leave the room because tenderness will break your resolve faster than anger.
My reflection almost buys it, but the cracks around my eyes give me away.
