“Watching you work the floor tonight—watching you watch them,” he pants against my skin. “Do you know what I thought?”
I draw in a ragged breath. “What?” I manage, my voice a whisper lost between thrusts.
Lorenzo’s eyes darken with desire. “That this—us—this pack we’re building… It’s everything. That you were made for this. For building something bigger than the two of us.” Lorenzo thrusts up harder, forcing a moan from deep in my chest that echoes against the walls. “That your heart is so goddamn big that the two of us were never going to be enough to fill it.”
Heat spreads behind my eyes while fire consumes my body. Lorenzo maintains his rhythm despite his ragged breathing,each deep thrust pressing against something inside me that blurs the edges of my vision into white light.
“I love you.” These words escape between my gasps and sobs, punctuated by the wet sounds of our bodies joining. “I love you, I love you—“
Lorenzo’s hand slides around the back of my neck and pulls my forehead against his. “I know, baby. I love you too.” His hips snap up once, then again. “Come for me.”
My entire being fractures. My untouched cock pulses between our bodies, painting his stomach and chest with hot streaks while I clench around him so tightly his careful control finally breaks. Lorenzo buries his face against my throat as he comes with a groan that travels through every place our skin connects, his hips pressed flush against mine.
Lorenzo holds me upright in his lap as aftershocks continue to ripple through us both. Tears mix with sweat on my cheeks as I press my face into his shoulder. It’s times like these I wish Lorenzo was an Alpha and could probably claim me but that all dissolves every time I realize the silent bond Betas and Omegas can share is enough.
“We do this,” Lorenzo murmurs against my hair, his voice rough and stripped bare. “We do this together. All four of us.”
14
Wilson
Pine-scented cleaner mingles with bourbon's lingering sweetness in the office air. Financial documents spread across Lorenzo's desk reveal the same grim numbers I've been staring at for forty minutes while promising myself I'll finally walk out onto the main floor.
The club is quiet, Lorenzo having taken Oliver to meet with a contractor about those emergency lights Voss flagged in his bogus code violation. Now only two people remain in the building—me, hiding in here, and Nicholas waiting at the bar.
He arrived twenty minutes ago, right on schedule. We were closing in on a time limit and desperately needed Nicholas’ investment. Stupidly, I volunteered myself. Some misplaced bravado or a way to pretend I wasn’t falling apart every time I was in Nicholas’ presence, that him being here didn’t affect me.
Either way, I’m now inches away from my ex’s brother, gathering up the courage to speak to him about money.
The folder in front of me contains everything needed, lease terms, Voss correspondence, operating costs, and survival projections for both immediate quarter and long-term defense. Lorenzo assembled it, double checking each number and making sure each argument was bulletproof. My only job is carrying it to the bar to present to a man whose amber scent makes my hands tremble and whose deep voice reopens fault lines I've spent years trying to seal shut.
My phone lights up on the desk with his message:I'm here. No rush.
I hear two words that shouldn’t make my throat close: “No rush.” As if he hasn’t been waiting five years. As if patience is something he has in infinite supply and he’s perfectly happy to sit alone at a bar in an empty club while I’m still afraid of what his presence does to my emotions.
I stand, and the chair scrapes against the floor. I tuck the folder under my arm and count the twelve steps to the main floor, anything to give my panicking brain something else to do.
I see Nicholas at the bar, a glass of water before him and his jacket draped over the stool beside him. His white shirt sleeves are rolled to his elbows; the tattoos on his left forearm dark against his skin.
He turns the moment my footsteps hit the main floor. His eyes soften, his mouth curves before he can stop it, and his whole body leans just a bit toward me. After five years, he still reorients to me the second I enter a room. “Hey, Will.”
“Nicholas.” I set the folder on the bar between us and pull out the stool two seats away. The distance is a deliberate way to keep me from falling apart but I’m already fraying at the edges.
“How are you?”
I brush that off, knowing full well Lorenzo gave Nicholas a brief understanding of why this meeting was called. “I’m fine. Can we talk about the investment?”
His mouth twitches. A full smile never forms, but its ghost sits at the corners of his lips. He lifts his water and takes a sip, giving me the silence I need. I open the folder and spread the documents across the bar’s surface.
“Vice & Virtue is facing a hostile lease restructure from Marcus Voss, the boardwalk owner,” I say, the words rehearsed in the bathroom mirror this morning. Still, every word I push out feels like ash in my mouth.I’m using him.“He’s demanding a thirty-two percent increase in base rent, plus extra fees designed to make our operating margin unsustainable. He’s even fabricated code violations to apply supplementary pressure.”
Nicholas moves his eyes across the documents. His expression shifts from the soft warmth he wore when he walked in to something sharper. He picks up the lease terms and reads through them at a speed that tells me he's handled papers like these before. “Voss,” Nicholas mutters before looking up. “I know Marcus.”
“I figured with both of you in the same type of business.” Some part of me wants to clarify that Nicholas isn’t an Alpha who would try to steal things from under a Beta/Omega pair but I don’t get that far.
“How much do you need?” he asks.
“To survive the quarter, seventy-five thousand. To fight long-term with legal coverage and enough operating cushion, closer to two hundred.” All rehearsed, every last word and I’m still fighting the urge to fall to my knees and ask for forgiveness by tarnishing whatever connection we restarted.
