What the fuck.
When did this legislation pass? When did the government decide that Alphas without Omegas were a regulatory problem requiring punitive intervention? And why is my mother delivering this information to three men in suits as if she is presenting a quarterly earnings report with me listed as the primary asset?
She is arranging a pack.
No. She is arranging a transaction. A business deal dressed in biological language. A contract where I am the commodity being transferred from one portfolio to another, my value measured not in talent or ambition or the fifteen years I have spent carving my identity into the ice, but in the regulatory compliance I provide to three Alpha strangers who need an Omega on their books to avoid a tax penalty.
An arranged packship. Can you even call it that?
My fists clench at my sides. The tendons in my forearms jump. The blisters on my right hand, freshly torn open during today's four-hour session, scream in protest as raw skin pulls tight over swollen tissue. My nails carve fresh crescents into palms that are already mapped with old ones.
I look at the three men.
Really look at them.
At the tailored suits and the polished shoes and the receding hairlines and the soft bellies and the predatory confidence of men who have spent their lives acquiring things and have just added an Omega to their shopping list.
"You want me to marry these old geezers?"
The horror in my voice is genuine, non-performative, and delivered at a volume that probably carries to Jeffrey in the foyer and possibly to the neighbors three acres east.
The one on the left huffs, his earlier composure fully shattered.
"You are lucky your little ugly scram can be associated with men like us." The words drip with a disdain so concentrated it is almost admirable in its purity. He has clearly been waiting for permission to express what his face has been communicating since I walked in.
The one on the right leans forward, his hands clasped between his knees.
"We are only in our late thirties." He says this as if three decades plus is a selling point rather than a red flag with a marriage license attached.
I huff, crossing my arms over my chest and tilting my head to a degree that communicates maximum skepticism with minimum movement.
"That is literally a ten-year age gap."
The one in the center chuckles.
It is not the boardroom chuckle from earlier. This one is darker. Slower. The sound of amusement curdling into intent. He rises from the settee, unfolding his height with the controlled deliberation of a man who has weaponized his physicality in every negotiation he has ever conducted.
He crosses the distance between us in four strides.
Up close, he is taller than I estimated from across the room. Six foot four, minimum. Broad enough to block the light from the window behind him, casting his features in shadow while mine remain illuminated. His cologne is aggressive at this range, a designer fragrance applied with such excess that it functions less as scent and more as chemical warfare. Beneath it, his Alpha pheromones pulse with a dominant frequency that presses against my sternum like a palm attempting to flatten me into compliance.
He is projecting.
Deliberately, viciously projecting his dominance aura at maximum intensity, flooding the space between us with thebiological equivalent of a floodlight aimed at a single target. The Alpha command designed to trigger submission in Omegas, to buckle knees and lower gazes and transform defiance into deference through neurochemical override.
My body registers the assault. My hands tremble. The fine muscles along my jaw quiver with the effort of keeping my chin raised against a gravitational force that exists only in pheromone chemistry. My hindbrain screams at me to look away, to fold, to present throat and bare the submissive line of my neck to the Alpha towering over me and accept that this is how the hierarchy works.
I do not look away.
I glare upward with so much defiance that it burns in my eye sockets. Green meeting dark. Five foot eight meeting six foot four. An Omega who smells like community center ice and shattered dreams meeting an Alpha who smells like synthetic cologne and the certainty that the world was built to accommodate him.
He smirks.
The expression slithers across his face like oil across water, coating his features in a satisfaction that makes my stomach turn. He has read my trembling. Read the effort it costs me to hold this posture. Read the war between my conscious will and my biology and found the gap between them entertaining rather than threatening.
He leans in.
Close enough that his breath ghosts across my forehead. Close enough that the chemical burn of his cologne invades my sinuses. Close enough that his whisper arrives with the intimacy of a confession and the violence of an assault.
