Chapter 16
Vincent
Sleep didn’t come any easier an hour later. If anything, I was just as awake as I’d been when I stood at the stove, hoping warm milk might coax my thoughts into quiet.
It usually helped, just enough to blur the edges, to let me drift into something that resembled rest.
But tonight, even the dozes were shallow.
Brief pockets of silence between waves of thought.
My mind wandered where it shouldn’t. To my brother. To the other siblings I never got to meet. It wondered to Charles. And to the phone call.
That stayed loudest. The weight of it pressed against everything else.
Who would want him back at Lockswell House so badly? And why now?
I didn’t have answers. Just questions that curled around my ribs and refused to let go.
I didn’t know who the clients were. Just that they came, and the Omega served as he was trained and ordered to do as.
Maybe he was popular; it wouldn’t surprise me.
The way he shifted so easily—reading me, adapting without effort—it spoke of practice. Of survival.
I sighed and rolled over again, facing the window. The moonlight spilled across the floor, soft and indifferent.
And I lay there, wondering what it meant to be wanted by someone who was only after one thing, and one thing only.
Was that the way for all Omegas in Lockswell?
I shook that last thought away. I knew the answer and refused to let it fester.
It was already dangerous with how easily Charles was slipping beneath my defenses.
Not with grand gestures but just small things. Fleeting moments when his real self surfaced without him noticing.
A glance. A shift in tone. The way he held silence like it was armor.
Anyone else might’ve missed it. But I didn’t.
I turned over again, restless, and caught the faint sound of feet brushing against the carpet.
Soft. Intentional. He wanted me to hear him.
It was the first time I’d heard him move since bringing him home.
I sat up slowly, letting the quiet stretch between us. And waited.
When his feet didn’t move, or at least not that I could hear, I called his name. “Charles.”
Almost a full second went by before my bedroom door slowly opened on soundless hinges.
His face was shadowed by the dim light from the hallway, but even then his eyes weren’t on me.
“What do you need?” I kept my voice gentle.
Charles shifted, his weight moving from one foot to the other like he couldn’t quite settle.
