His Downfall (Omegas After Dark: Omega Auction #5)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

Jack

Ihated being a lawyer.

No, that wasn’t really true. I loved standing up for truth and justice.

I loved helping people who found themselves in trouble and needed someone with a savvy head for the law to guide them out of it and into a better life.

I lived for that moment when one of my clients stepped out of the legal woods they’d been lost in and breathed a sigh of relief.

Except that wasn’t generally the kind of law my family’s firm practiced. Salisbury and Salisbury—the second Salisbury being my uncle Roger, definitely not me—was a corporate law firm. “That’s where the money and influence is,” Dad always said.

He should know. John Salisbury, Sr. was not only the senior partner of the firm, he was a state senator who had already announced he’d be running for governor in the fall.

Dad was powerful and sometimes a little scary.

He came from one of the most impressive, high-society families in the country.

So did Mom. So did I, come to think of it.

But Dad embodied the old ruling class and their archaic ideas about caste and alpha superiority that most people liked to think had died out a generation or two before.

Spoiler alert, it hadn’t. No matter how many equality laws had been passed and social changes had happened.

I sighed and sat back as I finished my first draft of the brief for the pro bono case I had somehow convinced Dad to let me take.

Dad never would have let me represent the small business who had been falsely accused of misrepresenting their profits to shareholders, but its CEO was a friend of one of Dad’s most important campaign donors, and he’d agreed to take the case because he needed those donations.

I was willing to overlook the high-level back-scratching and the blatant tit-for-tat because I loved fighting for the little guy. What was the point of all the power and prestige I’d been born into if I couldn’t use it to help people now and then?

As I read over everything I’d just written, I caught myself humming along to one of my favorite show tunes that sounded from my computer’s speaker.

I had a whole playlist of musical theater that I’d made to keep myself sane through the tedious, corporate days.

I loved musical theater, and I’d been told I had an amazing voice.

Okay, that was being a little too modest. I had an outstanding baritone voice.

And I’d actually been allowed to use it way back in college, when I’d starred in a production of Annie as Daddy Warbucks.

But when I’d gushed to Mom and Dad about how much I’d loved the whole experience and how I wanted to change my major from Law to Theater?

Well, you would have thought I’d told them I planned to shave my head and hike naked in the mountains with a group of monks.

It wasn’t funny, but I laughed anyhow as I stared at my computer screen, trying to focus. The image of me wandering through the mountains as a monk was…actually, it was amazing and liberating. I would have been naked, but I would have been free.

A knock on the doorframe of my open office door shook me out of my thoughts.

“Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Salisbury,” my assistant, Imogen, a competent, middle-aged beta, said, taking a step into the office.

“Hey, Imogen,” I said informally, smiling in the way my dad hated. I wasn’t supposed to be friendly with our employees, but I considered Imogen a friend. One of the few I had.

“Morning, Jack” Imogen replied in a cozy manner that would have my dad fuming. “I have the fourth quarter profits for Quantum Adventures,” she said, walking forward to place the file she carried on the desk. “And I’ll have statements from the auditors that doublechecked everything by Monday.”

“You don’t have to rush,” I told her. “I’m probably going to be out on Monday anyhow. No need to put in late nights over the weekend for me.”

“Aaw, you’re a sweetie,” Imogen said. “And vastly underappreciated in this place.”

My face flushed hot, but not because of anything Imogen had said or done. The burst of heat was because I still hadn’t come to grips with what I was about to do this weekend.

“I don’t want to throw a wet blanket on anything,” Imogen went on, “but Mr. Salisbury, Sr. wants you finished with this case as soon as possible so you can focus your efforts on other things while he’s campaigning.”

We shared a silent eye-roll.

“Right,” I said, falling into seriousness. “Thank you, Imogen.”

“Hang in there,” Imogen said with a wink, then headed out.

I blew out a heavy breath and sank back in my chair.

It wasn’t really a surprise to me that Dad wanted me working on his campaign more than helping clients.

I was pretty sure he had spies all through the office who reported everything I did to him so he could berate me for “failing to focus”, as he liked to call it, later.

I’d spent my entire life having everything I did reported back to my dad and being grilled about it all when Dad had the time.

I was the heir apparent, the only child. I was John Clarence Salisbury, Jr.

And no one ever let me forget it.

The show tune swelling from my desktop speakers reached its crescendo, and since it was a song of angst and freedom from the hit musical that was taking the cultural world by storm just then, I was tempted to belt out the chorus along with the singer.

I might have even closed my eyes, thrown my arms wide, and imagined myself up on stage at the Barrington Performing Arts Center, an audience before me and all the joy and freedom I could handle right there within my grasp.

But a second later, my dad stepped into my office. Without knocking or introducing himself.

“Grab your coat,” he said without so much as a “hello” or “how’s work?”. “We’ll be late if we don’t leave right away. And turn that garbage off. I’ve told you to stop listening to it.”

All of the potential elation of the music I’d tried to wrap myself in flattened.

“Sure, Dad,” I said, grabbing my mouse and clicking off the music program, then shutting everything down that I’d been working on.

“If your mother asks, you know you’re to tell her we’re going to a conference this weekend,” Dad went on. He apparently thought I was moving too slowly, as he strode to the old-fashioned coat stand in the corner of my office to grab my coat for me.

“Yeah, I know,” I mumbled, my face heating all over again.

My computer played a chord to let me know it was shutting down, and I stood up, feeling gross and a little sick to my stomach. Not just because we were lying to Mom, but because of why and where Dad and I were actually going.

We were heading out to Kincade Slopes to participate in their third omega auction event.

It was basically a glorified munch where Dom alphas were paired up with subby omegas for kinky sex surrounding some sort of trafficking fantasy.

Dad had been a member of the Dark Fantasies Club since it started, and he’d forced me to join last year as well.

Okay, so he didn’t force me force me. I wasn’t a complete eunuch.

I was an alpha. Enjoying sex and craving it, at least on some level, was part of the biological package.

But just like with everything else in my life, when I’d asked for one thing—to be trained as an Emergency Support Alpha so I could volunteer with Bangers & Mash—I’d been handed something else, the Dark Fantasies Club.

“I hate that music you listen to,” Dad grumbled as the two of us left the office and headed down to the parking garage.

“I’m pretty sure most fathers hate the music their sons listen to,” I said with a wry smirk.

We stepped into the elevator, Dad mashed the button to take us down, and then he turned a sharp glare on me.

“It’s not a joke,” he said. “Musical theater is pedestrian. It’s unbecoming of an alpha, especially one of your pedigree. We’ve talked about this before.”

“Yes, Father,” I said. I was being subtly defiant by saying that, at least in my mind.

Dad seemed to like my acquiescence. He nodded once and said, “We won’t talk about this again.”

Which meant that if he ever heard me listening to musical theater again, there would be consequences. As if I were a disobedient teenager instead of a grown man fast approaching his thirtieth birthday.

We reached the parking garage, and unsurprisingly, the valet already had Dad’s luxury sedan idling just a few steps away from the elevator. I nodded and smiled at the valet—Dad did not—and slipped into the passenger seat while dad walked around to get in and drive.

Once we were out on the twilit streets of Barrington, heading for the highway that would take us out to Blue Knob Mountain, Dad picked up the conversation where he’d left off.

“If you want to listen to music, classical is acceptable,” he said. “I have season tickets for a prime box at the Barrington Philharmonic. Right now, I give those seats to supporters, but it would probably reflect well on the family if you wanted to use them several times a month.”

“Alright,” I said with a stiff nod. I didn’t love classical music the way I did musical theater, but they were friendly cousins as far as musical genres were concerned.

“I’ll come up with a list of suitable omegas you can ask to attend the concerts with you,” Dad said as he took the turn onto the highway.

“Okay,” I sighed.

Dad must have heard my lack of enthusiasm. He glanced quickly to me with a frown. “You’re nearly thirty, Junior, and you’re an alpha.”

I winced hard at the name he insisted on calling me. I would have reminded him that I preferred to be called Jack, but we’d been down that road twelve dozen times, and I was tired of the argument. Dad only saw me as a “Junior”, an extension of himself, anyhow.

“Okay,” I repeated, because there wasn’t really anything else to say.