Chapter 7 Sai #2
She pulls the backdrop without comment, though that look stays on her face for the rest of the setup. I’m not supposed to show anyone the cracks in my facade and yet… I can’t help it.
My muscles tense through the rest of the shoot, sweat gathering at my hairline even though the studio temperature has not changed.
Between setup, my breathing kicks up just a little, panic fraying the edges of my vision.
At one point, the hair stylist glances up with her brows furrowed in confusion.
Clearing my throat, I refocus on my model, a gorgeous Omega who still can’t hold a candle to Mavi.
“Chin up,” I tell her, my voice coming out way harsher than I meant it to. “Higher. There.”
She adjusts without reacting, though her scent sours just a fraction. I catch Priya watching me from beside the monitor but shrug that off too. I’m fine. This is fine. Everything is fine.
A grunt escapes my throat as I review the frame on the monitor.
The composition is right. Everything sits exactly where I placed it.
Yet my brain still slides sideways to a different image.
A softer jaw. A glossed mouth. A body that moves through rooms like it dares anyone to look away.
My Doll is two blocks south right now, standing in front of someone else’s camera.
He’s letting someone else frame him. It should be me.
Fuck.
My fingers tighten on the camera body until the grip digs into my palm.
“Let’s push through,” Priya says when the break question comes.
I just manage to nod, letting my body drag me around on autopilot. Thinking requires too much effort and the only thing I truly want to do is see my doll, my Mavi, maybe even rewatch one of those videos I’ve trained myself to believe is only for me.
Wrap happens at four-thirty. Priya transfers the shots and during review one frame catches my eye.
The lighting on the Omega’s left cheekbone sits a fraction too warm.
A highlight blows out where it should have held detail.
It’s small and most people would never notice, just like yesterday’s picture but I notice.
Priya notices. And unlike yesterday, there’s no doubt in either of our minds that the problem is me, not the camera.
Something fractures quietly inside the part of me that has always trusted my hands. Still, Priya doesn’t point it out but I’m sure this will get back to the family at some point.
The team filters out, Priya pausing at the door and looks back at me with that same careful expression. “You okay, Sai?”
“Fine. Good work today.”
She hums a response, tapping the door frame twice before slipping outside. There’s no way she believed that but it’s the only answer I have to give. Saying anything other than ‘fine’ as a Hollis Alpha means that Hollis Alphas break and I cannot let that happen.
Carefully, I pack up my bag, ensuring everything is in the right place. Some semblance of peace is restored, though that fractures the moment my phone lights up with Alistair’s office number. It only takes me a moment to realize it’s not my cousin calling and it’s his assistant.
I answer because not answering Alistair’s office has consequences.
“Sai, hi. Do you have a moment?”
“Of course.”
“We have noticed some inconsistency in your availability lately. The gallery commitments from the spring are still outstanding and the Moreau campaign needs a photographer confirmed by end of week.”
My hand grips the edge of the desk so hard my knuckles blanch.
The Moreau campaign. Not just the arrangement.
Not just the boy Lyric volunteered me for.
A campaign. The family has already woven the Moreau name into my professional obligations so that refusing the mating means refusing the work.
It means confirming that the asset is underperforming.
“I understand.”
“The family has concerns about your focus.” Her voice is level, devoid of all emotion. “Alistair wanted me to convey that personally.”
“Convey to Alistair that my focus is fine.”
“I will pass that along. End of week for the campaign confirmation, Sai.”
I want to throw the phone again and hear it crack against another wall. I want to sweep the desk clean and watch everything hit the floor. Then I want to call the number back and tell Alistair’s assistant exactly where the family can put their concerns about my focus.
Instead I sit very still. I breathe through my nose. I grip the edge of the desk until my knuckles ache. I think about the one thing that has consistently, reliably, without fail, made the noise stop.
My Doll. Two blocks south. He’s probably walking out of a building right now wearing whatever he wore to the shoot. Makeup done. Hair styled. Smelling like honey and citrus and performance and power.
The shaking is even worse by the time I reach the car.
My hands fumble the keys twice before the lock clicks.
I drop into the driver’s seat and sit there gripping the steering wheel with the engine still off.
The smart thing would be to go home, clean up the ceramic and wipe the scuff off the wall and eat something and be the asset the family requires.
But I just… I need my Doll. It’s the whole reason I chose this place and I can’t leave without getting what I came for. My hands are already reaching for the camera bag in the backseat.
I pull out of the garage and drive two blocks south, parking just across the street and raise the camera to focus on the door. My breathing finally slows for the first time since this morning, the anticipation of seeing the one man I desire shutting everything else out.
“Come on, Doll,” I whisper behind the lens. “Come out and make it quiet. You are the only thing that makes it quiet.”
The door opens.
“There you are.”
He walks out and every single thing that has been screaming in my head since six o’clock this morning goes silent.
My cock twitches in my pants at the glorious sight of him, the Omega covered in tight black pants sitting so low on his hips the fabric is a dare.
A cropped shirt ends just above his navel, a strip of pale stomach glowing in the late sun.
I want to drag my tongue across it slowly from one hip bone to the other. I want to taste the salt on his skin while he watches me do it. His makeup makes him even more gorgeous, the kind of work that takes a beautiful man and makes him catastrophic.
My shutter clicks, my hands perfectly, insultingly steady.
“Look at you, Doll.” My voice is barely a breath behind the camera. “God, look at what you do to me.”
He pauses at his car and shifts the bag to dig for his keys.
The movement pulls the crop top higher, exposing the full line of his waist. Just above the waistband where the fabric clings tight, I can see the thin line of a thong cutting across his hipbone.
A delicate thread against skin that I want to trace with my tongue.
Then with my teeth. Then with my mouth. I want to press into the crease where his thigh meets his hip and breathe him in until honey is the only thing I can taste.
“Fuck, Doll.” My cock thickens against my thigh so fast my vision swims. “What are you wearing under there? Is that for me? Tell me that is for me.”
The shutter keeps clicking. My hands will not stop even though the rest of me is falling apart.
He turns to unlock the car, the movement giving me his profile and then his back.
The thin line of the thong shows clearly between his hips and disappears below the waistband.
The way he moves is so fluid and unconscious that unlocking a car door looks like it was designed specifically to destroy me.
“You don’t even know, do you?” I talk to the image through my lens, my voice cracking on every word. “You don’t know what you look like right now. What I would do to get my mouth on you. What I would let you do to me, Doll. Anything. Anything you wanted.”
The admission makes my cock jerk hard in my pants because it is true. It is the truest thing I have said all day. Truer than “I am fine” and “my focus is fine” and “Friday works” and every other performance I have delivered.
What I would let him do to me. Not what I would do to him. What I would let him do. The wanting in that sentence points in a direction that Hollis Alphas are not supposed to want but my body does not care. My cock is so hard it hurts.
He bends to toss his bag into the backseat, his pants stretching tight across his ass. The crop top rides higher, showing off the full curve of his lower back, the two dimples at the base of his spine, and the thong disappearing between the perfect swell of his cheeks.
The fantasy builds perfectly of Mavi bent exactly like this over the edge of his bed while I kneel behind him.
I spread him open with both hands. I press my mouth against him and taste the slick I have watched glisten on his thighs through the camera.
I lick into him slow and thorough while he moans and rocks back against my face.
“That is it, Doll,” I breathe, my hips rocking forward against nothing. The pressure in my cock builds past the point of control. “Tell me I am good. Tell me I am doing it right. Tell me—”
A low groan pulls from my lips as I jerk forward, one hand falling to the steering wheel. I grip it tight enough that the leather creaks beneath my palm, heat settling low in my stomach.
“Mavi,” I whisper just as an orgasm fully hits me.
My hips roll forward and I come hard in my pants.
Thick ropes of cum pulse out of me in heavy waves, soaking through my boxers, coating my balls, and leaking down the inside of my thigh.
My knot swells painfully against the wet fabric as I drop my free hand to my lap and grip it through the ruined material.
I squeeze hard because the pressure is the only thing keeping me from making a sound loud enough to carry across the street.
“Oh fuck.” My forehead drops to the steering wheel. My hand is still squeezing my knot through the soaked fabric while the aftershocks roll through me, my breath coming in ragged bursts against the leather. “Fuck. Doll. Fuck.”
The camera has captured three more frames from where I knocked it sideways on the passenger seat. Shame crashes in a second later, the brief peace Mavi brought shattered by the newest realization.
A Hollis Alpha is control. Discipline. The perfectly hung frame on the perfectly measured wall.
I have never wanted to be a Hollis Alpha less than I do right now.
I sit in the wreckage of what my Doll has made of me and the terrifying part is not the shame.
The terrifying part is that underneath it, I do not want to stop.
I want to be worse. I want to knock on his door.
I want to kneel on his floor. I want to show him everything and hear him say good boy and mean it.