Chapter 6
Kieran
Iwake up with my face against his chest and his arm around my waist. For a few seconds I don't remember any of it.
Just warmth. Skin on skin. His scent fills my head, thick and expensive, the kind of smell that settles in your bones.
My body is loose, heavy, every muscle slack and satisfied in a way nothing else has ever managed.
I’m half-hard against his thigh, pressing in before I’m even awake, nose tucked against his collarbone.
I breathe him in. He smells even stronger now, after a night of sweat and sex, his scent tangled with mine until I can’t tell them apart.
Something in my chest goes soft and stupid.
Then I remember.
Everything. In order. The floor and the railing and saying please with his hand on my cock.
The private room and riding him and losing the rhythm when my heat crested.
Face down on the mattress, sobbing while he knotted me.
The vibrator and the ring and him asking questions while I shook apart and the way he turned it down every time I mouthed off and turned it up when I answered and the confession — oh, fuck, the confession, I've been thinking about you for three months and I couldn't stop and I hate it, and I said that, I actually said that out loud while crying with a cock ring on and a vibrator in my ass, that happened, that's a thing I did with my mouth in front of another human being.
I go very still against his chest.
Okay. Take stock. My heat’s basically done.
What’s left is a dull ache, more soreness than need, like embers after a fire.
My head is clear now. That’s a relief, and a disaster.
No excuses left for last night. No buffer between me and the mess I made.
I came to Knot Club with a plan—revenge on a man who didn’t even know I existed.
I stopped my suppressants, forced a heat, walked in, picked out one alpha.
Ninety minutes later, I was sobbing on his knot and telling him I’d been obsessed for months.
The plan didn’t fail. It was never real.
I just wanted Everett Callahan, and I couldn’t admit it, so I made up a story to cover for wanting to get fucked.
I am the worst lawyer alive.
My body doesn’t care about any of that. Last night was the best thing that’s ever happened to it.
I’m warm, sated, pressed up against this alpha like I belong here.
Every breath is full of him, and every breath makes me want to stay.
I can feel where he was inside me—a sore, used ache that should feel like a mistake but just makes me want more.
My hips are bruised from his hands. My neck is raw from his stubble.
All of it feels good. All of it feels like his.
My heat is over and I still want him. That’s not biology. That’s just me.
Just Kieran. Wanting this man. Without a single excuse to hide behind.
I need to leave. I need to get up, get dressed, get my mask secured, and walk out of this room and this club and never come back.
I need to do that now, before he wakes up, before there's a conversation that I am in no way equipped to have, before the vulnerability of this morning becomes something I can't take back.
I can still salvage this. He doesn't know my name.
He doesn't know where I work. He knows I'm a lawyer but there are thousands of lawyers in this city.
I can disappear and he'll never find me and last night will become a story he tells at the club about the weird omega with the agenda, and I'll go back to my life and pretend none of this happened.
I start to pull away from him and his arm tightens around my waist.
"You're awake," he says, and his voice is rough with sleep and so close to my ear that I feel it in my spine. His thumb moves against my hip, a small, lazy stroke across the bruise he left there, and my whole body lights up with a want that has absolutely nothing to do with heat.
"Yeah." My voice comes out scratchy. Wrecked. I barely recognize it. "I should go."
"Should you." He doesn't phrase it as a question.
His hand stays on my hip, not gripping, not holding me in place, just warm and there, and I could leave.
He's not stopping me. But his palm on my skin is making it very hard to want to move, and the truth is I don't want his hand to stop touching me.
"Masks are supposed to stay on until the omega leaves," I say, because rules feel safe right now, rules are something I understand, and if I can turn this into a procedural conversation instead of an emotional one I might survive it. "So I should leave."
"Okay." He doesn't move. "But that's not why you want to go."
I close my eyes. He’s right. He was right last night, too—when I was performing, when I was real, when I was lying, when I stopped.
He’s right now and I hate it. I hate how easily he reads me.
I hate that he took me apart with his hands, his voice, his patience, and I gave him the truth like he deserved it.
"You said you'd been thinking about me for three months," he says, and his voice is quiet and unhurried and his thumb is still moving on my hip. "Did you mean that, or was that heat talking?"
There it is. The question I can't dodge and can't answer honestly without handing him something that'll make me want to die of exposure.
"The heat doesn't make you say things that aren't true," I say, and it comes out small and reluctant and nothing like the sharp confident omega who walked onto that floor last night.
"So you came here looking for me specifically."
"Yes."
"Why?"
I laugh, and it sounds awful, bitter and thin. "You really want to know?"
"I've wanted to know since you looked at me from the gallery railing and your scent hit me like I'd been waiting for it my whole life. Yeah. I want to know."
My chest aches at that. I press my face into the pillow. I can’t look at him, can’t look at anything. The words come out muffled and messy and too honest.
"I saw you. Months ago, outside of here.
In a professional context. I don't — I'm not going to tell you the details because I'll lose my mind if you know the specifics of how pathetic this actually is.
But I saw you and I caught your scent, and I couldn't get it out of my head.
I tried. I really tried. And I told myself I was coming here for a different reason, a smarter reason, because I couldn't admit that I just — that I wanted—"
I stop. My throat is tight. I am not crying again. I’ve used up my lifetime supply of tears in this room.
"You couldn't admit you just wanted me," he says, finishing it, and there's no cruelty or smugness in his voice. He's just reading the obvious conclusion of an argument I've been building all night.
"I built an entire plan around it," I say into the pillow. "I built a case for why I needed to come here and it was the most convincing argument of my career. It was complete bullshit from the start. I just wanted you and I couldn't say that, so I made it about something else."
He’s quiet for a long time. His hand is still on my hip, warm and steady. I can hear him breathing. I can smell him thinking, just like last night. I want to pull the pillow over my head and disappear before he says anything else.
"You know what I think?" he says eventually.
"I really don't want to."
"I think an omega who can construct an elaborate scheme to get close to a specific alpha, maintain a performance through peak heat, and think strategically while being edged and denied is probably the most interesting person I've ever met.
" He shifts, and I feel his breath against the back of my neck.
"And I think whoever you are outside of this room is someone I want to have dinner with. "
I turn my head enough to look at him. He's propped up on one elbow, mask still on, and below it, his mouth ticked up in a smirk. Warmer than a smirk, steadier, like a smile. My chest hurts looking at it.
"You don't even know my name," I say.
"No. But I know you're a lawyer, and I know you're stubborn as hell, and I know you've been thinking about me. I know what your face looks like when you stop pretending." His hand comes up, and his fingers brush the edge of my mask, light, not pulling. "I'll figure out the rest over dinner."
"That's very confident of you."
"I'm a confident person." His thumb traces along my jaw. "Take off the mask."
I look at him. His mask is still on, and mine is still on, and we're two anonymous people in a club that runs on anonymity, and I should keep it that way. I should get up and get dressed and walk out and let this be what it was supposed to be: one night, no names, no consequences.
But he's looking at me like he already knows me. Like the mask is a formality.
"Kieran," I say, and my voice cracks on it. "My name is Kieran."
I don't know why I give it to him. I don't know what possesses me to hand this man the one thing I've been protecting, the thing that connects the anonymous omega on the club floor to something else.
It's the worst strategic decision I've ever made.
It comes out of me like a confession, like the ones he pulled out of me with the vibrator, except nobody's making me say this.
Nobody's edging me into honesty. I'm just lying here with his hand on my jaw and I want him to know my name. I want to hear him say it.
"Kieran," he repeats. "Take off the mask."
My hands are shaking when I reach up. The elastic catches in my hair and I fumble with it. He waits, patient, the way he's waited for everything tonight, and I pull the mask off and let it drop on the sheets. My face is bare and I'm looking at him. I have never in my life felt this exposed.
He looks at me for a long moment. Studies my face the way he studied my body, thorough and unhurried, and I can see his eyes behind the mask now that mine is off—dark, sharp, warm in a way I wasn't expecting.
He reaches up and pulls off his own mask, and I see the rest of his face for the first time and he's—
He's exactly what I remembered. Strong jaw, slight stubble, mouth that looks like it's always two seconds from either a smile or a devastating smirk.
Not movie-star handsome but something better, the kind of face you trust before you've decided to.
I understand why juries listen to him . I understand why I've been obsessed with him for three months, I understand that I am completely, irreversibly fucked.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi." My voice is barely there.