Chapter 6 Dom
I watch him on the feeds for forty minutes before I admit what I'm doing.
The camera in his office is positioned above the door, angled down. It gives me the top of his head, the line of his shoulders, his hands on the keyboard.
He hasn't moved since Viktor left him there. No stretching, no restless shifting, no checking the room for cameras or exits. He sat down, changed the password, opened the loss reports, and started reading.
He's been reading for forty minutes. He hasn't taken a single note.
I pull up the system log. He's accessed six months of table-by-table loss data, the dealer rotation schedule for Q3, and the pit boss incident reports going back to January. He opened them in that order, spent roughly seven minutes on each, and hasn't gone back to any of them.
Either he's skimming, or he's retaining it on a single pass.
I think about the surveillance footage from last night and the way his bet sizes shifted with the count. That was not a man who needs to take notes.
The door opens behind me. Viktor.
"The motel room is clean," he says. "Some clothes. Toiletries. Couple of paperbacks. Thirty-eight dollars in cash. Three fake IDs in different names, plus his real one. No phone besides the one we took, no laptop, no contact information for anyone."
"That's it?"
"That's it. The car is a ten-year-old Honda Civic registered under one of the aliases. Nothing in the glove box, other than some suppressants. Nothing in the trunk. The man lives like he expects to leave in the middle of the night."
Or there's another alias that we haven't found yet. The one where he keeps his real life.
I close the surveillance feed. "If it's all clean, send his things to his suite. Not the suppressants. Not the phone."
Viktor doesn't sit down. He stands where he always stands and looks at the blank monitor.
"You're watching him."
I don't answer. There's no point lying to Viktor.
"The ankle monitor is fitted," he says. "He didn't react. Just held out his leg and let the tech do it."
"Good. What about the Castellanos?"
"Luca's people reached out an hour ago. They suggested Cipriani's."
"How many?"
"Luca plus two. They're proposing lunch, which means he wants it civilized. He wouldn't pick a restaurant if he was planning to make a move."
"Or he would, because he knows we'd think exactly that."
Viktor grunts. "Your call."
"Set it up," I say. "This week. And get me everything we have on their recent activity. Financials, movements, associates. I want to know what Luca knows before I sit down with him."
"Done." A pause. "And the omega?"
"What about him?"
"If the Castellanos put him here, a sit-down is where they'll use it. Luca will want to see how you react when he mentions him."
I shrug. “We didn’t throw him out. They’ll know he’s here. They’ll know we kept an omega. Whatever they say, it’ll give us more information.”
“Sir—"
"I'll handle Luca," I say.
"You keep saying that."
"Because I keep meaning it."
Viktor looks at me for a long moment. Then he nods and leaves.
I go back to the window and stand there until the fog begins to burn off.
I should work on the quarterly projections. They're due to my father by Friday and if the numbers don't improve, the conversation that follows will be one I'd rather avoid.
Nikolai Novikov does not accept narrative explanations for falling revenue. He accepts solutions or he accepts your resignation, and in our line of work, resignation carries its own implications.
I sit at the desk and open the projections file. I make it through two pages before I pull up the surveillance feed again.
Theo is still at the desk. He's taken off the too-big shirt and is sitting in a plain white t-shirt underneath. It fits him better. I can see the line of his shoulders, the shift of muscle in his arms as he types. He's thin. Too thin. My omega doesn’t look like he eats properly.
I call the kitchen.
"Send a lunch tray to the office on twenty," I say. "The small one at the end of the corridor."
"What would you like on it, Mr. Novikov?"
I have no idea what he eats. I think of the minibar report from his suite last night. Four packets of cashew nuts.
"A club sandwich. Soup. Whatever the kitchen is running today. Coffee, Fruit. Water."
"Right away, sir."
I hang up and go back to the projections. Fifteen minutes later, the kitchen runner appears on the feed, setting a tray beside the keyboard. Theo glances at it.
He pulls the coffee toward him and drinks it black, without pausing in his work. After a few minutes he picks up the sandwich, takes a bite, sets it down, keeps typing. He eats the whole thing in stages over the next half hour, never fully stopping.
I force myself to close the feed and work on the projections. Two hours. Three calls. A security briefing for a VIP event scheduled for next week. Normal work. The work that keeps the empire standing.
I can’t help it. He’s right there on my screen where I can see him. I keep watching.
Theo is leaning back in his chair. He stretches his arms above his head. The t-shirt rides up. A strip of pale skin appears between the hem and the waistband of his pants. His stomach is flat, the ridge of his hip bone visible for a second before the shirt falls back.
My mouth goes dry.
He runs his hands through his hair. He pushes it back from his forehead and the movement exposes his neck.
I should close the feed. There is a long list of things I should be doing and none of them involve this.
He leans forward again, reading something, his lips moving slightly. His fingers are long and delicate. I watch them and I think about them and I think about where I want them.
I lock the office door. I unzip my pants and take myself in hand and I'm already hard. I've been hard since he stretched and that strip of skin appeared and my cock knows what it wants even if the rest of me is still pretending this is something I can control.
On the screen, Theo tucks a strand of hair behind his ear. I watch his mouth. I stroke myself slowly, my thumb pressing the underside on the upstroke. My breathing changes.
I think about the security room. His scent, sharp and clean, cutting through everything. His hands flat on the table, steady, while Viktor talked about ditches. His chin tilted up, defiant, even with fear rolling off him in waves.
I think about the slick. I could smell it on him through his pants. Through his fear, his body was wet for me and he hated it and I wanted to press my face between his thighs and taste what his body was offering even while his mouth was saying no.
My hand moves faster. The feed shows Theo typing, oblivious, and the fact that he doesn't know should make me stop. It doesn't. It makes something hot and dark coil tighter at the base of my spine.
He's mine. He's been mine for eight years. His body knows it even if his brain is still fighting.
I come hard, my free hand gripping the edge of the desk, my jaw locked shut. My hips jerk and the sound that escapes me is low and rough and his name.
I sit there for a minute. Breathing. The feed is still running. Theo is still typing.
I clean up. I go to the bathroom and wash my hands and look at myself in the mirror and I don't pretend.
I go back to the desk and pick up the phone.
"Viktor."
"I'm here."
"Move him into my suite."
Silence.
"You sure?" Viktor repeats.
"Yes. Get monitors and all the rest of the surveillance set up into the second bedroom. You can remove the bed to make space. Same setup as the conference room. Monitors, real-time access, archived footage."
I can practically hear Viktor thinking and trying to work out how to tell me this is a terrible idea.
"I want him where I can see him,” I continue. “If he's working for the Castellanos, I'll know sooner with him under my roof than two floors away."
"Dom."
"Do it tonight."
Three seconds of silence.
"Fine," he says. "Your building."
He hangs up. I close the feed. I sit in the quiet of my office and I can still smell Theo on my hands, underneath the soap. Or I'm imagining it. It doesn't matter. The scent is in my head now. It's not leaving.
My father's voice: The moment you start wanting things, you become the player, not the house.
I know. I don't care.