Chapter 9 Theo
I've been staring at the same column of figures for twenty minutes and they keep sliding sideways.
My eyes ache. The monitor is too bright. The air conditioning in the suite is set to the same temperature it's been set to all week but my skin feels hot and tight, like I've been sitting too close to a fire.
I push back from the desk and press the heels of my hands against my eyes. When I open them, the spreadsheet is still there. The numbers are still wrong. No, they’re not wrong. I'm wrong.
My brain is wrong. The instrument I've relied on for eight years to keep me alive, keep me fed, keep me invisible, is malfunctioning and I know exactly why.
It’s been five days since I kissed him. Five nights on the sofa. Five mornings waking up drenched in his scent with my cock hard and slick on my thighs and the taste of him still ghosting across my lips even though it can't possibly still be there.
My heat is very close. Maybe a day or two away. Maybe a lot less.
I can feel it the way you feel weather changing. There’s a pressure in my lower belly that doesn't let up. A sensitivity across my skin that turns the fabric of my shirt into something abrasive.
And his scent, which was already devastating, has become something my body processes like oxygen. The penthouse is saturated with it and I'm breathing it in with every breath and every breath is a little more fuel on a fire that's already out of control.
I go back to the spreadsheet. I force my eyes to focus. The numbers resolve for a moment and then blur again.
It doesn't matter. I don't need the spreadsheet. I have it all in my head. I am almost sure I know who is involved within the Grand and I can pinpoint most of the outsider players, at least the regular ones.
Still, I want to put more work into it. I need to map exactly what is happening. Suspicion isn’t enough. I need one hundred percent proof before I tell Novikov what I suspect because the problem is what happens when I pass over that information.
I know what Novikov is. He kills people or he has people killed.
He runs an empire built on the threat of violence and the occasional delivery of it.
Viktor suggested putting my body in a ditch and Novikov didn't flinch.
The only reason I'm alive is because my scent made his knees buckle before Viktor could finish the sentence.
If I give him the names, I'm the mechanism. Someone else might pull the trigger, but I'm the one who aimed the gun.
But if I don't give him the names, I have nothing. No leverage, no usefulness, no reason for him to keep the deal to let me go. Assuming the deal was ever real.
I close the laptop. The monitor goes dark and the room is suddenly quiet except for the hum of the surveillance screens on the wall and my own breathing, which is too fast.
I'm sweating. My shirt is damp at the collar and between my shoulder blades. I pull it away from my skin and the movement sends a ripple of sensation across my chest that has no business being there.
I need suppressants. I need to get out of this building. I need air that doesn't smell like him.
I don't have any of those things.
I open the laptop again and pull up the surveillance feeds from the high-roller room, not because there's anything left to find but because watching the tables is the closest thing I have to counting cards. The rhythm of the deal and the chips are almost enough to quiet my head.
Almost.
I make it another hour before I hear the front door.
His scent reaches the office before his footsteps do. It’s fresh and strong, and layered with the cold of outside, which means he's been somewhere.
My body is already responding, the low pulse in my belly sharpening into something urgent. I clench my jaw and stare at the screen.
He appears in the doorway. I see him in my peripheral vision. He leans against the frame and I can feel his attention on me.
"How's it going?"
"Fine."
"You've been in here all day."
"That's where the work is."
He doesn't leave. He walks into the room. He stops behind my chair, the same position he's taken before, looking at the screen over my shoulder. His body heat is immediate and enveloping.
"Anything new?"
"I'm working on it."
This is a lie. I have enough and I'm giving him nothing. My voice is steady enough that he might believe me if he weren't currently standing close enough to smell the sweat on my neck.
He doesn't respond right away. He's breathing. I can hear it: slow and deliberate, the way someone breathes when they're paying very close attention.
He's scenting me.
He's standing behind my chair, inches away, and he's breathing me in. My scent will have shifted. I know this. The approaching heat changes everything, sweetens the base notes. Every alpha within a hundred feet of me would be able to smell that my body is preparing.
"You look flushed," he says.
"It's warm in here."
"It's not."
I turn in the chair to tell him to back off. Another mistake. He hasn't stepped back. He's right there, close enough that my knees bracket his thighs, and he's looking down at me with an expression that makes my stomach drop through the floor.
His pupils are wide. His jaw is tight. The scent rolling off him has shifted into a deep, dark register that I've learned means arousal.
"You should eat something," he says. His voice is low. "I'll have the kitchen send up dinner."
"I'm not hungry."
"You haven't eaten since this morning."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know everything that happens in this building." He says it without arrogance. It's a statement of fact, delivered in that deep voice that makes my pulse hammer. "Including what you eat and when you eat it and whether you slept last night, which you didn't."
"Stop watching me."
"No."
He turns and leaves the office. I sit in the chair and grip the armrests until my knuckles ache. My underwear is wet. It's been wet since he walked in. The slick is a low, constant betrayal and I can't stop it and he could smell it. I know he could.
I hear him in the kitchen. I go to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face and look at my reflection. My cheeks are flushed. My pupils are dilated. There's a feverish quality to my skin that wasn't there this morning.
I think about money. I have thirty-eight dollars. It’s still in the wallet that Novikov’s people brought from the hotel room but even if he lets me go right now, it’s not enough for a motel room.
It's not enough for suppressants even if I could get to a pharmacy. If Novikov were to open the door right now and tell me to leave, I'd walk out into the street with no money, no suppressants, and a heat about to hit.
I'd end up in an emergency shelter. Or worse. An omega in unsuppressed heat on the street is a target.
This suite is the safest place I can be right now. I hate that. I hate it so much my hands shake.
I go back to the office and try to work until the light beyond the penthouse windows turns orange and then gray and then black.
Dom doesn't come back to the office. I can hear him in the living area. The low murmur of a phone call. The clink of glass.
At nine, I can't focus any more. My skin is burning. Every time I shift in the chair, the friction of my clothes makes me bite down on my lip. The low pulse between my legs has become a steady throb.
I shut the laptop. I stand. My legs are unsteady.
The living area is dim. One lamp on. Novikov is on the sofa with a glass and a tablet and he looks up when I come in.
He's changed out of his suit into a T-shirt and sweatpants. His feet are bare on the coffee table. He looks relaxed, domestic, like a man spending a quiet evening at home, except for his eyes which are tracking me across the room with absolute focus.
I go to the kitchen. There's a plate on the counter. Chicken, rice, vegetables. I peel back the film and eat standing up. The food has no taste. I eat it anyway because I can feel the heat building and I know from experience that once it hits properly, eating becomes impossible.
When I turn around, he is standing in the kitchen doorway filling it the way he fills every space he occupies, broad shoulders and the lazy confidence of a man who has never once doubted his right to be anywhere.
His scent is right there. It’s thick and warm in the enclosed kitchen with no distance left to dilute it. My body responds with a surge of slick so sudden and so forceful that I have to grab the counter behind me.
He looks at me. I look at him. The kitchen is small and he is large and my body is vibrating at a frequency that makes rational thought feel like trying to hold water in my fists. The throbbing between my legs is relentless. I can feel the slick soaking through my underwear, down my inner thighs.
He can smell it. I can see it in the way his nostrils flare, the way his chest rises on a deeper breath.
He smirks at me. "I’m not going to touch you until you beg me for it," he says.
"That’s not going to happen," I say, but we both know I’m lying.
He grins. "Okay."
He steps aside. The doorway is clear. I walk through it and my arm brushes his chest as I pass and the contact sends a jolt through my entire body. I make a sound that comes from somewhere deep and involuntary.
His eyes meet mine. There’s a tension in him that tells me the restraint is costing him. Good. I hope it's agony.
I make it to the sofa. I lie down. I pull the blanket up and close my eyes. The penthouse settles into quiet. I hear him move through the kitchen, into the hallway, then the bedroom.
The door stays open. It always stays open.
I lie on the sofa and I burn.
The slick is constant now. I can feel it every time I shift. My cock is hard, pressing against my pants, and the pressure is exquisite and nowhere near enough. I need friction. I need pressure. I need hands on me and a body against me and the specific weight of—
I press my face into the sofa cushion. His scent is in the fabric. Of course it is. Everything in this place smells like him.
I could get myself off. It would take the edge off for an hour, maybe two. I've done it before, every heat I've ridden out alone, hand on myself in whatever cheap motel room I could afford, biting the pillow to keep quiet.
But this isn't a motel room. This is his home. He's fifteen feet away. He'll hear me. He'll smell it. And the thought of him lying in his bed listening to me come on his sofa makes my whole body clench.
The waves are getting closer together. The heat is arriving faster than I expected. It’s his proximity. I’ve been doing nothing but breathing him in for days.
I try to summon the image of my mother at the kitchen counter, the apple slices, the careful humming.
It's the image I've used for eight years to keep myself safe.
Every time an alpha looked at me too long.
Every time my body responded to a scent.
I'd think about the terror in her eyes, and the way her humming stopped, and then the wanting would die.
It doesn't die. It doesn't even flinch. My mother's face dissolves into the dark behind my eyelids and all that's left is the scent and the heat and the ache.
Another wave. Stronger. I curl onto my side and press my thighs together and the pressure against my cock makes me gasp.
I can't do this alone. I've done it alone before, but not like this, not with a prime match waiting fifteen feet away with his door open and his scent in every breath I take. My body will not let me ride this out on this sofa. It's going to get worse. Much worse.
I sit up. My head spins. My t-shirt is soaked with sweat and I pull it off because the fabric against my skin is unbearable.
The hallway is dark. The bedroom door is a rectangle of deeper shadow at the end of it.
I could stay here. I could suffer through it. It won't kill me. It'll feel like it's killing me, but it won't.
Or I could walk down that hallway and into his room and let him do what my body is screaming for.
I stand up.
His scent thickens with every step. The bedroom door is open.
He's lying on his back. I can see the shape of him in the dark: the broad chest, one arm behind his head, the sheet pushed down to his waist. He's awake.
I can tell by his breathing. He's been lying there listening to me suffer and he hasn't moved.
I stop in the doorway. My heart is hammering so hard I can feel it in my throat, my wrists, behind my eyes.
He sits up. The sheet falls to his hips. His chest is bare and I can see the lines of muscle, the dark hair, the rise and fall of his breathing, which is no longer controlled.
"Come here, Theo."
I cross the room. I climb onto the bed. I put my hands on his chest and push him down and he goes, flat on his back, his eyes black in the dark.
I kiss him, hard and angry. My teeth catch his lip and he groans and his hands come up to my hips and press into the hollows above my hipbones.
His hand slides up my bare back. His palm is hot and wide and it covers the span between my shoulder blades. He pulls me down, flush against him, and I can feel him hard beneath me through the thin cotton.
"You can’t make me stay because of this."
"I know," he says.
He’s lying and so am I, but right now, it doesn’t matter.