Chapter 4 Dominic
Dominic
The dining room is quiet now, emptied of everyone except me and my thoughts, needing somewhere to be that wasn’t the office or my bedroom. I swirl the whiskey in my glass, watching the amber liquid catch the light from the chandelier overhead, and try to make sense of what I just witnessed.
Dinner was revealing. That's the most precise word for it. Not a disaster, not an embarrassment, but a revelation delivered course by course across an expensive table while Father demonstrated exactly what kind of man he is and Mattaniah demonstrated exactly what kind of Omega he's been made into.
I take another sip and let the burn settle in my chest.
Mattaniah. Even turning the name over in my mind feels like something I should examine more carefully.
He's nobody. He should be nobody. Just another person Father dragged into our lives without warning or consideration, another variable in whatever game the old man is running this time.
I should be cataloguing ways to remove him and his opportunistic mother from our orbit as quickly and cleanly as possible.
Instead I'm sitting here turning over a problem that doesn't have a clean answer yet.
My father does not do things without reason.
He does not make impulsive decisions, act on sentiment, or allow anything into his house that doesn't serve a specific and calculated purpose.
The image of this household, the Hale name, the perception of control and propriety that he has spent decades constructing — these things are not negotiable to him.
They are the foundation everything else is built on.
So why has he brought two Omegas into this house?
Not one. Two. A woman he's known for a matter of weeks and her grown Omega son, dropped into our lives like it costs him nothing, like the disruption to the household and the questions it will raise and the scrutiny it will invite are all perfectly acceptable prices to pay.
For what? For a woman he could have installed in a separate residence if he simply wanted a companion? For an arrangement he could have handled quietly, at a distance, the way he handles everything else he doesn't want examined too closely?
It doesn't add up. And things that don't add up are the most dangerous kind of problem.
The first possibility surfaces in my head before I can push it away. Is this a test? Has Father caught onto something about me and Amos, found some thread he's been pulling on quietly, and arranged this to see what we'll do when an Omega is placed directly in our path?
It would be elegant in the way Father's cruelties tend to be elegant, to give us exactly what we'd want and watch us destroy ourselves trying to take it. I sit with that possibility long enough to feel its weight, turning it over carefully.
Then I put it down. The edges are wrong.
Father doesn't use uncontrolled variables to test things he wants confirmed.
He's too precise for that. If he suspected something concrete about Amos and me he would already have moved on it, not constructed an elaborate domestic arrangement and hoped we'd incriminate ourselves at the dinner table.
So that's not it.
Which brings me back to the question of what is.
I think about the woman. She smiled at the right moments and said the right things and positioned herself on Father's arm with the ease of someone who has rehearsed that exact performance.
She knows what she's doing. She came here knowing exactly what she was walking into, which means she came here wanting something specific enough to be worth the risk.
And then I think about how she sat at that table tonight while her son got corrected into the floor. Not a twitch. Not a flinch. Not even the involuntary tightening around the eyes that happens to people who are trying to hold themselves still against an instinct they can't entirely suppress.
She kept eating while watching Father crack her son's hands and turned back to her soup like it was background noise.
Mattaniah never looked to her once. Not during the corrections, not when the whine escaped him, not even when Father's command locked him back into his chair.
He didn't look to her the way even the most trained Omega looks to a safe person when they're cornered.
The reflex simply wasn't there. Whatever she is to him, she isn't safe.
Whatever arrangement exists between them, protection isn't part of it.
Which means she isn't here despite what Father does to Omega son. She's here because of it. Or at the very least, she walked into this house knowing exactly the kind of man she was handing her son to and decided the price was acceptable.
Fucking bitch.
I pick up my glass and take a longer pull than I intended. The woman is running something, that much I'm certain of. But I don't think Mattaniah is in on the scheme. I think Mattaniah is the offering.
The question is who she's offering him to.
Father looked at the woman the way he looks at a useful acquisition, but his attention kept returning to Mattaniah.
And that was different.
It wasn't the way a man looks at an inconvenience he's tolerating.
It wasn't even the cold assessment he turns on people he's deciding whether to keep or discard.
It was more attentive than either of those things, more focused, the kind of look that means someone has been filed away as significant before they've done anything to earn that designation.
The corrections weren't just discipline.
They were something else — testing, maybe, or cataloguing.
Watching how the Omega responds under pressure, what he does when he's cornered, what sounds he makes when his control slips.
I don't know yet what that means. I'm not going to pretend I do when I don't have enough pieces.
But I know it can't be a good sign. And I know that whatever Father's angle is, it involves Mattaniah in a way that goes beyond tolerating an inconvenient stepson under his roof.
That's the part I need to understand before Father decides to act on it.
The soft sound of footsteps makes me look up. Amos appears in the doorway, his jacket gone and his shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal the tattoos covering his forearms. The sight of him settles something restless in my chest the way it always does.
"He's cleaning," Amos says, answering the question I didn't ask. "Crying while he does it, but cleaning."
"Crying."
"Silently. Trying to hide it." Amos crosses the room and stops beside my chair, close enough that I can smell him properly. "I don't think he knows how to do anything else other than hide, I mean. Everything about him is locked down so tight it's a miracle he can function."
I set my glass on the table and look up at him. "You noticed it too."
"Hard not to." Amos perches on the edge of the table, his thigh inches from my shoulder as I let my hand drift up to rest on his knee.
The movement is automatic, a comfort I've allowed myself for years.
"His scent is wrong, Dom. Muted. Like there's a wall between what he's actually feeling and what he's letting out. "
"Blockers," I confirm. "Strong ones, and a lot of them. I could smell the chemicals underneath the coconut when he first walked in. He must have been taking them regularly for a long time."
"Why would an Omega suppress that heavily? Most of them want to be noticed."
It's a fair question. Omega scents are designed to attract, to communicate, and to form connections. Blocking them serves no biological purpose. If anything it works against every instinct an Omega has.
Unless those instincts have been trained out of them.
I think about the way Mattaniah has moved through the house since he arrived earlier.
Even when Father was at his worst, cracking that Omega's hands until they must be throbbing, Mattaniah only broke once.
One small whine, immediately followed by a flood of shame so strong I could smell it across the table.
That's not natural. That's not how Omegas work.
That's conditioning and someone put a significant amount of effort into it.
"Someone trained him to suppress every natural instinct he has," I say, the pieces clicking together. "Taught him that responding genuinely was dangerous, that his own biology was a liability. That kind of conditioning doesn't happen by accident."
Amos' expression darkens. "You think it was his mother."
"I know it was his mother. Did you see how she reacted when his scent went sour at dinner? There wasn't a shred of concern on her face. She looked disappointed, like he'd failed an audition by letting his distress show."
"That's a specific kind of cruelty, Dom."
"It's strategy." I recognize the architecture of it even without knowing the full purpose yet.
The deliberate suppression, the trained shame response, the performance of availability without the reality of it.
"I don't know exactly what she's been using him for, but whatever it is, it requires him to be appealing without being attainable.
She needs him to draw Alphas in without forming real connections.
The moment he actually responds to someone, genuinely responds, he will stop being useful to her. "
Amos is quiet for a moment. "And she brought him here anyway, into a house with three unmated Alphas."
"Which is the part I can't figure out yet.
" I lean back in my chair, turning the thought over.
"Father doesn't bring chaos into this house.
He doesn't make moves he hasn't thought through.
So either he doesn't know what Mattaniah actually is underneath all those blockers, or he knows exactly what he is and that's precisely why he's here. "
"You think Father wants him."
"I think Father's attention at dinner wasn't the attention of a man tolerating his new Omega’s son. There's something there I need to understand before it becomes a problem I can't solve." I look at Amos. "And I think we need to know what we're working with before we decide how to move."
Amos holds my gaze. "So we get close to him."
"We get close to him. But carefully. He's going to run every time his instincts break through and the shame hits. We saw that already. We need him to feel safe enough to stop running before we can understand what's actually happening in this house."
"And if it turns out Father's angle is what you think it might be?"
A snarl sits at the back of my throat but I temper it down, refusing to let myself dwell over an issue that hasn’t even arisen yet.
"Then we deal with it. But we need to be in position first, which means right now we go check on our new stepbrother and make sure he survives his first night in this house. "
Amos' mouth curves. "Our stepbrother. Is that what we're calling him?"
"That's what he is, Amos."
"If you say so." He stands and tilts his head toward the hallway. "Let's go see how he's holding up with those dishes."
We find him at the farmhouse sink with his hands submerged in soapy water, shoulders hunched, his body shaking with the effort of silent crying.
The scrubbing is rhythmic, relentless, the motions of someone trying to clean away more than dirty pots.
His scent is barely detectable through the blockers, but what comes through is coconut gone sour with distress.
I stay in the doorway. Amos crosses the kitchen and stops just behind Mattaniah's left shoulder.
"Hey. You've been at this for a while. The pots can wait."
Mattaniah's spine goes rigid. He doesn't turn around. "Please leave me alone. I'm fine, I just need to finish this."
"You're not bothering anyone." Amos reaches out slowly, and rests his hand on the Omega's shoulder.
Mattaniah's whole body locks up for one taut second, every muscle braced against what's coming.
Then something gives way. His shoulders drop, his spine softens, his head tips back slightly, and a low whine escapes his throat as he leans into the touch like his body has been waiting for permission all night and just received it.
Amos makes a sound low in his chest and pulls Mattaniah gently away from the sink. The Omega goes without resistance, the rigid performance of the entire evening dissolving as his eyes close and his scent shifts beneath the blockers into something sweeter than anything I've smelled from him yet.
"There you go," Amos murmurs, turning him and pulling him against his chest. "You don't have to fight so hard."
Mattaniah presses his face into the curve of Amos' neck as his hands come up to fist in the fabric of Amos' shirt, another whine escaping him, higher and more desperate than the first. His whole body shudders with what looks unmistakably like relief, like he's been holding his breath for hours and just remembered how to exhale.
This is what all that rigid control must be designed to keep locked away. This is what his mother must have been trying to bury.
Silence filters into the kitchen as I catalog every last piece of Mattaniah and the way he’s holding onto Amos until he jerks away from Amos like he's been burned.
He stumbles backward until his hip hits the counter, his scent crashing sour so fast it makes my head swim.
"I'm sorry." The words pile on top of each other. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to do that, I don't know why I did that, please don't tell my mother, please, I can't..."
"Mattaniah." Amos holds up both hands. "You didn't do anything wrong."
"I did. I'm not supposed to, she told me never to..." He breaks off with a choked sound and bolts up the stairs. A few seconds later, a door screams as it’s shut, the broken hinges protesting the moment.
Amos turns to me. "He's going to be difficult."
"He's going to be worth it. His mother taught him that wanting gets you hurt, so every time he responds to us, the shame is going to hit and he's going to bolt.
" I push off the doorframe. "So we make sure that every time he runs, the thing he's running from feels better than the place he's running to.
We stay close, we keep pushing, and we make the wanting worth the fear. "
"And Father?"
"Father pushes to break. We push to open. There's a difference, and Mattaniah's body already knows it even if his brain hasn't caught up." I turn off the kitchen light. "Come on."