Chapter 5 Mattaniah #2
I don't know how long I struggle. Long enough that my arm cramps and sweat pools in the hollow of my throat and the sheets beneath me are soaked with slick I can't control.
Long enough that the desperation starts curdling into something darker, a hopeless, furious grief at being trapped inside my own discipline, my body screaming for something my mind refuses to allow.
I rip the toy out and hurl it across the room with a snarl, and it hits the door with a wet, solid thwack before clattering to the floor. I collapse back against the pillows, hands pressed over my face, every nerve in my body raw and unsatisfied and humming with a need I can't meet alone.
This will pass. The blockers will eventually kick in, the arousal will fade, and by morning I'll be back behind my walls where I belong.
That is… until the door opens.
My scent is so thick in the room that I don't smell him until the leather and smoke registers against the cloyingly sweet backdrop of my own arousal, and by then my eyes are already open and Dominic is standing in the doorway with the slick-shiny dildo at his feet.
His gaze drops to it first, then travels upward in a slow, methodical sweep that takes in the discarded clothes, the tangled sheets, the blocker bottle on the nightstand, and finally me, naked and flushed and sweating and obviously, pathetically aroused, the evidence of my failed night scattered around me like wreckage.
"Well." His voice is a low rumble pitched to resonate somewhere beneath my rational mind, in the part of me that responds to Alpha authority whether I want it to or not. "That explains the sounds."
I scramble backward, reaching for a blanket that's caught beneath the bed frame, and all my flailing accomplishes is a more thorough display of everything I'm trying to hide.
Fresh slick pulses between my thighs at the proximity of his scent, my body reacting to his presence with an enthusiasm that makes my face burn.
"Get out. I locked that door."
"The lock's been broken since Father kicked it in this evening." Dominic steps inside and pulls the door shut behind him, leaning against it with his arms folded across his chest. "I heard you and just wanted to make sure you were all right."
"I'm fine." The words come out breathless and thin, unconvincing even to my own ears. "Just couldn't sleep. Please leave."
"You're not fine." He pushes off the door and approaches, closing the distance between us while his scent fills the room in dense, rolling waves that make my thoughts swim.
"You've been tearing yourself apart for hours, and whatever methods you've been employing aren't working.
Your scent is broadcasting your need to every Alpha in this house, Mattaniah.
I promise you I'm the best option for who answers. "
The implication cuts through the arousal. Richard. The stepfather who looked at me in the foyer with eyes that promised nothing gentle. Dominic reads the understanding on my face and nods once.
"Let me help you."
"I don't need help. I don't need anything from anyone." I draw my knees up, trying to fold myself small enough to disappear. "I've been managing on my own for years."
"And the managing went so well that you launched a dildo hard enough to dent the doorframe.
" He reaches the foot of the bed and stops, his dark eyes holding mine with an intensity that pins me in place.
"Someone trained you to believe your instincts are dangerous.
Whoever it was did you a tremendous disservice. "
"My mother..."
"Isn't here." He puts one knee on the mattress, then the other, and suddenly he's kneeling at the foot of the bed, close enough that his scent wraps around me like a second skin and my body responds with an involuntary whimper I can't swallow in time. "It's just you and me, firefly."
The nickname snags on something in my chest, a warm, unexpected tug. "Why do you call me that?"
"Because you keep trying to hide your light.
" His hand comes up to trace a single finger along my jaw.
"All that warmth, all that sweetness you've been suffocating under those blockers and that rigid training.
I can see it flickering in you right now, fighting to get out.
You glow in the dark whether you want to or not. "
A fissure opens somewhere behind my sternum, running through a wall I've maintained for seven years, and my eyes sting with heat I refuse to let spill over.
"Let me give you what you need." He tilts my chin up, his thumb resting against my pulse. "One rule. Stay quiet. Sound carries in this house, and we don't want company."
I should say no. Every lesson my mother drilled into me is lined up behind my teeth, a chorus of warnings about what happens to Omegas who let Alphas touch them without a strategic purpose. This is how you become worthless. This is how you get discarded.
But his scent is turning my mother's voice to static, and my body has been starving for seven years, and I am so bone-deep tired of being hungry. "What do you want in return?" I whisper, because there is always a price.
"Nothing you're not willing to give." His thumb sweeps across my lower lip, and resisting the urge to open my mouth makes my jaw ache. "I want to make you feel good. You tell me to stop, I stop. You tell me to leave, I leave. The choice is entirely yours."
Nobody has ever given me a real choice before. Mom's choices came with predetermined consequences. The Alphas she paraded through our lives never asked what I wanted at all. But Dominic is kneeling on my bed, close enough to take anything, and he's waiting.
"I don't know how to let go," I tell him, my voice scraped raw. "I don't know how to stop fighting it."
"Then don't try to stop all at once." Both hands cup my face, tilting it so I can't hide. "Just stop holding on so tight, and let me do the rest."
I nod before the fear can catch up.
The smile that crosses his face is deviant, telling me that even though he’s giving me something I need, I shouldn’t trust him. It should terrify me; instead it sends heat pooling low and liquid in my belly, a fresh wave of slick dampening the sheets beneath me.
"Good boy."
The praise slams into me, my cock twitching against my stomach. I've been called plenty of things by Alphas over the years, compliant, appealing, useful, but nobody has ever said those two words like they were proud of me for choosing to stay instead of running.
Dominic catches the tear that slides down my cheek and presses his lips to the damp trail it leaves on my skin. "There you go," he murmurs. "Just like that."
His mouth finds my throat first, pressing hot, open kisses along the column of my neck, and I tip my head back on instinct, offering access I've never given anyone voluntarily. The sound of approval he makes vibrates against my pulse and sends sparks cascading through my nervous system.
His hands move with a deliberate kind of patience, mapping the planes of my body like he intends to memorize me, lingering at the spots that make me jolt and returning to the ones that make my back arch off the mattress.
He's building a language of my responses, cataloguing every gasp and shiver, and the thoroughness of his attention makes the backs of my eyes burn because nobody has ever cared enough to learn what I like.
By the time his mouth reaches my stomach, the arousal has rebuilt itself, a pressure so immense I can feel it in my teeth.
My cock is leaking steadily, my hips rolling in small, involuntary motions I can't control, and every breath I take is saturated with his scent until the air itself feels like his hands on me.
"Please," I whisper, the rule about silence forgotten entirely.
He looks up from the soft skin below my navel, his chin resting against my belly, his pupils so wide his eyes look black. "Please what, firefly? Tell me what you need."
I don't have words for it. I've never been allowed to develop a vocabulary for wanting. So I roll my hips upward in a wordless plea and trust him to translate.
"I've got you." He presses his mouth to my hip bone, then trails lower, his stubble scraping against the sensitive skin of my inner thigh, and the friction alone nearly unravels me. "Just lie there and let me take care of you."
His mouth closes over me a moment later, hot and wet and so shockingly, perfectly good that I have to shove my fist against my teeth to catch the sound that tears out of my chest. Everything is perfect from the heat of his tongue, the tight ring of his lips, to the way his hands pin my hips flat so I can't thrust upward or set the pace or do anything except take what he's giving.
He swallows me deep and draws back slowly, building the pleasure in overlapping waves, each crest higher than the one before, and I am shaking apart beneath him because this is nothing like my own hand or the useless toy or the clinical service of a rent-an-Alpha during a scheduled heat. This is someone paying attention.
"That's it," he murmurs against my skin, pulling off just long enough to speak, his breath warm and damp over my cock. "You're doing so well. Let go for me, firefly. You're safe."
The word safe reaches past the arousal and the desperation and the knotted mess of training and trauma and finds the terrified creature at the center of me that's been running since it was nineteen years old, and holds it still.
I let go.
The orgasm rips through me like nothing I've ever experienced, whiting out my vision and bowing my spine off the bed and pulling a sound from my throat that's raw and wrecked and utterly beyond my control.
Dominic holds my hips steady and works me through every shuddering wave, until the aftershocks fade to tremors and the tremors fade to a boneless, floating stillness that feels like sinking into warm water.
He moves up the bed and settles beside me with his hand on my stomach, tracing slow patterns on my skin while I remember how to breathe.
"Is that what it's supposed to feel like?" My voice comes out wrecked.
"Every time." His lips brush my temple. "And it gets better."
I brace for the shame, for the crash that always follows, but it doesn't come.
There's just the warmth of his palm and a quiet in my head I don't recognize.
My body feels wrung out and loose and settled in a way that scares me almost as much as the desperation that preceded it, because Dominic now knows exactly what I sound like when I stop fighting.
He knows what praise does to me, how fast I go under, every crack in the armor I've spent four years welding shut. I've given him a map to one of the biggest weaknesses I have, and I can't take it back.
After a while, he shifts toward the edge of the bed as my hand moves toward him before I can stop it. "Where are you going?"
"My room." He stands and rolls his sleeves down, his composure reassembling in seconds.
At the broken door he pauses and looks back at me, the softness in his expression folding into something darker.
"Sleep well, firefly. And don't bother putting your walls back up tonight.
" The corner of his mouth lifts. "I'll just take them down again tomorrow. "
Then he's gone as I press my face into the pillow where his scent is already fading, and the last thing I feel before sleep pulls me under is the warmth of his hand on my stomach and the cold understanding that I've just shown a man exactly how to ruin me and he smiled like I'd given him a gift.