Chapter 20 Mattaniah
Mattaniah
They told me to stay home.
The conversation happened last night after the third spike in two days, Dominic's hand on my forehead and Amos' voice steady as he listed symptoms I already knew I was having. Spikes getting closer together. Slick production increasing. Scent breaking through the blockers more often than it should.
"You should take a few days," Amos said. "Work from here. Or don't work at all. Your body is telling you something and ignoring it isn't sustainable."
"I can't." The words came out before I thought about them.
Dominic's hand stilled on my forehead. "Can't or won't?"
Both. The honest answer was both, but saying it out loud would mean admitting things I'm not ready to name.
The spikes are worse when I'm alone. The spikes are worse when I can't smell them.
The spikes are worse when I'm at my cubicle wondering if Richard is going to round the corner and the only thing keeping my body from screaming is the knowledge that Dominic is three floors down and Amos is four floors down and if I really needed them I could get to one of them in under three minutes.
"I'll be fine," I said instead. "I'll text if something happens."
"You'll text." Dominic's voice carried the particular flatness that means he's not agreeing, just choosing not to fight. "And if something happens while you're at your desk and we're in meetings?"
"Then I'll handle it the way I've handled every spike for the past seven years."
The silence that followed told me exactly what they thought of that answer.
"You're not alone anymore." He said it like a fact, not an argument. "You don't have to white-knuckle through this by yourself."
"I know."
"Do you?"
I didn't answer. He let my chin go and I rolled over and pretended to fall asleep, and in the morning I went to work anyway because the alternative was staying in that house alone while Richard could have access to me and my body ached for Alphas I couldn't reach.
They didn't fight me on it. They just made sure one of them was always within a few floors, their phones on loud, their schedules cleared of anything that couldn't be interrupted. The compromise sat between us unspoken: I wouldn't stay home, but they wouldn't let me be alone.
I've even stopped pretending I have reasons to find them. The excuses died somewhere around the fourth day, when I walked into Amos' office carrying nothing before sitting on his couch and reading through the forensic accounting data he'd been compiling while he worked.
We spent two hours like that, not touching, barely talking, just existing in the same room while his scent settled into my clothes and my scent warmed his office and the whole thing felt so domestic and comfortable that it should have terrified me.
It did terrify me. I went back the next day anyway.
Now it’s Thursday and Richard has been in meetings since one o'clock, which should mean the executive floor belongs to me and Tamsin. I finished my actual work an hour ago. The filing is done, the correspondence is sent, and the expense reports are reconciled.
Except... Richard's meeting ends early. I hear his voice in the corridor before I see him, that particular cadence he uses when he's wrapping up a conversation he's already won.
My spine straightens on instinct as my hands find busywork on my keyboard, the performance of productivity that's become second nature in his presence.
Instead of going to his office, he comes straight to my desk.
"Mattaniah." He stops beside my cubicle, close enough that his cologne fills my nose and his hip brushes the edge of my partition. "Walk with me. I want to discuss your development since I was too busy recently."
I was hoping he forgot about that or at least had backed off after Dominic confronted him. My stomach drops but I stand anyway, because refusing Richard in the middle of the office isn't an option I have.
He leads me toward the corner where the executive floor meets the windows, a stretch of corridor that's empty this time of day because the afternoon light makes the temperature uncomfortable. No one comes here between two and four. He knows this. He chose this.
"Dominic seems to think he has a claim on you." Richard's voice remains pleasant. "He was very... protective the other day. Territorial, even."
"I don't know what you mean, sir."
"Don't lie to me, Mattaniah. It insults us both." He stops walking. We're alone in the corridor, the rest of the floor fifty feet away and around a corner. "My son pulled you out of my hands and told me that people should get the wrong idea. That's not ambiguous."
"I can't control what Dominic does."
"No. But you can control what you do." He steps closer. His hand finds my hip, his thumb pressing into the tender skin there, my body going rigid with the effort of not flinching. "You can control who you encourage. Who you seek out. Who you let touch you."
"Sir—"
"I've been patient with you." His other hand comes up to cup my jaw, tilting my face toward him. His thumb traces my cheekbone in a mockery of tenderness. "I've given you time to settle in, to understand how this household works. But my patience has limits, and my sons are testing them."
His scent is everywhere. Overwhelming. Wrong. My body wants to gag on it but I hold still, caught between making a scene and just waiting until this is over. Richard wouldn’t... he wouldn’t...
"You work for me." His thumb traces down to my lower lip and presses against it, not entering, just resting there with a promise of what he could demand.
"You live in my house. You exist in my sphere because I allow it.
Whatever my sons have told you, whatever they've made you feel, remember that.
They can't protect you from me. No one can. "
His hand drops from my face and then he steps back, straightens his cuffs, and smiles.
"Think about that. We'll talk more soon."
His footsteps echo down the corridor and around the corner, and I stand in the empty stretch of hallway with his scent on my skin and his thumb-print burning on my lip and my whole body screaming to get clean.
I make it back to my desk on autopilot. Tamsin looks up and her expression shifts the second she sees my face. "Matt? What happened?"
"Nothing." The word comes out hollow. "Nothing happened."
"You're shaking."
I look down at my hands. She's right. They're trembling against my keyboard, fine tremors I can't control. Richard's scent is still in my nose, his cologne clinging to my clothes where his body pressed close, and the need to scrub it off is so overwhelming I can barely breathe.
"I need to go." I stand so fast my chair rolls back and hits the partition. "Cover for me. Please."
Tamsin doesn't ask questions. "Richard won't be back until four. Go."
The elevator takes forty seconds and I spend them scrubbing my hands over my face, trying to wipe away the ghost of Richard's thumb on my lip. It doesn't work. His scent is in my clothes, in my hair, ground into my skin where his hand gripped my hip. I can still feel the pressure of his fingers.
The doors open on eleven, Amos already in the hallway, which means either he heard the elevator or he was waiting for it. His expression shifts the second he sees me, from warm to alert to something darker as his nostrils flare.
"You smell like him." The words come out with a dangerous edge to them. "You smell like my father."
"He cornered me." My voice cracks on the second word. "In the corridor by the windows. He touched my face, Amos. He put his thumb on my mouth and told me you can't protect me from him."
His hands curl into fists at his sides as his scent spikes with fury, the soft pine turning sour. For a moment, he looks like he's going to turn around and go find Richard, and I grab his wrist before he can move.
"Don't. Please. That's not what I need."
"What do you need?"
The truth spills out. "I need to not smell like him. I need to smell like you. I need—" My voice breaks. "I need to feel like my body belongs to me again."
Amos' expression shifts. The fury doesn't disappear but understanding blooms beneath it. "Come with me."
His office door is open but he walks past it. I follow without questioning the change in destination, because right now I'd follow Amos anywhere that isn't the corridor where Richard's hands found me. Anywhere that doesn't smell like his cologne.
He stops at a door marked SUPPLY ROOM 12-C and opens it. The room is small, lined with shelves of printer paper and toner cartridges and boxes of office supplies. It smells like cardboard and cleaning solution.
"You brought me to a supply closet." I stare at him from the doorway.
"I brought you somewhere that doesn't smell like him.
" He holds the door open, the look on his face carrying an edge I recognize from the kitchen, the version of Amos that has teeth beneath the warmth.
But there's something else there too, a fierce protectiveness that makes my chest ache. "Get inside, Niah."
He follows me in and lets the door swing shut behind us, but he doesn't lock it. "You didn't lock it," I say.
"No." He backs me against the shelving unit. A ream of printer paper digs into my lower back. "I didn't."
"Someone could walk in."
"Someone could." His hands find my hips. His thumbs press into my hips, the way they did in the kitchen, directly over the spots that make my breathing stutter. "Does that bother you?"
The honest answer is complicated. The honest answer is that the thought of someone opening that door and finding me pressed against a shelving unit with my stepbrother's hands on me should bother me enough to make me leave.
My mother trained me to be invisible, to never be caught, to control every variable in every encounter so that nothing could be used against me. An unlocked supply closet in the middle of a workday is the opposite of controlled. It's reckless and stupid and dangerous.
My scent sweetens so sharply that Amos' nostrils flare.