Chapter 22 Mattaniah
Mattaniah
Mom catches me in the hallway outside my room at seven in the morning, which means she's been waiting because my mother doesn't wake up at seven unless she's hunting.
I smell her before I see her, that sharp rose scent that used to mean home and now just means trouble.
She's leaning against the wall in a silk robe with her arms crossed and her makeup already done, which is another tell because my mother doesn't put on a full face before ambushing someone unless she wants to look composed while they fall apart.
"Good morning, Mattaniah." She says it the way she says everything, pleasant on the surface with teeth underneath.
Her eyes travel over me as I close my bedroom door, cataloguing details the way she trained me to catalogue marks.
My hair is loose instead of pulled back.
My shirt collar is open one button lower than usual.
My scent, even through the blocker, carries a warmth that wasn't there two weeks ago.
"Morning, Mom." I keep my voice neutral. "You're up early."
"I'm up because we need to talk, and you've been impossible to pin down." She pushes off the wall and falls into step beside me as I head toward the stairs. "You've been busy. Spending your evenings somewhere other than your room. Coming to breakfast smelling like you slept in someone else's bed."
My stomach drops but I keep walking. "I've been working late. Amos has me helping with the financial analysis for the Southeast division."
"Amos." She repeats the name like she's tasting something sour. "You're on a first-name basis with your stepbrother."
I’m not sure what else she would have wanted me to call him. Alpha? Older brother? "He asked me to call him that."
"Since when do you do what Alphas ask?" She catches my arm at the top of the stairs and turns me to face her. Her grip is firm enough to leave marks and her eyes are doing the thing I've feared since childhood, the cold inventory of a tool that isn't performing as expected. "Sit down."
I sit on the top step because standing requires more defiance than I have at seven in the morning with her hand on my arm.
She sits beside me, close enough that her scent floods my nose and triggers the involuntary response that years of conditioning built into my nervous system.
My spine straightens and my face empties and my hands fold in my lap before I've decided to do any of it.
"Your blocker dose." She says it without preamble. "You've lowered it."
"The triple dose was causing a lot of shakiness. Dominic noticed the tremor and told me to drop to two."
The silence that follows my use of Dominic's first name stretches for five full seconds while she studies my face.
"How long?" Her voice is quiet.
"How long what?"
"Don't play stupid with me, Mattaniah. You've never been good at it." She releases my arm. "How long have you been sleeping with them?"
The floor drops out of my stomach. I could deny it.
I could lie, could construct a cover story, could deploy the exact skills she spent years teaching me.
But my mother reads lies the way Amos reads spreadsheets, and the warmth in my scent and the looseness in my body are evidence she's already processed.
The fact that I'm wearing Amos' t-shirt under my button-down just confirms her conclusion.
"It's not what you think," I say, and her expression tells me I just confirmed everything.
"It's exactly what I think." Her composure holds but something shifts behind her eyes. "You're falling into old patterns. The same thing that happened with Marcus is happening again, except this time you've managed to involve two of them."
"This is nothing like Marcus."
"Really?" She crosses her legs and smooths her robe over her knee, every gesture controlled.
"A lonely Omega meets an Alpha who pays attention to him.
The Alpha says the right things, makes the Omega feel special, makes him believe the attention is genuine.
The Omega lowers his guard because it feels so good to be seen.
" She turns her head and pins me with a look that cuts through every defense I have.
"You've done this before. I spent four years putting you back together afterward. "
The Marcus comparison lands exactly where she aims it. The coordinated approaches, the shared looks, the way they handle me in tandem. My mother is naming the suspicion I've been filing away and refusing to examine.
"They're not running a scheme on me," I manage.
"Everyone is running a scheme, Mattaniah. I taught you that." She leans closer and her scent sharpens with something I can't identify. "But this conversation isn't about whether they're genuine. This conversation is about the fact that you've been letting them distract you from the plan."
"What plan?"
"The plan, Mattaniah. The one I've been running since before we moved into this house." She says it with the patience of someone explaining something obvious to someone very slow. "Richard wants you. He's wanted you since the first dinner. Why do you think I brought you here?"
My mouth opens but nothing comes out. The hallway tilts around me and I grip the edge of the step.
"You thought we moved here for Richard's money." She watches me process it with clinical detachment. "The money is the bonus. Richard is the target, but the real asset was always you. An Omega your age, in his house, under his control. Richard's type. I've known his type since before I met him."
"You..." My voice comes out strangled. "You brought me here for him."
"I brought you here because Richard Hale is worth more as your Alpha than as my husband.
" She says it without flinching. "A bonded Omega has legal claim to an Alpha's estate.
A wife can be divorced. A bonded mate can't be severed.
Every time I told you to stay away from the sons, it was because they were getting in the way of Richard having clear access to you. "
The stairwell spins. My hands are shaking and my vision is narrowing and I'm gripping the step hard enough that the edge cuts into my palms. Every lesson she ever taught me reshuffles in my head with this new context.
The blockers weren't to protect me. They were to keep me available, unbonded, unclaimed by any Alpha who might get to me before Richard could.
The suppression training wasn't about strength.
It was about keeping the merchandise in sellable condition.
"The blockers," I whisper. "Since I was nineteen. You put me on blockers so I wouldn't bond with anyone before..."
"Before the right Alpha." She straightens my collar with a tug that makes me flinch.
"Richard is the right Alpha. He has the money, the power, the legal standing.
Once he bonds you, everything he owns becomes accessible.
And once I have access to a bonded Omega's legal claim on the Hale estate.
.." She trails off. "You see the elegance of it. "
"Richard isn't going to wait much longer.
" She says it with flat certainty. "He told me two nights ago that he's making arrangements.
His patience with the courtship phase is ending, Mattaniah.
Whatever he's planning, it's coming soon, and every day you spend tangled up with his sons is a day closer to Richard taking what he's decided is his without you being prepared for it. "
"You were grooming me." The words taste like bile. "My whole life. Every lesson about suppression, every warning about letting Alphas in, every time you hit me for responding to a knot. You were grooming me to be handed to a man like Richard."
The slap comes so fast I don't see her hand move. My head snaps to the side and my cheek burns and the sound echoes off the stairwell walls. I press my palm against the sting and taste copper where my teeth caught the inside of my cheek.
"I was protecting you," she hisses. "I was making sure you survived long enough to reach the one Alpha who could actually provide for us.
Do you think I enjoyed watching you suffer through suppressions?
Do you think I wanted to lock you in that apartment for four years after Marcus?
" Her voice drops to something raw. "I did what I had to do. For both of us."
"For both of us." I hear my own voice from very far away. "You trained me to be a sweet little sacrifice for a predator and you're telling me it was for both of us."
"Richard isn't a predator. Richard is an opportunity."
"Richard put his hand on my thigh under the dinner table while you watched.
" My voice is climbing and I can't stop it.
"He backed me against a wall in the copy room and told me he wanted to explore my responsiveness.
He touches me every day, Mom. Every single day his hands are on me and you sat across that table and did nothing because it was part of the plan. "
Her expression doesn't crack. "He was establishing claim. That's normal Alpha courtship behavior."
"That's not courtship. That's assault." I'm on my feet now, my cheek burning, my hands fisted at my sides. "And you set me up for it. You gift-wrapped me and delivered me to his door."
"Sit down, Mattaniah."
"No." The word echoes down the stairwell louder than I intend and my mother's eyes widen a fraction. My body is shaking but I stay on my feet, gripping the banister hard enough that my knuckles go white.
"Sit. Down." She doesn't have an Alpha voice but the command in her tone hits the trained nerve anyway. My knees buckle and I catch myself on the railing before they give out completely.
"End it with the sons." She stands over me, her robe gathered around her.
"Today. End it, go back to your blockers, and let Richard do what I brought you here for.
The allowance your stepbrothers offered me is insulting.
What Richard's estate is worth makes five thousand a month look like pocket change. "
"And if I don't?"
"Then I tell Richard about the honey trap operations, about Marcus, about every mark I've ever run. I burn it all, including you." Her eyes are flat. "Those Alphas know exactly who you are, all three of them and I can guarantee the two you’re sweet on are using you. You’re just too desperate to see it.”
A cramp rolls through my abdomen so hard I double over on the step. The stress spike punches through my blocker and my scent floods the stairwell with sour fear that makes my mother step back.
"Get that under control," she says. "Richard's staff can smell you from the kitchen."
She walks down the stairs without looking back.
Her heels click against the marble and the sound follows me as I press my forehead against the banister and try to breathe through the cramp and the nausea and the feeling that the ground beneath my entire life just opened up and swallowed everything I thought I understood about my own history.
"She's lying," I mutter into the wood. "She has to be lying."
But the pieces fit. Every piece fits because my mother doesn't lie about strategy.
She lies about love and intention and how much she cares about me, but when it comes to the mechanics of an operation she is brutally honest. The blockers since nineteen.
The four years locked in that apartment.
Every warning about staying compliant and keeping my head down.
None of it was about making me strong. It was about keeping me available.
I was the operation. I've always been the operation.
The spike passes in five minutes but it leaves me wrung out on the stairs with my vision blurry and my slick panties doing their job beneath my work pants. I push myself up and walk to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face and stare at the red mark on my cheek where my mother's hand landed.
"Just get through the day," I tell my reflection. "Get through the day and figure it out tonight."
The day is impossible. I sit at my desk on the executive floor and type correspondence with shaking hands while Richard's voice floats from his office and my mother's words play on a loop in the register she trained into me at sixteen.
Submission is weakness. Needing is how you get destroyed.
An Omega who gives away control gives away everything.
Except she wasn't trying to make me strong. She was keeping me compliant, blank and blocker-fogged and available for the highest bidder.
Tamsin asks me if I'm okay at ten and I say yes. She asks again at eleven with enough concern that I snap at her to leave it alone, and the hurt on her face makes me want to apologize but I can't open my mouth without the whole thing spilling out.
My phone buzzes with a text from Amos at noon. Just a simple "lunch?" that I stare at for two full minutes while my thumb hovers over the keyboard and my chest aches with how badly I want to type yes.
I type "can't today, busy" and put my phone face down on my desk.
The response comes immediately. "Everything okay?"
I don't answer. If I answer I'll crack, and if I crack I'll end up on the twelfth floor with my face in his chest and his scent in my lungs and the armor my mother spent twenty minutes rebuilding will come apart.
Dominic texts at one. "Firefly. Amos says you're off today."
I turn my phone off.
Another spike hits at three, sharp enough that I have to grip my desk through it while Tamsin watches from behind the partition.
I wave her off and breathe through it, the slick panties catching what my body produces.
Refusing to do anything about it, I sit in my own warmth and think about my mother's words when she said "you were always meant to be his. "
By five o'clock I've made my decision. Even if my mother is lying about the grooming, which the evidence suggests she isn't, the exposure threat is real.
Richard would throw us both out if he knew everything, or worse, and I'd be on the street with no job and no money and two Alphas who might not want me once they learn what I was trained to be.
And if Richard is truly making arrangements, if his patience is ending the way my mother says it is, then every day I spend with Dominic and Amos is a day I'm not preparing for what's coming.
The safe play is to end it. Cut the connection before it costs me everything.
Lock the armor back into place, increase the blockers, and return to the compliance my mother built me for.
It worked for four years after Marcus. It can work again.
Except... I’m not sure that’s what I want, the indecision undercutting the one I just made.