Chapter Twenty-One
Lucian
T he marble beneath my feet echoes like a threat. Clean, cold, and polished to hell - like everything else in this architectural monument to my own dysfunction.
I stride through the east wing, past curated silence and a grotesque number of Renaissance busts - none of which are helping.
This house was designed for order, for control - for the kind of legacy that says I don’t share snacks, parking spaces, or omegas.
And yet, here we are.
Because apparently , Rhea has decided we’re running some kind of charity cuddle co-op now.
Everyone gets a turn. Step right up: comfort the omega. Don't forget to bring a flannel!
My jaw’s locked so tight it feels like my molars are trying to fuse. I’ve spent two nights parked outside her door like a rabid doorman with unresolved feelings, whispering like some deranged alpha Shakespeare, trying to talk her through the worst of it while every molecule in my body was screaming mine .
And I held it.
I held the line. I gave her space.
Because I thought she'd ask for me.
But now she’s asking for all of us?
All of them ?
Kai, who thinks discipline is a safe word. Theo, who looks like he’d apologize for breathing too loud. And Ash - grumpy, brooding, permanently armed Ash.
Great. Fantastic.
She’s collecting alphas like they’re fucking Pokémon.
My temper crackles like static behind my ribs.
I stalk through the southern corridor, past ten-foot arched windows showing off the estate.
The gardens are perfect. The perimeter’s sealed. Everything is secure.
Except me.
Except her .
I can feel her. Even now. Through walls, through wings, through steel.
It’s like an itch in my bones. A tether pulled taut between her body and mine - and she’s tugging it without even knowing.
And I hate it.
Hate that she makes me feel unsteady. Hate that she made a nest and didn’t build it for me. Hate that I can’t walk into that room right now and drag her into my arms like some deranged fairy tale alpha.
Because the truth? I’m already halfway there.
But what if her bond doesn’t belong to just me? What if I’m not the only one on the end of it?
What if she chooses all of us?
My stomach lurches. I’m going to be sick. Or violent.
Possibly both.
I stop in front of the north gallery. It's filled with portraits of Vales going back six generations.
All of them stiff, cold, ruthless. All of them alpha.
One Omega each. One legacy. One fucking narrative.
I follow it inward until I come to stand at the foot of my father’s portrait. I stare up at same unyielding jaw, same cold eyes, same intolerance for weakness.
The face of a man who’s very much still breathing down my neck. The kind of man who doesn’t bend. Who doesn’t wait.
Who doesn't share .
He wouldn’t have whispered through a door like a lovesick schoolboy, or let his omega crawl into someone else’s lap while he drove a vehicle at high-speed, trying to manage his feelings.
But he also wouldn’t have cared about her the way I do.
I want to be better than him. I do.
But right now?
I want to storm into that room, throw Kai through a window, wrestle Ash out of his emotional repression, and make Theo stop being so goddamn gentle.
And more than that, even -
I want her. Just her; singular and certain.
And not in some poetic, fated, destiny bullshit way. No, I want her messy and raw and in my arms, saying my name like it’s the only one she knows.
I don’t want to share her, but I already have. By allowing them here in the first place, I have.
But I couldn’t have gotten her out of that gala on my own. Not without compromising her safety, without risking exposure.
And whether I like it or not, I can feel it starting to pull again - the connection that’s forming, still igniting, still growing.
I rub the heel of my hand against my chest. The ache there isn’t just instinct: it’s jealousy. It’s frustration.
It’s the unbearable fact that she didn’t choose me first.
And worse?
I understand why.
I’m cold. I’m calculating. I didn’t touch her. Didn’t break. Didn’t offer comfort - only structure, only restraint .
And maybe she didn’t want that. Maybe she wanted arms and warmth and someone who wasn’t one bad look away from growling at the furniture.
But she’s still mine.
Even if she doesn’t know it yet.
Even if she wants them, too.
This house is a fortress. But tonight, it’s holding me in.
Because if I go in there now, then I don’t come back out until she’s mine in a way no one else can touch.
Not Theo. Not Ash.
Not even that smug, chaos-addicted, hypersexual gremlin I let sleep in the guest room.
God help them if they break her, because I’m the one who will put her back together, and I’ll make damn sure she remembers who waited. Who held back. Who stayed outside the door because he respected her enough not to walk through it.
(…Also because I was legally advised not to bust down another wall on private property.)
But we’re past that now.
I turn on my heel and leave the gallery without any further hesitation. I don’t storm back through the corridors, though - I stalk .
There’s a difference.
Storming implies recklessness. A tantrum. Rage without aim.
But this?
This is focus. This is fury in a tailored suit.
This is every sharp corner of me honed by decades of lessons in silence, strategy, and suppression.
Lessons from a man who could ruin you with a glance.
I pass the west atrium, ignoring the enormous oil painting of my great-great-grandfather posed beside a lion he probably didn’t kill himself. Another Vale tradition: posture like a god, perform like a myth, feel absolutely nothing.
At least until your omega picks another alpha to crawl into bed with.
My jaw tics.
When I was six, I cried during a piano lesson. My left hand wasn’t coordinating with the right, the time signature made no sense, and my tutor said I was distracted by emotion.
That night, my father made me stand barefoot on the marble balcony for two hours.
“If you want warmth,” he said, “earn it.”
I stopped crying after that.
I still don’t know how to play that piece.
I turn down a narrower hallway, one most people don’t notice. Staff wing. Service corridor. Less polished, more practical.
Unlike the rest of the estate, this part of the house isn’t designed to impress; just control.
Exactly how he likes it.
Funny thing, control. You spend your whole life mastering it, only to get undone by the sound of your omega moaning someone else’s name.
God, if I had a dollar for every time I held back while someone else got the credit - actually, never mind. I do .
I have several million dollars, and a vault full of weapons-grade restraint.
And tonight, I used every last ounce of it not to snap Ash’s neck like a glowstick.
You’d think the war vet would have some chill.
I pass a mirror. Stop.
I look good. Objectively.
Sharp cheekbones, black-on-black tailored perfection, five o’clock shadow carved like it was sculpted by vindictive gods.
If I weren’t me, I’d fuck me. Probably thank me afterward, too.
But the man staring back doesn’t look impressed. Or satisfied.
He looks like someone who built his entire identity around being unshakeable, and is now being shaken by one little omega who made a nest out of his shirt and didn’t ask him to be the one in it.
I breathe in slow. Hold it. Let it out.
“You really let a girl in a stolen flannel and heat-slicked thighs get under your skin.”
And now I'm talking to my reflection.
Great.
The man in the mirror doesn’t deny it, though. Instead, he lifts a brow like, Yeah, you did. Dumbass.
I move on.
I reach the end of the gallery and shove open the door to the solarium. This house is full of rooms I don’t use, and this one’s always been the least offensive. Quiet. Shadowed. Isolated. Humid, thanks to the temperamental greenhouse system no one dares touch but the old caretaker who still insists on calling me Master Vale , like it’s 1824.
The air smells like earth and memory. There's a slightly overgrown garden out back - the one my mother planted the year before she died.
Half the plants are probably dead, and the other half are thriving out of spite.
Fitting, really. She was like that, too.
I move past the grossly oversized sofa - imported, uncomfortable, absurdly expensive - and cross to the grand piano in the corner.
It gleams like it’s judging me.
(It belongs to my father, which means it probably is.)
I sit.
Spine straight. Shoulders squared.
As if posture can drown out the noise in my head.
Then, I play.
Not because I’m feeling particularly inspired, but because there’s only so many times you can grind your molars before someone offers you a dental plan.
The keys are cool beneath my fingertips. The notes come easy. One of the first pieces I ever learned. A nocturne. Gentle, elegant, and designed to remind six-year-old Lucian Vale that feelings were to be expressed musically, not… inconveniently.
My tutor said I was emotionally inconsistent. My father said I was weak.
Some nights, after my mother passed, he made me practice until my hands blistered. Then he made me play through them.
Ah, childhood. Full of whimsy.
The notes echo out, warm and broken, filling the high glass space like they might climb the vines and take root. Each one is measured. Clean.
Control in sound.
Because I am control. I am legacy. I am the product of generations of ruthless, joyless alphas who believed in empire first, affection never, and the deeply unsettling concept of leather belts as character-building tools.
And now?
Now I’m the man standing outside a heat-locked door while the Omega I’ve been anchoring for days chooses a different Alpha’s lap to collapse into.
I slam the final chord harder than necessary. It echoes like it’s mocking me.
I shut the piano lid with quiet finality. Pretend it doesn’t feel like failure.
She should’ve chosen me.
I was the first one she reached for when the haze hit, when the fear crested. It was my voice that steadied her, my scent she curled into first.
I didn’t cross the line. I didn’t take advantage. I didn’t touch.
I showed restraint.
And this is the thanks I get?
Ash gets a cuddle pass?
Somewhere between the north and south wings, there’s probably a council of goddamn alpha clowns trading her shirts like it’s the draft round of some intimate bonding Olympics, and meanwhile, I’m here playing Chopin for Sad Bastards.
My fists clench in my lap.
The worst part isn’t that she chose someone else tonight.
It’s that through it all, I still feel her.
That thread. Taut. Quiet. Still pulling.
Not desperate. Not demanding. Just… there.
Like she’s dreaming of me. Or needing me without knowing it.
Or maybe she does know it, and she’s just keeping me at arm’s length.
Because she knows I don’t share. That I can’t .
That if she says my name, really says it, I’ll go in that room and I won’t come out until every other scent has been overwritten by mine.
Marked. Bound. Finished.
And if I can’t have her that way? Entirely?
Then I’ll have nothing.
That’s the difference between me and them - they’re all fine being part of the picture. But me?
I built the goddamn frame.
So I sit in my silence, in my fucking solarium, surrounded by glass and ghosts and vines that never got trimmed.
Because if I go in that room now - if I answer the call of that pull -
Then I won’t stop at just holding her, and none of us are ready for what happens if I stop pretending I’m above all this.
She’s not mine. Not yet. Maybe not ever .
And if I can’t have all of her - if she’s really meant for all of us -
Then I’ll take what I can survive.
Which, right now, means nothing at all.