Chapter Twenty-Five
Diwa spent three hours walking Lysander through the recording setup, which was two hours longer than Lysander had expected to need.
The microphones were intuitive, the camera straightforward, and the editing software laid out clearly.
But Diwa’s audio console had more dials than a commercial aircraft, and every time Lysander touched one of them, something unintended happened.
A gain knob sent his voice into a feedback shriek that rattled the acoustic panels.
He found the reverb by accident and spent forty seconds sounding like he was presenting from inside a cathedral before Diwa reached across and turned it off.
“You’ll get the feel for it,” Diwa said when Lysander’s shoulders bowed forward.
And he did, eventually. Diwa showed him how to set levels, how to monitor the waveform on screen so he could see the peaks before they clipped, and how to export a clean file without accidentally bouncing it in mono.
Then Colin’s buzzer went off, two short pulses on the intercom system Diwa had wired through the house, and Diwa was up the stairs before the second pulse had finished, leaving Lysander alone in the basement.
He had time to experiment. That was the thing about staying in a house where the person you’d come to see spent most of the day sleeping or in pain.
Colin’s bad days outnumbered his good ones now, and when the headaches hit, the bedroom door closed, the lights were turned off, and the house quietened.
Diwa disappeared upstairs. Lysander was left with long, empty stretches of afternoon that he filled the only way he knew how: by working.
His mind maps spread across the basement desk in a growing archipelago of unlined paper.
He’d started with one sheet, a single circle in the centre with PODCAST written inside it in block capitals.
By the third day, the circle had sprouted branches that sprawled across seven pages taped together at the edges, his handwriting shrinking as the ideas multiplied.
Names of people he wanted to interview sat alongside themes he kept circling back to.
The branches kept converging on the same territory.
He drew a line between ONLINE IDENTITY and REAL CONSEQUENCES and underlined it twice, then added a third line because two hadn’t felt emphatic enough.
Every route through the map led him back here.
The teenager who posts something thoughtless at sixteen and finds it still indexed by Google at twenty-six, when he’s looking to establish his professional identity.
The influencer whose curated feed becomes the only version of themselves that anyone believes.
The sex worker whose professional persona bleeds into every relationship she tries to build outside the camera’s frame.
For years Lysander had believed the comfortable fiction that the online world was a place with its own borders.
He’d sat across from Dane on the sofa in Knightsbridge and said yes to uploading their first sex video because it was just the internet, just content, just pixels on a screen that would dissolve into the endless churn of porn, get them a bit of money, and be forgotten by Thursday.
He uncapped a marker and wrote, in letters large enough to read from across the room: THERE IS NO “JUST ONLINE” ANYMORE.
Then he sat in the leather chair, adjusted the boom arm until the microphone was positioned the way Diwa had shown him, four inches from his mouth, slightly off-axis, and hit record.
He didn’t have a script. The mind maps were pinned to the wall behind the camera, but he was looking at the red light on the console that told him the file was running, and he was thinking about Dane’s Knightsbridge flat.
“I was eighteen,” Lysander said to the microphone.
“Mid-heat, and it was three in the morning. Back then, I was sharing an eight-by-ten bedroom with my twin brother in a council flat in Barking, and if you’ve never had two male omegas cycling in the same room with just a plasterboard wall between them and the rest of the flat, then consider yourself lucky. ”
He paused. The waveform on the centre monitor held steady, a green line barely rippling.
“So I called an older alpha I’d been seeing, because he had space, privacy and central heating that actually worked. He said I could ride out my heat with him, and all I had to do was let him film it.”
Lysander’s fingers found the edge of the desk and gripped.
“The terms he gave me were simple. We’d make one video, just the one, and in exchange I could move out of Barking and come live with him. I was eighteen and in heat in a room I couldn’t lock the door of, so of course I said yes and I gave it a go.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and kept speaking.
“We got pretty far along. I got naked, he had his hands on me, and then I decided that I didn’t want to be filmed after all.
I know that doesn’t fit the TheoTheO story.
But that first time, I’m on the video saying ‘please don’t record this,’ and everyone who watched it assumed I was just acting.
” He let out a breath that the microphone caught as a soft rush of static.
“I wasn’t acting. But one video became two, became a whole OnlyFans channel, and by that point I’d been living in his flat for six months with nowhere else to go.
He kept asking for more, and I kept saying yes, because what’s one more video when you’ve already done the first one? ”
He swallowed and stared at the screen.
“And the thing I told myself the whole time is that it’s just video online.
Just content. It doesn’t really touch anything real.
Except the first video was uploaded, and it didn’t stay a small thing; it metastasised.
It got screenshotted and reposted and clipped and captioned and sent to my brother’s uni mates.
And then my brother gets cornered in an alley by an obsessed fan who’s watched me get knotted on camera for years and now wants a chance at the real thing… ”
Lysander stopped talking, and the waveform flattened. He took a moment to compose himself, then he reached over and hit the playback button.
His own voice came through the studio monitors, and the sound of it made his whole body recoil.
It was nasal and thin, with a wheedling upward inflection at the end of sentences that made every statement sound like it was asking for permission, something he’d picked up in Australia from Hamish and Cassian.
“Fucking hell,” Lysander said. “I sound like that?”
The second time was worse, because now he was listening for the inflection and finding it everywhere. Inside his head, he was assured, dry and sharp-edged. On the playback, he stumbled over words and sounded uncertain of his own story.
He recorded it again. Then again. Then six more times, adjusting his posture, his distance from the microphone, the angle of his chin, because surely the problem was mechanical. If he gave his voice box more room, he would sound better.
By the ninth take, he’d stopped flinching at the playback.
His voice was still higher and thinner than he would have liked it to be, but at least the story underneath it had started to settle into a shape that felt coherent.
When he listened back to the final take, he could at least hear the steadiness in his own voice, even if it wasn’t entirely polished.
He saved the file, labelled it test 09, and closed the software.
His ankle throbbed when he stood, the joint stiff from two hours of immobility, and he took the basement stairs one at a time, gripping the banister. He should check on his father, whose headache had been particularly bad that morning.
Diwa was sitting on the edge of the bed when Lysander made it up to the master bedroom.
Colin was propped against him, his head resting in the crook of Diwa’s shoulder.
His face was crumpled and blotchy as his hands gripped the front of Diwa’s shirt with a white-knuckled desperation that Lysander had never seen from him.
“Daddy?”
“The headache’s come back,” Diwa said. “He’s been struggling with it for the last hour.”
“It’s not just a headache.” Colin’s words came out thick, each one misaligned with the one before it, as though his mouth and his brain were running on a delay.
“It’s… the light’s doing something. When I look at the window, there’s…
” He blinked, and his gaze drifted past Lysander towards the curtains.
“There’s bits. Flickery bits. Like when you look at the sun and then look away, except I haven’t looked at the sun, so I don’t know why they’re… ”
He trailed off. His brow creased, and his fingers tightened on Diwa’s shirt.
“I had a thought,” Colin said. “Just now. I was going to say it and it’s gone.” He turned his face into Diwa’s neck. “Things keep going.”
Diwa’s free hand came up and cupped the side of Colin’s head, his fingers sliding into Colin’s hair.
“You’re all right,” Diwa murmured, his mouth close to Colin’s ear. “I’m right here.”
“Can you get Diwa for me?” Colin said.
Lysander’s breath stopped.
Colin was looking at Diwa. His head was resting against Diwa’s collarbone, and he had the alpha’s arm around his shoulders. “Can you —” Frustration and confusion pulled at Colin’s features. “I need Diwa. He’ll know what to do about the flickery bits.”
The colour left Diwa’s face at once.
Colin opened his mouth to say something more, but he stopped mid-syllable.
His jaw clamped shut. His whole body stiffened against Diwa, every muscle locking at once, his back arching so that his head pressed hard into Diwa’s shoulder and his hands pulled the fabric of Diwa’s shirt taut across his chest.
His eyes rolled upward until the irises disappeared and only the whites remained, glassy and unseeing, fixed on a point on the ceiling.
He made no sound at all. His father lay rigid in his alpha’s arms like a piece of wood, his spine curved, his swollen belly straining against the jumper, and the only sound in the room was Lysander’s own breathing, coming in shallow and fast. Then the convulsions started.
Colin’s limbs jerked. His arms, still locked, began to shudder in short, rhythmic spasms that travelled from his shoulders to his fists, and his legs kicked against the duvet, his swollen ankles catching in the bedding. A thin line of saliva ran from the corner of his clenched mouth down his chin.
Diwa rolled Colin onto his side, away from the headboard and into the centre of the mattress.
He pulled the pillows away from Colin’s head, swept the duvet back so it couldn’t tangle around his legs, and positioned himself behind Colin’s seizing body with one arm braced along his spine to keep him from rolling off the bed.
His hand found Colin’s belly and held it. Even now, his hand went to the baby.
“Lysander,” Diwa called out. “Ambulance — now.”
Lysander’s hands were shaking so badly that he nearly dropped his mobile twice before his thumb found the nine and pressed it three times.
A woman’s voice picked up and asked which service he required.
“Ambulance.” The word came out wet and wrecked. “My father’s having a seizure. He’s a male omega and he’s pregnant with pre-eclampsia. He’s seizing, please, he’s on the bed and he won’t stop —”
The operator asked for the address. The house number and the street and the postcode came out of his mouth in the right order, which surprised him, because nothing else inside his skull was in any order at all.
“Is he still seizing?”
Lysander looked at the bed. Colin’s body was still jerking in Diwa’s arms, his limbs shuddering hard enough to make the mattress creak. Diwa had one arm across his belly, holding him steady on his side, his legs kicking at the bare sheet.
“Yes,” Lysander said. “He’s on his side. His partner’s holding him. He’s been seizing for — I don’t know how long. A minute. Two minutes. I don’t know.”
“Don’t try to restrain him or put anything in his mouth. Can you tell me how far along the pregnancy is?”
“Thirty-eight weeks. He’s been on bed rest for pre-eclampsia.
He’s having issues with high blood pressure, protein in his urine, swelling in his hands and ankles.
” He recited each fact in the order Diwa had given him over the phone during their check-in calls.
“He was having visual disturbances before the seizure started. He said he could see flickering spots, and he couldn’t recognise his partner. ”
“The ambulance is on its way. Stay on the line for me.”
Lysander stood three feet from the bed with his mobile pressed to his ear and watched his father seize in his alpha’s arms. He described what he was seeing in words that belonged to a medical textbook because the ones that belonged to him — Daddy, please, Daddy, stop, please stop — would have been useless to the woman on the other end.
Colin stilled. The spasms stopped, all at once, as though someone had cut the current running through him. His body sagged against Diwa, his head lolling forward so that his chin dropped to his chest.
“He’s stopped,” Lysander said into the mobile. “He’s not moving, but at least he’s breathing. I can see his chest rising.”
Colin made a low and formless sound. His gaze drifted across the room without catching, passing over Lysander’s face.
The sharp smell of urine hit Lysander a beat later, even before he saw the wet patch spreading through the sheet beneath Colin’s hips, darkening the fabric of Diwa’s trousers where Colin was pressed against him.
Diwa didn’t flinch or shift away from Colin. He held Colin against his chest with both arms and pressed his mouth to the top of Colin’s head, murmuring into his hair.
The alpha’s head lifted at the sound of incoming sirens, his gaze snapping towards the window, and Lysander was already moving, his splinted ankle forgotten as he staggered down the stairs and wrenched the front door open.
Two paramedics came through the yellow door with their bags and a stretcher that they left folded in the hallway. Lysander led them upstairs, his voice steady enough to relay the basics, and then he stepped back from the bed because there was nothing left for him to do except stay out of the way.
They worked quickly, getting a blood pressure cuff on Colin’s arm, a cannula in the back of his hand while they talked to each other in a clipped shorthand. Colin lay between them with his eyes half open, his breath fogging the inside of the mask in shallow, irregular clouds.
Diwa hadn’t moved from the bed. He was sitting in the wet sheet with Colin’s hand in both of his. One of the paramedics asked him to step aside, and Diwa shook his head once without looking up.
“I’m not letting go of his hand,” he said.
The paramedic glanced at her colleague, then worked around him.