Chapter Thirty-Seven
Lysander came through the front door and walked straight into his alpha. He pressed his face into Hamish’s chest and went heavy, his whole body surrendering to gravity at once, and Hamish caught him with one arm around his waist.
Hamish kicked the door shut and held him in the hallway.
He didn’t ask how it went. The answer was in the boneless drape of limbs that had spent the afternoon held rigid, the way his fingers curled into the back of Hamish’s shirt and stayed there. Lysander had done the hard part on his own, and now he needed help getting past it.
Hamish walked him upstairs with an arm still around him, Lysander’s feet finding the steps on instinct while the rest of him leaned into Hamish’s side. The bedroom door closed behind them, and Lysander sat on the edge of the mattress and looked up at him.
“Come here, alpha,” Lysander said.
Hamish crouched between Lysander’s knees, and Lysander’s hands found his face, his fingertips scratching through his beard, then exploring the rest of his face like he was checking that all the familiar pieces of him were still where he’d left them. Then Lysander kissed his cheek.
His omega’s scent rose around them both, thick and syrupy, the warm, ripe sweetness that Hamish had learned to read as an invitation.
This was the scent that meant Lysander wanted to be held down and covered and reminded whose teeth belonged on his neck.
Hamish breathed it in, and beneath it he caught the fleeting scent of another alpha.
It was faint enough that Lysander probably couldn’t smell it on himself anymore, but Hamish’s alpha hindbrain was calibrated to track any encroachment on his omega.
Lysander’s head tipped back, baring his throat and the smooth, unmarked skin over his mating gland.
Hamish drew closer, pressed his mouth to the gland and bit down.
He didn’t break skin, but he bore down hard enough that Lysander’s breath caught, his spine arching off the mattress as the pressure settled into the nerve cluster beneath the surface.
Hamish held it, his teeth denting the flesh, his tongue flat against Lysander’s skin.
Lysander’s head lolled sideways. Hamish kissed the bite mark and rose, shifting his weight forward and pressing Lysander down into the mattress with the full length of his body. Lysander’s thighs opened around his hips. His joggers were already damp at the front, slick soaking through the cotton.
Lysander’s joggers came down to his thighs and no further, Hamish’s belt buckle hit the floor with a clatter, and then Hamish was pushing into him while his hand found Lysander’s jaw and held it, turning his face so they were breathing the same air.
The tight, wet heat of Lysander’s body yielded around him easily. Lysander’s eyes opened and fixed on Hamish’s face, glassy and dark.
“There’s my omega…” Hamish murmured, and began to move.
He kept his thrusts slow and deep, his weight bearing down on the omega through his chest and his forearms while Lysander’s legs locked around him and his heels dug into the backs of Hamish’s thighs.
The bedframe shifted against the wall with a rhythmic thud that neither of them cared about, and Lysander’s fingers found Hamish’s hair and held on.
Every thrust drove Dane out of Lysander’s mind and out of the room, until all that mattered was the two of them: the omega spread out beneath his alpha, taking everything he gave.
Lysander came first, clenching hard enough around Hamish’s cock that his own orgasm followed seconds later, his knot swelling and locking them together.
He pressed his forehead against Lysander’s collarbone and breathed, his heart still going hard against Lysander’s ribs, while Lysander’s fingers combed through his hair in slow, absent passes.
“Hamish,” Lysander said, into the top of his head.
“Mm.”
“You’re very heavy.”
“I know.”
Lysander’s chest vibrated with laughter, his body tightening around Hamish’s knot until they both groaned. Hamish lifted himself just enough to pull his glasses off and drop them blindly onto the bedside table, where they landed with a clack.
He settled back down, one arm beneath Lysander’s shoulders, his nose buried in the crook of his neck where the bite mark was already darkening into a bruise.
Lysander’s hips shifted beneath him in a deliberate grinding movement that tightened the pressure around the knot.
Then again, with more purpose, a rhythmic clench and drag that worked his inner muscles in a practised sequence, milking Hamish’s cock in waves that drew another pulse of come out of him, then another, the knot softening incrementally with each one.
Hamish knew the technique for what it was.
Lysander had told him about his ‘milking trick’ once, late at night in the Brunswick East cottage.
It was a move he’d perfected across hundreds of hours of filmed content, because every minute an alpha spent locked inside him was a minute the next alpha couldn’t start, and Dane ran his shoots on a tight schedule.
“Feels really good for them, and gets them out of me more quickly,” he’d laughed.
His hands settled on Lysander’s hips and held them still.
“Don’t,” Hamish said. “There’s no rush. I could stay locked in you for the rest of the day.”
Lysander went slack beneath him. The grinding stopped, his muscles softening around the knot, and his breath came out in a long, unsteady exhale.
“I sent you the audio file,” Lysander said, his lips moving against Hamish’s hair. “From today’s recording. It’s in your inbox.”
Hamish lifted his head just enough to see Lysander’s face. His omega’s eyes were closed, his lashes dark against the flushed skin beneath them.
“Will you listen to it?” Lysander asked. “And tell me what you think.”
“Of course I will,” Hamish said.
Lysander’s fingers started moving through his hair again. Hamish set his mouth to the bruise on his neck and closed his eyes.
? ? ?
Lysander was asleep before Diwa had finished clearing the plates.
One minute he’d been sitting upright at the dining table with a fork in his hand and his knee pressed against Hamish’s beneath it, and the next his head had dropped onto Hamish’s shoulder with the sudden, total surrender of someone whose body had simply overruled the rest of him.
Hamish had got him upstairs, steered him out of his jeans and into the bed, and Lysander had curled onto his side and gone under without so much as pulling the duvet up.
Hamish stood in the doorway, watching the shallow rise of his omega’s ribs, then eased the door shut and went downstairs.
The living room was lit by the television and not much else.
Cassian had claimed the far end of the sofa with his legs folded beneath him, Tala propped upright against his chest, her head tucked under his chin.
A panel show was on, one with comedians behind desks, where every punchline arrived at the expense of a very British celebrity Hamish had never heard of, and Cassian was laughing at it with the breathless, full-bodied commitment he gave to everything that delighted him.
He couldn’t possibly have understood half of the references. Two of the panellists had just spent forty-five seconds on a joke about a Love Island contestant’s accent, and he was laughing so hard that Tala’s head wobbled against his collarbone.
“She started it,” Cassian said, catching Hamish’s eye as he lowered himself onto the empty end of the sofa.
He nodded down at Tala, whose mouth was open in a gummy, wet approximation of hilarity, her fists batting the air beside Cassian’s jaw.
“She laughed first, and then I had to laugh because she was laughing, and now we can’t stop. ”
Tala shrieked in apparent confirmation, and Cassian dissolved again, his nose scrunching, his free hand coming up to cradle the back of her head while his shoulders shook.
Hamish settled into the cushions, pulled his over-ear headphones from the side pocket of his bag, and fitted them into place. The room dropped away, replaced by the insulated quiet of noise cancellation.
He opened his inbox on his mobile, found Lysander’s email, and tapped the audio file.
Dane’s laugh came through the headphones with a warmth that made Hamish’s molars press together.
He listened to the man describe pulling up to a Barking estate in a white Range Rover and spotting a skinny eighteen-year-old with his arms crossed, pretending not to care.
Hamish could see all of it, and had to close his eyes against the image of this man circling his omega like something he intended to buy.
He listened on.
Then Lysander asked for an apology, and Dane said no. Hamish could tell from the man’s voice that he’d genuinely never considered the possibility that he’d done anything wrong.
Hamish pulled his glasses off with one hand and pressed his thumb and forefinger into the corners of his eyes. The lenses caught the television’s light as he set them on his knee, and his vision blurred the room into soft, indistinct shape.
The recording played on, but Hamish wasn’t hearing the questions anymore. He was hearing the pauses between them, those silences where he could feel the effort it had taken his omega to sit in that room with the alpha who’d used him.
A tear slid from beneath his lashes and tracked down to his jaw. He wiped it with the heel of his hand in a quick, rough pass.
Cassian’s weight shifted on the sofa. A shoulder pressed into his arm, followed by the solid warmth of Cassian’s side settling against him. Tala was still on Cassian’s chest, her breathing gone slow and even. Cassian’s free hand landed on Hamish’s forearm and stroked.
Hamish looked over. Cassian’s mouth was moving, shaping two words with exaggerated care so that Hamish could read them through the blur of his tears.
Good alpha, Cassian mouthed at him, over and over.
Hamish put his glasses back on, and kept listening.
He rewound the file to the beginning and started again.
This time, he switched off the part of his brain that knew Lysander’s body, and the warm sprawl of him asleep on Hamish’s chest. He turned off the part of him that wanted to reach through the recording and pull Dane’s tongue out of his mouth by the root.
He’d been evaluating recorded content for fifteen years, and so had developed a solid rubric for media.
The first criterion was always timeliness.
Did this story need to exist now, today, in the current landscape, or was it content for content’s sake?
Lysander’s piece cleared that bar without effort.
The conversation about creator exploitation, about the machinery that chewed up young people and monetised their worst moments, was everywhere at the moment.
But almost none of it came from the ones who’d been the product.
Lysander’s recording inverted that, and the inversion alone was enough to make an audience lean in.
Heart was the second criterion, and the hardest to quantify.
He’d spent years trying to define what separated a competent documentary from one that crawled under your skin and lived there, and the closest he’d come was this: heart was the moment when the subject stopped performing and you heard the actual person underneath.
Most interviews never got there. The subject stayed behind their talking points, and the interviewer stayed behind their questions, and the result was two people maintaining adjacent monologues in the same room.
Lysander got there inside the first ten minutes. His voice cracked on the word “heat,” and instead of covering it or cutting around it, he sat in the crack and kept talking. The rawness wasn’t decorative.
Dane was good too. That was the part that set his jaw aching.
The man was articulate, charming, entirely without shame, and his refusal to apologise created a tension that no amount of scripting could have manufactured.
Here were two men with fundamentally incompatible versions of the same history, neither willing to concede.
The podcast’s audience would be unable to stop listening.
Cassian shifted beside him, adjusting Tala’s position against his chest, and Hamish reached over without looking and tucked the blanket tighter around the baby’s feet.
Structure. Lysander had an instinct for it that Hamish wouldn’t have guessed at. The recording built in clean, escalating beats — how they met, how the content started, how it evolved — with each stage raising the stakes without overselling them.
There was no narrative commentary between sections, no voice-of-God telling the listener what to feel.
Lysander asked a question, Dane answered, and the horror of the man’s answer did its own work.
By the time Lysander said “twenty alphas,” the listener had already arrived at their own revision of everything Dane had presented as reasonable, because the escalation had been so gradual that the line between consent and coercion had blurred without anyone drawing attention to it.
That was craft. Whether Lysander knew it was craft or whether he’d simply told the truth and the truth had arranged itself into good architecture, the result was the same. The piece worked.
Hamish pulled up the mental checklist and ran the rest. Originality: a male omega interrogating his own exploitation, with the exploiter sitting across the desk and cheerfully confirming every accusation as a business decision.
Nothing like it existed. Replay value: he’d already listened to it twice, and the Dane sections revealed new layers on the second pass.
Audience: built-in and massive, between Lysander’s existing subscriber base and the press coverage from Stephen’s stalker.
He pulled off his headphones and stared at the ceiling as he held two things in his head at once.
The first was that listening to the man who’d pimped out his omega describe the operation with fondness had been one of the most repulsive experiences of his professional life.
The second was that it was fucking good.
It was the kind of debut that would chart in its first week. Meredith would know exactly what to do with it, and the industry would fall over itself to hail Lysander as a rising star.
When Lysander woke up and asked him what he thought, Hamish would have to tell him the truth, even if Hamish wanted nothing more than to make this recording disappear from existence.