"Sai."
That's all we need. My hands find the camera and the weight of it settles something in my chest immediately. The viewfinder rises to my eye, the world reducing to a rectangle where my brain finally cooperates.
"Chin left. Slow. Stop. Hold that." There’s no need for greetings, setting up, or even pleasantries. Ines knows my routine and my hatred for small talk. It’s unnecessary when the lens can do all the talking anyone needs.
She holds and the image is already there, the one I saw in my head last night while I was supposed to be pre-visualizing this exact shot but kept drifting to a softer jaw, a glossed mouth, and a body that dares rooms to look away. I press the shutter before the comparison can settle because the comparison is a door I cannot open on set.
"Don't breathe."
The click of the shutter is the most satisfying sound I know. The rhythm builds, Ines responding to my voice with trained ease, Priya beside me with the 50mm at the exact moment the light shifts, the exchange happening without a word. Between frames I catch something warm from the styling rack, probably fabric softener, but my brain decides it's honey and citrus, the scent of an Omega who’s not even here.
The sudden craving for him has me tightening my hands on the camera. My Doll, two blocks south, standing in front of someone else's lens, and the thought of it makes my jaw clench until Priya glances at me sideways.
I exhale through my nose and reframe and keep shooting. The afternoon wraps and by four-thirty Priya is transferring the day'sshots to the monitor. I scroll through frames looking for the one where everything converges, where the light and the shadow and the expression land exactly where I put them.
Frame 847 it is. Ines at the three-quarter angle, left cheekbone catching warmth exactly the way I planned, the shadow under her jaw a perfect gradient. The satisfaction of it clicks in my chest like a lock turning.
Then Priya says, "Frame 312."
She zooms in, revealing that the focus is soft, not enough that anyone outside this room would notice, but the eyelashes that should be razor-sharp at this aperture are fractionally blurred. A thousandth of a second of motion from a hand that moved when it should have been still.
"Might have been the lens," Priya shrugs, brushing it off as a mistake made by technology rather than an Alpha who shouldn’t be making them.
It wasn't the lens and Priya knows it wasn't the lens because Priya has watched my hands hold a camera steady through twelve-hour shoots without a single frame going soft in eight years.
"Flag it. I'll reshoot if we need to."
She nods and makes a note, something fracturing quietly inside the part of me that has always trusted my hands to be the one thing the chaos couldn't reach.
The team filters out in ones and twos, goodbyes exchanged, and equipment packed in the order I always pack it. The studio empties until it's just me and the concrete and the fading light, but instead of leaving I take the back hallway to the small office I rented with the studio space and lock the door behind me.
The chair creaks as I sit down and press my palms flat on the desk, trying to breathe through the panic creeping in at the edges of my vision. When my phone buzzes in my jacket pocket with the one notification sound that makes my pulse jump, I fish itout, needing a certain Omega’s voice to calm the chaos in my head.
Velvet, Behind Glass tier, new upload.
I should ignore it and just go home where I can disappear into my prison sanctuary. My thumb opens the app anyway because my hands have been serving a different authority all day and the pretense of fighting it is exhausting.
The thumbnail loads and my breath catches because this is different from anything he's posted before. No ring light, no polished production setup, just a warm lamp and his actual bedroom, a newer lingerie set sitting against his skin in the golden light of a room that looks lived-in and real and so intimate that looking at the thumbnail alone feels like trespassing.
I press play.
"Hey," he says, the word hitting me somewhere behind my ribs.
Just hey, not the cam voice, not the performance register, not the confident commanding warmth he uses when four hundred people are watching. This is quieter, closer, the voice of a person talking to someone already in the room, and even though I know I'm one of hundreds of subscribers who will see this video my body hears that hey and decides it's for me.
"There you are, Doll," I murmur at the screen, the chaos in my head going quiet so fast it's like someone pulled a plug.
The soft frame disappears. My mother's voice disappears. Lyric, the Moreaus, the family watching, the hairspray, the laughing producer, Ines' perfume that wasn't the right scent, all of it drains out of my skull and the only thing left is this gorgeous Omega in warm light talking about his day.
Here it's just where he lives when he's being honest, and the honesty makes my throat tight in a way that the filthiest content on his platform has never managed.
"I want to know about your day, Alpha. Were you good today? Did you do something that made you proud or did you do something that made you spiral?" A pause where his eyes hold the lens. "You don't have to answer. Just listen. Be a good boy and listen to me."
"I'm listening, Doll." My voice is already wrecked, scraped down to nothing, and I'm talking to a recording that can't hear me and I don't care. "I'm right here."
He talks about his day, then his hand drags across the thin lace connecting the bralette to the panties, following the line over his stomach. "I wore something new tonight. Can you tell? The lace connects here, see, from the bralette all the way down to the panties, and the panties sit high, right over the hip bones, and the whole thing leaves very little to the imagination which is the point because I don't think you need to imagine anymore, Alpha. I think you've been imagining long enough."
"Fuck, Doll." My hand grips the edge of the desk. I am painfully hard, the arousal not from the lace or the expanse of bare skin but from his voice telling me I've been imagining long enough, like he knows, like he can see through the screen into this dark office where I'm gripping furniture to keep from touching myself.
