"It's a crisis if I don't even know his name."
"Actually," Noemi muses, a shift in her voice, something between cautious and amused that immediately makes the back of my neck prickle, "I might be able to help with that."
I sit up. "What?"
"Remember that picture you showed me last week? The one you took from your window of the guy in the hallway?"
"The one where he's carrying camera equipment, yes, what about it."
"So I was at a gallery opening today and they had a wall of editorial prints from this photographer who's apparently a big deal, won a bunch of international awards, and his picture was on the program and Mavi, it's the same guy. I almost texted you but I wanted to be sure so I looked him up and it's definitely him."
My hand tightens on the phone. "What's his name?"
"Sai Hollis."
Sai. The syllable lands in my mouth and fits there perfectly, a name I could say in the dark without stumbling, a name I could moan into a pillow or whisper against someone's throat. Sai. My brain turns it over, tasting it.
Then the second word catches up.
"Wait. Hollis?"
"Hollis."
The last name hits differently than Sai did. Everyone knows the Hollis family, or at least everyone knows the version that shows up in magazines and society pages. Old money. Corporate dynasty. The kind of family that owns buildings, galleries, firms, and whole companies and people and has been doing it long enough that the owning feels like natural law. The kind of family that arranges matings for their Alphas the way other families arrange dinner parties, strategically and without consulting the main course.
The kind of family that is, in every way that matters, a larger, richer, more dangerous version of the machine my own family tried to feed me to before I walked out the door and never came back.
"Mavi?" Noemi's voice softens. "You still there?"
"He's a Hollis." The words come out flat and I can hear the temperature in my voice dropping as the implications stack. A Hollis Alpha doesn't just date people. A Hollis Alpha has arrangements, contracts, and expectations that extend beyond individual desire into the architecture of a dynasty. A Hollis Alpha who gets caught watching a camboy through his wall wouldn’t just face embarrassment. He’d face consequences from a family that considers scandal a structural failure.
"That's what I said."
"Noemi, the Hollis family is..." I don't finish the sentence because I don't need to. She knows. Everyone knows.
"I know what they are."
I lie back down and stare at the ceiling and the ache in my chest from five minutes ago, the tender one, the one that wanted to press my mouth to the wall and tell him he didn't have to hide, is still there but it's joined now by something else. Because the man on the other side of my wall isn't just a beautiful, serious, broken Alpha who watches me being soft on repeat. He's a Hollis. Which means the hiding isn't just a personality trait. The hiding is survival.
"This complicates things," I say.
"But does it change anything?"
The question sits in the quiet of my wrecked bedroom, my body still humming from the orgasm, his name in my mouth for the first time, the weight of what that name carries pressing against the want that hasn't diminished even slightly despite everything I just learned.
Sai Hollis. My subscriber. My neighbor who can't look at me in the hallway but says my name when he comes.
"No," I tell Noemi. "It doesn't change a goddamn thing."
"That's what I thought." I can hear the smile in her voice. "Be careful, Mavi."
"Careful is boring."
"Careful keeps you alive."
"So does being good at what I do." I roll onto my side and press my palm to the wall one more time, feeling the cool plaster under my skin, knowing he's on the other side of it in his orderly dark with his orderly shame and a name I finally have. "Goodnight, Noe."
"Goodnight. And Mavi?"
"What?"
"Wash your sheets."
A genuine laugh tears out of me as I roll off the bed to strip the sheets but not before I whisper into the darkness just one thing.
"Nice to finally meet you, Alpha."
