It was wet, broken, and dangerously relieved.
I knew exactly what was happening in that bedroom. I knew the logistics of it. I knew the physiology. I had spent the last hour reciting the biological parameters of post-withdrawal cramping to myself like a catechism, trying to convince the roaring beast in my chest that this was a medical procedure. Daniel was providing sonic oscillation to break up muscle tension. Daniel was providing stability.
Daniel was putting his mouth on the woman I had spent years trying to forget.
"Stop pacing," I snapped, not turning around.
Simon froze mid-step near the window. He was a mess of nervous energy, his dark hair pulled into a chaotic knot, his fingers twitching against his thighs as if he were trying to draw the air.
"I can't sit still," Simon hissed, his voice pitched low, darting a terrified glance toward the hallway. "Do you hear that? He's… he’s reading to her."
"He is managing the crisis," I corrected, though the words tasted like battery acid. "He is utilizing his skillset."
"His skillset involves her legs wrapped around his head, Anders," Simon muttered, sliding down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, burying his face in his hands. "God. We broke every rule in the book."
"We wrote new rules," I said, opening my laptop.
I couldn't listen anymore. If I listened, the Alpha in me, the possessive, territorial creature that lived beneath the tailored suits and the contract law, was going to kick that bedroom door down. I would drag Daniel off her and finish what we started on the kitchen floor. And that would invoke the brass lamp again. That would destroy the fragile détente we had managed to scrape together.
I needed a target. I needed something to kill.
Since I was currently barred from killing the source of her pain, and I couldn't kill my friends, I decided to kill the things that threatened her existence.
I logged into the network. The satellite connection was spotty thanks to the storm damage, but the redundant uplink I had installed in the rental unit, my own paranoid backup, was holding steady at low bandwidth.
I pulled up the dossier on T.L. Rose.
Not the marketing packet. Not the sales figures. I pulled up the raw data. The digital footprint.
"What are you doing?" Simon asked, lifting his head.
"I am auditing the fortress," I murmured, my fingers flying across the mechanical keyboard. Theclack-clack-clackwas a satisfyingly violent sound, a percussion of control in a chaotic room.
I started digging. I ran a traceroute on her domain registration. I engaged the search algorithms I paid a small fortune for, the ones that scraped the dark underbelly of the forums where obsession turned into stalking.
What I found made my blood run cold.
It wasn't a fortress. It was a house of cards built inside a glass box.
Nexus Management. Her previous representation. The hack-job agency that had pumped her full of suppressants and milked her for content before I bought out her contract. They hadn't protected her; they had hidden her.
"Security through obscurity," I muttered, a curse word in my industry.
They had relied on the fact that no one was looking hard enough. They hadn't encrypted her personal email metadata. They hadn't bought up the typo-squatting domains. Her registered address for the copyright filings funneled through a shell company that dissolved two years ago, leaving a paper trail that led, terrifyingly, to a P.O. Box three towns over from here.
"What is it?" Simon crawled over, drawn by the change in my scent. I reeked of cold winter air and ozone, sharp and aggressive.
"She’s exposed," I said, hitting a key that brought up a visualization of the threat vectors. "She thinks she’s anonymous because she doesn't do interviews. But look at this."
I pointed to a thread on a sub-forum dedicated to Omegaverse theory.
User: RoseWatcher88 posted: "I tracked the IP on the newsletter header. It pings to the Pacific Northwest. Coastal grid. Anyone else think the descriptions of rain in 'Alpha's Oath' are a little too accurate?"
Drafted three weeks ago. No replies yet. But it was a crack in the dam.
"Someone is knocking on the door," Simon whispered, his eyes widening.
"And no one locked it," I snarled.
