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Mrs White from the dry cleaner’s had delivered the Colin and Diwa saga to him in weekly instalments over the course of a year, each chapter arriving with her Tuesday sourdough order. The handyman who’d been fixing up houses along Ledbury Road for years, an omega (a male omega, which Mrs White repeated each time as though the information might have leaked out of Ruari’s ear since last Tuesday), had somehow landed the tech billionaire. Diwa de la Vega was Filipino-American, younger than Colin by over a decade, and so rich that he’d bought the five-bedroom Notting Hill house outright before the estate agent had finished the virtual viewing.

“He didn’t even negotiate,” Mrs White had told Ruari, as evidence of the young alpha’s madness. “He agreed to the full asking price. On the spot.”

Ruari had made the right noises while handing over her sourdough, since appearing interested in the bits and pieces that came to him was seventy per cent of his job.

He’d met Colin himself soon after. The man had walked into Proving Ground on a Wednesday morning, and ordered a flat white with an extra shot, no small talk. He’d paid, drunk it standing at the counter in four long pulls, set the empty cup down, and left.

Ruari had clocked him the second the door opened, because male omegas smelled like nothing else on earth: a green sweetness that cut through Proving Ground’s pervasive smell of coffee and caramelised sugar. Colin had that uncanny male-omega androgyny to his features. He was forty, easily, and was enough of a looker that Ruari’s hindbrain had supplied a brief, vivid image of bending him over the counter until his forebrain had caught up and reminded him that this omega had not shown the slightest interest in him, and was very much not here for that.

Colin came back the next day, and the next, and by the end of the week he was a regular.

Ruari’s own history was neighbourhood property too, and had been since before Proving Ground had opened. The ex-footballer. Villa’s golden boy, once upon a time, before the knee had gone in a match against Wolves that half the pub on Westbourne Grove still claimed to have watched live. The footage was on YouTube if you wanted it, showing the tackle, and the way his right leg had folded in a direction legs weren’t supposed to fold.

He’d never watched the footage. He didn’t need to when his knee replayed it for him every morning when he stood up from his bed and felt a deep grinding click that served as a daily reminder that his body had once been worth twelve million pounds a year.

The neighbourhood had opinions about his second act, and those opinions split along predictable lines. The market-stall lot and the builders thought he’d done well for himself. He made good bread, and honest work beat sitting on your arse counting your injury pay-out.

The Notting Hill mums had a different opinion, and he heard it sometimes in the exaggerated gentleness of their small talk. To them, the bakery was a beautifully rustic plaster over a wound that hadn’t healed. Poor Ruari. All that talent. At least he has his little project.

So when Cassian had appeared in Colin’s orbit, the neighbourhood had assembled a comprehensive profile within a week. He was Australian, a male omega, and he’d been taken in by Colin after one of his boys, the one who used to have an OnlyFans account, but who now had a partner who made proper documentaries, had pulled the kid out of some commune that the BBC had done a programme about. A hippie setup gone wrong, one of those places where everyone shared everything.

Ruari had never watched the documentary. He’d liked what he’d seen of Cassian just fine, and figured he’d learn anything he needed to through his own dealings with him.

But tonight, he couldn’t sleep.

His knee was the excuse he gave himself as he swung his legs off the bed at half eleven. His knee, and the fact that his brain was still running hot from a day that had started at two in the morning and hadn’t slowed down since. He’d tried lying in the dark for forty minutes, counting backwards from five hundred. He’d even done the breathing thing Dr Hartwell had suggested.

He’d done up his flat above the bakery properly when he’d bought the building, putting in a good kitchen and underfloor heating. Then he’d proceeded to use it exclusively as a place to sleep between closing and his morning alarm.

He poured himself a whisky, then tipped in a second measure because the glass looked sad half-empty, and took it to the sofa. He loaded the iPlayer on his huge telly, and typed Family of Light into the search bar.

The opening shot was of the Australian countryside, green and rolling, dense bushland climbing into mist. The Dandenongs looked like somewhere you’d go for a weekend ramble, not somewhere you’d hide a commune. A title card faded in over the image: The Family of Light: Inside Australia’s Most Secretive Commune.

Hamish McNally appeared on screen, standing at the edge of a dirt track with his hands in his pockets. Good bloke, Hamish. Ruari had shared a few rounds with him and Lysander at the pub, back when the couple had been in London before heading off to film something new for the BBC. After three pints he’d had Ruari crying with laughter over stories about the swingers’ retreat he’d filmed in Byron Bay and a couple in Fremantle who’d unschooled their kids so thoroughly that the eldest couldn’t identify the hands on a clock but could skin a rabbit in under a minute.

On screen, Hamish was doing his straight-man bit. He stood within a wide clearing as the camera pulled back to reveal what was behind him, and Ruari nearly choked on his whisky.

Fifty or sixty people, all stark naked, were arranged in rows across a sun-bleached paddock, moving through yoga poses. Men and women of every age and shape, folded and stretched in unison. Hamish stood fully clothed at the periphery with his hands still in his pockets, his expression carefully neutral.

The camera moved through the rows, until it found Cassian, picking out his bright blond head, three rows from the front, arms raised overhead in a pose that stretched him long and taut. Even in the wide shot, and amongst dozens of other naked bodies, Cassian was the one Ruari’s eye went to.

Ruari drank deep. Cassian’s male-omega cock sat small and neat between his legs. When the pose shifted and he folded forward, Ruari got a clear look at the pert curve of his arse, and had to look away.

Ruari settled deeper into the sofa cushion and turned the volume up.

On screen, Hamish’s voiceover laid it out. The Family of Light had operated from the same Dandenongs compound for thirty years, a self-sufficient community of more than a hundred and fifty residents, with sister compounds in New Zealand and Portland, Oregon. The footage cut between drone shots of the main site, showing off vast vegetable gardens, a timber prayer hall, and a cluster of low buildings with corrugated roofs, then moved on to close-ups of smiling faces at long communal tables, forty to a table.

Then the Lumineer appeared, the leader of the organisation, and Ruari understood immediately why people followed him.

He was mid-sixties, lean and straight-backed, with a full head of silver hair. He sat in a high-backed wicker chair and spoke directly to the camera.

The Universal Principles, he explained, were simple. The Universe provided, as long as you opened yourself to receive. Every person had a designation: alpha, beta, omega. Each designation carried specific gifts. The role of the Family was to honour those gifts through adherence to the Universe’s natural order. Alphas led. Betas sustained. Omegas received, nurtured, and bore the next generation into the world.

“We don’t impose roles,” the Lumineer said, his hands open on his knees. “We observe the ones the Universe has already assigned. A river doesn’t choose to flow downhill, it does that because it follows the laws of nature. In that way, we simply help our people find their flow.”

Hamish, off-camera, asked about the designation ceremonies.

Among the omegas, the Lumineer said, there were those whose Receptivity was so pure, so absolute, that they were given the title of Calyx, the Sacred Vessel through which new life entered the Family. A Calyx was cherished above all others. Protected. Honoured. Female Calyxes were already rare. A male omega Calyx was rarer still.