Seattle – Skycliff Penthouse
Rain pattered against the penthouse’s floor-to-ceiling windows like liquid mercury, distorting the skyline into a smeared watercolor of neon and shadow.
Lydia’s reflection flickered in the glass—as her tits bounced up and down.
She did not know when it became so monotonous for her.
She was used to travelling and receiving attention from men.
She lived a glamorous night.
Elias palmed her bronzed skin greedily, sucking on her massive breasts appreciatively.
The headboard cracked against the wall in a staccato rhythm that matched Elias’s thrusts.
He gripped her jaw, forcing her to meet his “This is only because of the two-week backlog you have, sugar. ” The filthy sounds of skin slapping as the room swam in their pheromones.
‘If he knew I purposefully blew him off with a task to get him this worked up, would he get pissed off?’ Lydia thought.
He was as vigorous as some of the younger Alphas she visited in her circuit.
He grabbed her hair in his hands.
The sting of the pain was like a cup of coffee.
He would hopefully come soon.
Lydia clawed at the sheets, her breath coming in ragged gasps as Elias pinned her wrists above her head.
His rut-addled brain barely registered the way her thighs trembled—not from pleasure, but exhaustion.
“Slow down, Elias,” she pretended to complain and moaned.
It was a dance with each partner, and she had known Elias for fifty years.
She pretended to pull away.
“Take it,” Elias grunted.
The biological imperative drowned out reason, his teeth finding the scar tissue on her mating gland—the one he’d given her at nineteen, back when he’d believed in forever.
He thrusted hard, aligning himself inside her, and hit her pleasure spot.
“Yeah, uhn, uhn!” Lydia’s moan sounded more like a sob, her nails raking down his back in a hard-hearted attempt to push him over the edge.
The scent of her distress—burnt caramel layered over vanilla—only made his rut deepen.
“You’re so fucking tight,” he snarled against her throat, hips pistoning relentlessly.
“Like you haven’t been taking others while I waited.” Elias spanked both sides of her ass hard.
“Oh fuck you,” Lydia spat.
She swung to smack him and landed a hit.
Elias kissed her hard; it was against the rules.
His tongue invaded her mouth.
It was enough to pull her back into it.
She moved her hips, now bucking back.
Elias finally felt it—the shift in her scent, the rich honeyed musk of her Omega pheromones blooming thick in the air, no longer tainted by exhaustion or fear.
It was pure, potent, and exactly what he needed.
He snarled, driving into her one last time, his knot locking them together as he spilled inside her.
His fingers tangled in her hair, pulling her head back sharply, forcing her to arch against him as he leaned down to scent her gland, inhaling deeply.
The pheromones flooded his system, sweet and heady, and his vision blurred at the edges with satisfaction.
Lydia felt him start licking the sweat from her like he was nursing off her pheromone gland.
They all did it; it was a curse of her pheromones.
Her sons inherited it from her mother’s line.
She was a boon for the Riveria family to use.
Her brothers and cousins all held official positions.
Her father wanted another ‘pawn’ like her.
It was why he had moved her to Skycliffe.
Her lonely penthouse.
She was approaching her seventies; she was no spring chicken.
She was kept away from the women to try to produce a female for the next generation.
She wondered if her own mother felt locked away from the world as a girl.
Now she knew.
It was very lonely.
Lydia’s breath hitched when Elias finally released her hair, her body sagging forward onto the mattress, boneless and spent.
He kept her pinned, his weight pressing her into the sheets as he nuzzled the sweat-damp curve of her neck, breathing her in.
The scent of submission clung to her skin now, mingling with his own musk—claim laid bare, hunger sated for now.
Outside, the storm raged on, rain hammering the glass like an echo of his pulse.
Elias exhaled, his fingers tracing the fading marks along her spine—some old, some fresh—before pressing his lips to the nape of her neck.
A gesture too soft for the moment, too gentle for what had just happened between them.
Lydia didn’t react.
She was already drifting, her body surrendering to the exhaustion he’d wrung from her.
Elias looked at the usually energetic Lydia; their relationship was contractual, but he still cared.
She was the mother of his son after all.
He pulled out slowly, knot deflating, and rolled onto his back beside her.
“Why the delay?” he asked, voice rough but curious.
Lydia stretched her sore limbs, wincing as the motion pulled at fresh bite marks.
“My father’s friend,” she muttered, her voice thick with fatigue.
“Demanded breeding rights during my estrus. Took him four days to finish—weaker rut, weaker knot.” She exhaled sharply through her nose, a sound halfway between disgust and exhaustion.
“Not like you.”
“Oh?” Elias’s jaw tightened.
He hadn’t known.
“I was in Geneva last month, settling Owen into his new place. He looks so much like your father,” he said, as if expecting her to care.
“He and Kieran needed change.”
The rain outside had softened to a murmur, but the silence between them was louder.
Lydia turned her head slightly, studying his profile.
“Oh? Is he taking over Europe already? You getting tired?”
Elias laughed—a low, humorless sound that didn’t reach his eyes.
“No, he just takes after you. Eager to take half my fortune and run away from my love.” His fingers traced idle circles on her hipbone, a mockery of tenderness.
Lydia’s lips curled into something too sharp to be a smile.
“He’s a smart boy.” She rolled onto her side, wincing as her abused muscles protested.
She hissed slightly.
“I was just about to send another girl. She is from South Africa, you’d like her.”
“That would probably drive him to Antarctica to never return if you sent someone ‘like you’,” Elias said.
His son and Lydia did not mix well.
He had stopped hosting her at Martha’s behest after she witnessed an interaction between Owen and his mother.
Elias continued, “I have been trying myself. I think the next generation is going to be Omegan.” Owen was stubborn and damaged.
Elias’ gaze flicked to the bite marks blooming along her shoulder—purple fingerprints of possession.
He hummed; that was going to cost him.
“Not that it is a bad thing, but we’ve kept the family Alpha run since the beginning.”
Lydia’s laugh was brittle, catching in her throat.
“Maybe he likes a conquest like his father.” Her fingers brushed the mating scar at her neck—old silver against fresh bruises.
“Or I wouldn’t still be here. You can contract with other, younger women you know.”
Elias scoffed, “Not many girls are built like South American girls. As you know, I have specific tastes.”
Lydia pulled out a cigarette and lit it, the flare of the match casting jagged shadows across her exhausted face.
She inhaled deeply, the ember glowing like a dying star between her fingers.
“You always did like them bigger,” she said, exhaling smoke toward the ceiling.
“But youth doesn’t guarantee Omegas—just desperation.”
The silence stretched, broken only by the hiss of rain against glass.
Elias watched the way her ribs moved beneath her skin with each drag—too pronounced, too sharp.
He’d noticed it earlier, when he’d gripped her.
“You okay, Lyd?”
Lydia exhaled through her nose, smoke curling around her face like a veil.
“Enrique keeps arranging matings,” she said, voice flat.
“Like I’m some—” Her fingers twitched around the cigarette.
“—broodmare with a spreadsheet.”
Elias snorted, tracing a bruise on her thigh—dark as wine, blooming where someone had held her down too hard.
“Tell him no.”
“Tell him?” She laughed, low and bitter, the sound catching like a hook in her throat.
“You think I haven’t?” The cigarette trembled slightly between her fingers.
His gaze flicked to the comms on the bedside table—the one blinking with notifications from the Koch Consortium, the Montez Group, half a dozen Alphas waiting their turn.
Elias reached over and flipped it face down.
“Then stop answering.” He caught her wrist, thumb brushing the raised scar on her inner arm—an old mating mark, faded but never gone.
“You’re not a fucking prize to be auctioned.”
‘This again.
Every five to ten years.
From another male.’ Lydia exhaled smoke through her nose, watching it curl toward the ceiling like a dying ghost.
“Easy for you to say,” she softly murmured.
Her free hand drifted absently to her stomach—flat now, but not for lack of trying.
“The only time I’m left alone is when I’m carrying. Nine months of peace.” Her lips twisted.
“Then after the milk dries and my body rebounds, it starts again. Says it’s better this way—less attachment. That it is the law, and it is, because of the Accords. I brood until I cannot. I am not a royal, and I was too stupid before I met you.”
Elias’s jaw flexed.
He’d seen the nursery photos on Owen’s tablet—Lydia blurred in the background of each frame, her smile brittle.
Owen understood his mother, but he did not.
‘Why not leave?
Why not just implore him?
Enrique was a powerful man, but so was he.’
“Bullshit.” His fingers tightened around her wrist.
“You could fight it. You’re still a Riveria.”
Lydia’s cigarette ash trembled as she tapped it into a crystal tray, her laughter sharp enough to cut glass.
“A Riviera?” She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling where condensation from their sweat still streaked the plaster.
“That meaning of that name died when my father traded me for mineral rights to Chettiar. The brat I bore for him hates me too. His father has assassinated the less powerful younger Alphas who earned a bit of favour.” The hollows beneath her collarbones deepened as she inhaled—not just smoke, but the memory of iron bars and a contract signed in her own blood.
“What would he do if he heard I was going to form a limited harem?”
“He’d eliminate any threats to him and competition,” Elias said and sighed.
His thumb stilled on her wrist.
He would fight for her, but others would die.
She’d be left without her kin and the target of revenge.
“Now you remember why. At least, you reached the conclusion quickly, that you just cannot save me like life is some fairy tale.” Lydia frowned.
She could see his brows furrowing.
All the fathers of her progeny were so concerned.
Alphas were territorial creatures.
“I am not some princess in a tower, who can be saved. I have to run out the clock as per the Accords.” she looked at the rain streaking down the window and said.
“You know, Owen just does not understand why you choose to stay, and he hates his grandfather. He resents your choices. He refuses to enter into a contract with an omega because of my mistakes. It’s my fault for falling in love with you and trying to use him to entice you to stay.”
‘I wish he had not said that.’ Lydia thought as she struggled to keep her emotional state steady.
The room fell silent as his love confession hit her heart again.
It was not the fact that she did not love him or care, it was because she could not.
Her cigarette burned forgotten between her fingers, ash curling like dead petals toward the sheets.
“He doesn’t need to understand,” she said softly, watching the smoke curl toward the ceiling.
“He just needs to thrive and use the gift of freedom he has.”
Elias’s comms buzzed—an insistent pulse against the nightstand.
“Ah, damn it.” he whined.
Martha’s ID flashed, urgent and blue.
“I told her to handle everything, I am sorry.” He swiped it open without moving from Lydia’s side.
“Speak.”
Lydia ashed the cigarette.
What was she going to do anyways, maybe it would soften up his knot, and she could go shower or eat something.
“Elias,” Martha’s voice was clipped, professional, but the slightest tremor betrayed her unease.
“There’s been high spending on Owen’s corporate account—a hospital in Normund. And purchases. Female clothing. Size extra small.” A pause.
“All the specialists were added. A Dietician. Endocrinology. Gynecology. Genetics.”
“Oh? He has not announced anything to me. Neither of them would fit those clothes.” Elias sat up slowly, the sheets pooling at their waists.
He didn’t glance at Lydia—didn’t need to.
The air between them had gone static, thick with unspoken implications.
His fingers tightened around the comm.
“Investigate, if he dropped his comms, just wipe it, and send a new one. There no need to go after some poor beta who is suffering in a hospital,” he ordered, voice low.
Martha exhaled—a soft, knowing sound.
“I anticipated you’d ask me to look into it, so I did. I’m not an idiot who would interrupt your ‘time’ with Ms. Riveria over identity theft.” She paused, heavier this time.
“Owen is keeping an Omega girl there. Registered under a pseudonym—of Jane Doe, but the patient records, according to our people, are for a C. Agneau. Upon closer examination, her records…” A beat.
“They’re falsified. Poorly at that.”
Lydia wiggled her hips to check the knot with a sigh.
It was a risky gambit that might lead to another round.
But he was on the comms with Martha, a wet blanket personified.
They used to get along.
Lydia’s cigarette had burned down to the filter, the acrid scent of charred paper curling between them.
She didn’t move; she saw Elias’ shoulders tense up.
She pulled out another basil cigarette and lit it, sucking in the sweet smoke.
Elias rubs his brow, “Did you find out anything about her?”
‘Her?’ the thought perked Lydia up suddenly, she froze and started listening to Elias’ half of the conversation.
Martha responded, “She looks like a pretty beta, but she is in an omegan wing. Kieran is involved.”
“Hmm.” Elias hummed, “Then it should be fine, at least his interest is piqued. Watch the situation from afar, but we know ‘he’ won’t let anyone touch him.”
Elias’ fingers tapped against the comm, slow and deliberate, like he was counting down the seconds before the next disaster.
“I will call him to check in. He knows we can see the accounts. He knows he cannot escape his doting father.”
Martha sighed, “I am pretty sure Europe is his attempt to step out of your shadow, Elias. Don’t push the clinginess too far. You’re like an obsessed broodsire. The omega staff all think so.”
Elias grinned, “I cannot help it. You are one to talk. You call that kid every other day.”
“At least mine did not want to run away. I don’t smother.” Martha said.
Her little dark one liked her just as she was.
They were both different beasts.
“I will reach out, thanks for keeping watch while I was indisposed,” Elias said, thanking Martha.
“You were in something. No problem. I will reach out to Kieran later.” Martha exclaimed.
“Have fun.”
Elias laughed and tossed the comm onto the nightstand with a clatter, fingers raking through his sweat-damp hair.
The mention of Kieran Rose giving up his place to another omega coiled in his gut like barbed wire—too many unanswered questions, too many hushed rumors about that family.
Was there something going on?
Was he going to step away from the company?
He exhaled sharply through his nose, the scent of Lydia’s cigarette smoke mingling with the fading musk of their coupling.
Lydia watched him from beneath half-lidded eyes, the ember of her cigarette casting flickering shadows across the sharp planes of her face.
“Kieran?” she murmured, the name curling off her tongue like a dare.
“Was that the pretty little Rose heir with the martyr complex? The one that used to go out culling with Owen?”
Elias’s jaw tightened.
He didn’t miss the way Martha had hesitated—the unspoken something clinging to her words like static.
Kieran Rose wasn’t just *involved*; he was meticulous, surgical in his dealings.
If he’d let this girl slip through the cracks of some beta pseudonym, it wasn’t an oversight.
It was either his insistence, or Owen had let her in.
Lydia blew a smoke ring toward the ceiling, watching it dissipate into the humid air.
“So he’s with that boy still. No kids yet?”
Elias snorted, flicking a speck of ash off the sheets.
“Kieran doesn’t breed. Doesn’t like being touched—like Martha, he’s just… different.” His thumb traced Lydia’s hipbone absently, recalling the way Owen had recoiled from casual contact since childhood, always preferring the sterile distance of spreadsheets to skin.
“He’s got the same wiring as my boy. Cold hands, colder heart. Good with his hands.”
Lydia exhaled sharply through her nose, smoke curling from her nostrils like twin wraiths.
“Different,” she echoed, the word tasting bitter.
“Different, like how he convinced Owen that breeding contracts are barbaric? He has the boy wrapped around his fingers, Elias. Something is not right with him.” Her fingers twitched around the cigarette, ash scattering onto the sheets like dried blood flakes.
“Owen could have been bonded to a dozen fertile Omegas by now—extending your line, securing your legacy—if not for Kieran’s *influence*.”
Elias watched Lydia’s cigarette tremble between her fingers, the ember flaring as she inhaled sharply—too sharply.
The accusation hung between them like the smoke curling toward the ceiling, thick and acrid.
“It’s more your influence,” he said, voice low as he traced the raised scar on her inner wrist—the one shaped like a crescent moon, from when Owen had bitten her as a toddler.
“He wants the love and affection you weren’t able to give him.”
Lydia’s laugh was a brittle thing, fracturing against the silence.
She stubbed out the cigarette with unnecessary force, the filter smearing ash across the crystal tray.
“And you think Kieran’s giving it to him?” Her lips curled, revealing teeth.
“That boy doesn’t know love. He knows strategy. Owen’s just another piece on his board. I heard you say ‘girl’. Care to elaborate?”
“No.” he rasped.
He did not know much.
Elias caught her wrist before she could reach for another cigarette, his thumb pressing into the pulse point beneath her skin.
“Listen, I will let you know when I see you next if there is more.” he conceded, watching her pupils dilate—half defiance, half dread.
“But Owen trusts him. He is the one who answers when Owen calls at midnight—” His grip tightened.
“—to talk about the pain of losing a mother and family. Owen at least started smiling after he brought him home. You should trust him.”
Lydia wrenched her hand free, the motion sending a cascade of ash onto the sheets.
“Don’t, you know the deal,” she hissed, the word ragged.
For a moment, Elias thought she might strike him—her fingers twitched like she was imagining it.
Then she exhaled, slow and measured, and reached for the pack again.
This time, he didn’t stop her.
“You don’t get to guilt me, never does he, he has no idea how it hurts to be pulled away from your children. To be trapped by the Accords,” Lydia murmured, lighting the cigarette with hands that didn’t shake.
Not anymore.
Elias watched the way the flame guttered between her fingers before she shook it out.
He knew the shape of her silence—had memorized it over years of watching her retreat into smoke and bruises.
“Then tell me,” he said, softer now.
“Tell me what Enrique really does to you when the contracts are signed.”
The cigarette glowed as she inhaled, the ember flaring like a warning signal.
“You think it’s just breeding?” Lydia’s laugh was a brittle thing, fracturing against the silence.
“He trades my pussy for force to private military company families.” She tapped her forearm, where the skin was faintly bruised.
“They get rough.” She wrenched forehead and twisted his nipple hard between her nails until he hissed.
“But, I fight back.”
Elias’s fingers curled into fists against the sheets, his scent spiking sharply with fury.
Lydia just smiled—a thin, knowing thing—and blew smoke toward the ceiling.
“See? Even you, don’t know half of it.” She shifted, wincing as fresh bite marks pulled against the sheets.
“Freedom’s a fairy tale, Elias. My children, who are hurt by my forced absences, stay breathing. If I don’t love them, they stay safe from other Alphas. They stay off the Riviera chessboard if I keep my distance. Or else he’d try to use them as their dear old ‘grandpa’. ”
‘Fuck she is so pissed.’ Elias thought as he exhaled through his nose, the scent of burnt caramel and clove clinging to his skin like a brand.
He traced the ridge of Lydia’s collarbone, the way it jutted too sharply beneath her skin.
“He knows better than to ask for favours from my son and me.” His thumb brushed the bruise blooming beneath her clavicle—dark as a storm cloud.
“I’m sorry, Lyd. I’m just a bit possessive.” The admission tasted like ash on his tongue.
Lydia snorted, the sound dripping with irony.
She flicked her cigarette toward the tray, missing by inches.
The ember hissed against the silk sheets, burning a black hole in the fabric.
“Possessive?” Her lips curled around the word like it was poison.
“You fuck me like you’re trying to carve your name into my bones, then act like getting out of the cycle is so easy. When you are just another bar in my gilded cage.”
The silence that followed was thick enough to choke on.
Elias watched the smoke curl from Lydia’s lips, the way it twisted into the shape of things unsaid—of contracts signed in blood, of children kept at arm’s length, of a boy who hated his mother because he didn’t understand the cage she was born into.
Outside, the rain slowed to a whisper, the city lights bleeding through the glass like distant stars.