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His scent is everywhere now, blood orange and amber gone molten with want, and the strength holding me effortlessly aloft against the chrome makes something primal in the Omega of me keen low and needy.

I can feel the restraint in him—the deliberate, devastating control of a man who could take and chooses instead to ask, who has me pinned and breathless and could have anything he wanted in this empty studio and still stops, forehead to mine, to make certain the wanting runs both ways.

It is the single most seductive thing about him, this leashed power, the proof that all that strength will only ever be turned toward holding me up and never toward holding me down. My pulse roars.

My whole fractured chorus of selves falls silent at once, every splinter of me listening for my answer as hard as he is.

And because we are both unmasked, because there is no one here to perform for and nothing left to protect myself from in the circle of his arms, I give him the truth—the whole of it, with no armor and no angle and no escape route greased for later.

“That future is the only one I ever actually wanted,” I admit, the confession scraping out of somewhere unguarded. “Underneath all of it—the blades, the schemes, the lunacy I wear like couture—that’s the thing I’ve been too afraid to even name. A home. A pack that stays. A morning that isn’t the start of another betrayal.” I hold his gaze, and let the mastermind ask the only question that still matters. “The real question isn’t whether I want it, Doc. It’s whether the three of you are truly up for the ride that wanting it will entail. Because I don’t come clean. I come with an ex-husband who slaughtered everyone before you, a body count, and a mind that will never fully stop calculating the exits. That’s the cargo. Are you up for the whole haul?”

He smiles then—a real one, that rare and devastating thing, the twinkle surfacing in his eyes like sunlight finding the bottom of deep water.

I do the thing I have only dared once or twice, the thing that undoes me every time.

I reach up, slow, and I slip the glasses from his face.

Without the glass between us there is nowhere for him to hide, no lens to refract the truth into something clinical and safe.

There is only Lucien, bare and unguarded, every emotion he gatekeeps behind those frames laid open in the depths of those steel-blue eyes and the handsome unhidden lines of his face. He lets me see all of it.

The love. The certainty.

The obsession that has stopped pretending to be anything other than devotion.

I understand, holding his glasses in my hand like a stolen relic, that this is his version of what he asked of me at the pole all evening.

The full commitment. No hedging.

He has taken off the one thing he hides behind and handed me his unguarded face the same way he asked me to hand him my unguarded weight—completely, or not at all.

A man who built his entire life around never being seen, choosing to be seen.

By me. The fellow survivor.

The reflection.

It is, I think, the most naked thing he owns, and he is offering it without a single condition, and the Omega in me finally stops fighting the sound rising in her throat.

“We’re going the whole way, Genevieve,” he whispers, holding me suspended against the steel and the warmth of him, holding my gaze with nothing left between us, the glasses still warm in my fist where I refuse to give them back.

“You’re our little Omega, and we’re not going to abandon you.”

CHAPTER 28

~Lucien~

The words leave my lips like a vow etched into the amber hush of the studio, conviction threading through every syllable until they settle heavy between us.

“You’re our little Omega, and we’re not going to abandon you.”

Genevieve—Vex, my beautiful catastrophe—remains suspended against the cool chrome, her thighs locked around my hips, the full delicate weight of her entrusted to my arms without reservation.

Her fingers curl tighter around my glasses, that fragile barrier I have worn for years as both shield and signature.

Without them, the world sharpens into unfiltered edges:the violet-pink strands of her hair catching the low light like fractured amethyst, the storm-cloud flicker in her mismatched eyes where calculation wars with raw, unraveling need.

I feel exposed, stripped of the polished veneer that has armored me through lectures, through interrogations, through the meticulous reconstruction of a life built on calculated detachment.