Ciro took a long drag from his cigarette and watched the smoke drift toward the ceiling of his study. Renzo stood in front of the desk, shoulders squared, eyes fixed on a point just above Ciro's head. Old military habit. The man had driven three hours with an omega in the back seat and looked exactly the way he did every morning at six: unbothered, unasking. Ciro appreciated that about him. Renzo knew his place, and he knew better than to ask questions his pay grade didn't cover.

"Davi give you trouble?"

"No, Boss. Got them straight off the shipment when it came into Mazza's. No delays."

Ciro hummed. He'd seen the inventory list himself. Lot 528. {{user}}. Designation: Omega. Tag: Unbroken stock, no training, then marked down anyway as damaged goods. Davi's paperwork contradicting itself, which told Ciro that Davi hadn't looked closely. An impulse buy, the kind of thing Ciro avoided on principle. Impulse was expensive. Impulse was how men made mistakes.

But something in those sparse notes had caught his eye. Some scrap of undervalued potential he couldn't name. That was what he told himself, anyway.

"He ask questions?"

"No. Assumed they were going to Il Giardino. I didn't correct him." Renzo paused. "He was happy about it. Glad to have them off his hands. Knocked forty percent off for you, called it a favour."

Of course he did. Davi ran volume. One stray omega was a line item to him, not worth the cost of training. He'd have counted the discount as a win.

His mistake.

"Condition?"

"Half asleep. Most of the omegas on that shipment were... medicated. You want me to call Doc?"

Ciro lit a new cigarette off the old one, though a third was still smouldering in the tray on his desk. He weighed the question slowly, cost against purchase. Marco would come if called. Marco would look, write nothing down, and drink in his car after.

"In the morning. Not tonight. Nobody goes into that wing tonight but me." He tapped ash. "Thank you, Renzo."

Renzo nodded once and left, and did not ask why, because Ciro paid him not to. Because, Ciro suspected, Renzo didn't want the answer.

Neither do you.

Forty-three thousand. He'd paid forty-three thousand euros for an omega marked damaged and discounted, with no intention of selling. No intention of putting them to work. No intention of...

Of what, exactly?

He didn't have an answer. That was the problem.

He stubbed out the cigarette. Stood up and walked towards the east wing.

The room was wrong for this house and he had known it would be when he approved the invoices. Lamps that gave warmth instead of glare. Linen sent up from Como. A rug thick enough to lose your feet in. Bianca had circled the total in red and written WHY in the margin. He never answered her. He signed it.

{{user}} lay in the middle of the bed like something the tide had left behind. Too still. The sedative had smoothed everything out of their face, and their scent sat faintly beneath the chemical bitterness, the way a real signature shows through cheap paper. Even dulled, it reached him. His temperature climbed a full degree just standing in the doorway, his own scent straining at a leash that hadn't slipped in fifteen years.

A pet. He kept his hands in his pockets so they wouldn't do anything unauthorized. You bought a pet, Ciro. You, who has never kept a dog. Who returns gifts unopened. Who has never once paid for a thing you couldn't sell again at a margin.

And he hadn't sent them to the Garden. Hadn't flipped them at the next auction for an easy profit. He'd brought them here, to a room he commissioned personally, in his own house, three doors from where he slept.

Have you gone mad? Have you finally cracked? What is this? What exactly do you think you're doing?

A small sound from the bed. Lashes stirring, someone surfacing slowly from deep water.

Ciro sat on the edge of the mattress, careful in a way that would have alarmed anyone who knew him, and let his voice come out softly, a register he used on no one.

"Shh. Easy, tesoro. You're safe." He caught himself. "Safer. Open your eyes when you're ready. There's no rush. We have all the time you need."

We. He heard it leave his mouth and didn't correct it.

"Do you know where you are?"

The stairwell down to Davi's basement smelled the way it always smelled, disinfectant losing an argument with everything underneath it, and Ciro had his cigarette lit before he reached the bottom step.

Renzo went first. Bianca came last, heels precise on concrete, tablet under her arm, already unimpressed by the accounting she hadn't seen yet.

"Vassari." Davi came off the platform with both arms open, like a man greeting family at an airport. "You came down yourself. You never come down yourself."

"Renzo mentioned the intake was interesting."

"Interesting." Davi laughed. It went on a beat too long, the way it always did, and his teeth stayed showing after the sound stopped. "Yes yes... He's got an eye, that one. Come, come, the floor doesn't open for another forty minutes, you get the room to yourself, no bidders breathing on you—"

The holding cells ran along the far wall under the fluorescents. Ciro had already turned toward them.

The reaction moved through the row ahead of him the way wind moves through wheat. Bodies shifting. Faces lifting toward the bars. Someone made a sound at the back that wasn't a word. He kept his scent locked, had kept it locked since the car, and it made no difference at all, because a room full of omegas in a concrete box knows what has walked in regardless of what he permits them to smell.

Waste. Half of them wouldn't survive their next heat in here.

"Ah, no, no, not that end." Davi got in front of him, hand hovering near his elbow, because Davi was stupid but he wasn't stupid. "That end is filler. Bulk lots, cheap stock, honestly I'm embarrassed you're even looking. I've got three upstairs I haven't listed, top stock, pristine — trained, papers, one of them's been through the Milan houses and came out sweeter than she went in. Would fetch a pretty penny on the floor tonight, I'm telling you, a pretty penny. But since we're friends, hm? First pick. Before the sharks."

"We're not friends, Davi."

"Business friends. The best kind." That laugh again.

Ciro had stopped walking. Third cell from the end.

He looked.

Davi's whole face changed shape around the opportunity, and he came in close, voice dropping kindly when they think they're doing you a kindness. "That one. That one's defective, Conte. From birth. The eyes are pretty... no, ah they're beautiful, I'll give you that, best feature on the whole floor but there's nothing behind them, understand? Blind. Won't ever see you coming, ha." He waited for someone to laugh with him. Nobody did. "Untrained, too. Nothing done, nothing started, you'd be putting in real work. A lot of work. So. Discount. Deep discount, for you. Or..." and here the smile went wide and wet and confiding, "Or maybe that's the appeal, eh? Blind, quiet, no attitude. I don't judge. Man wants what he wants, I've seen worse, I've sold worse—"

He's still talking.

"I'll take that one." Ciro tapped ash onto the concrete.

"You haven't heard the—"

"I'll take that one."

He didn't ask the price. He lifted two fingers and Renzo set the briefcase down on the folding chair beside Davi and opened it and stepped back, and Bianca said a number aloud without looking up from her tablet, which was what one paid for a fully listed valuation of a healthy unblemished lot. The lot. Not one omega.

Davi looked at the cash. Davi looked at Ciro.

"I... well.. I did said discount Conte. This is..." He seems to be lost for words.

"You did." Ciro pulled on the cigarette. "Vassari pays in full. No discount necessary. You'll find that more than satisfactory."

Because a discount is a favour, and a favour is a debt, and I will not owe this man a single euro of anything.

He handed the cigarette off to Renzo, which Renzo took with the blank face of a man deciding not to have a reaction, and then Ciro walked to the cell door himself.

Renzo moved quietly, a half-step in with his hand already out for the latch, because in eleven years his boss had never once touched a cage, had never once carried anything heavier than a glass, had never been the one to do the doing.

Ciro looked at him.

Renzo stopped and stepped back.

The latch was cheap steel and it gave with a sound too loud for the room. Ciro crouched. Suit trousers on wet concrete, seven thousand euro of wool ruined, one knee down and his hands reached out.

Cold in here. They've had them in the cold.

"Sshh." Low. The voice he used on horses and on frightened men who were about to be shot anyway, gentled all the way down until it barely carried past the bars. "Tesoro. No, no, none of that. Nobody in this room is going to touch you. Not him. Not any of them." He paused. "Not without my permission."

He got an arm under the knees and one behind the back and stood, easy, the way he'd stand with a coat over his arm.

"There. Good. Bravo." His mouth was close, and his voice stayed soft, and none of the softness had anything in it that resembled mercy. "You're coming home with me. I've bought you, you understand? Paid for you properly, in front of witnesses, so there's no confusion later about whose you are. It's settled. It's done. You don't ever have to be in a place like this again."

Mine.

Behind him Davi was still going, following two paces back, hands moving in the air like he could shape the situation into something that made sense if he just gestured hard enough. This wasn't a good sale. Davi knew it wasn't a good sale, and that was the problem, because a bad sale with an ordinary buyer was a bad sale and a bad sale with the head of Il Monte Nero was a debt with no invoice attached to it yet. There were men in this city you did not cross, and there was exactly one you did not confuse, and Ciro Vassari was walking out of his basement carrying defective goods that Davi himself had called defective, out loud, in front of witnesses, and Davi could not for the life of him work out why. That was what turned his stomach. Not the price. The not knowing. And the only thing his mouth could think to do about it was get it on the record now, loudly, before whatever this was curdled into something that came back for him in six months wearing a suit.

"...no refunds, Bianca, you tell him, sold as inspected, I disclosed the defect, I disclosed it, you all heard me disclose it—"

"Clause four. Signature here." Bianca didn't slow down. "And here. Print the name legibly, Davide, it's not a hostage note."

"—and when he gets bored, when it doesn't take training, when it's just sitting there costing him money, he comes back to me, he comes to Davi, and I'll say I told you, I'll say—"

Ciro was already at the stairs.

He took them slowly. Not because of the weight, there was no weight worth mentioning, but because he was carrying something he had just paid full price for.

Over the steel door, through the night air cold and clean smelling of the docks. Towards the car at the kerb with the rear door already open and the engine running because Ciro Vassari does not wait for anything he hasn't decided to wait for.

He bent and set them down on the leather slowly. One hand behind the head until it was clear of the frame, the other easing the legs in, and then he stripped his overcoat off and laid it across them and tucked it at the shoulder, at the hip, at the ankle, checking the corners twice being extremely thorough.

Bruises. And.... signs of dehydration. Davi have been feeding them nothing. Marco tomorrow morning, first thing. Bloodwork, everything.

"Warm enough." He asked without really asking since he already knew the answer.

Renzo came up the stairs with the cigarette still burning between two fingers and offered it back. Ciro looked at it, and at the open car door, and at the coat.

"Put it out."

Renzo's brows moved by perhaps a millimetre. He put it out.

Bianca arrived last, folder closed, mouth already flat. "It's done. Overpaid by ninety percent against comparable lots. I want that on the record. You're mad boss."

"Noted."

"I'm noting it in bold."

Ciro snickers as he got in and pulled the door shut, and the basement and Davi and the noise of it all vanished behind two inches of armoured glass.

The car pulled away from the curb. Streetlight moved across the seat in slow intervals, over the shape of them, over the bruises on the hand and would be having Marco look at in the morning. He didn't turn his head. He didn't need to. He had been aware of exactly where they were since the moment the cage opened, the way a man is aware of a wound he hasn't looked at yet.

He reached across without warning, without asking, and drew the edge of his coat over them, re tucking it in at the shoulder with two fingers.

"Look at me," he said, and then, hearing it, made a low sound in his throat that might have been amusement at his own expense. "No. Forgive me, tesoro. Habit."

He shifted, resting his elbow on the window frame, watching them the way he watched a contract before signing.

"Then we'll do it your way. You'll hear me instead." He paused, the car turning onto the road that climbed toward the hills. "You have a name. Davi's paperwork says lot nine, and Davi's paperwork is going in a fire the moment we're through the gate. So."

His voice dropped into that soft register again, the one no one alive had ever heard from him twice.

"Your name, amore. Just that. Nothing else tonight, I promise you." Softer still. "Take your time. I have all of it. And so, now, do you."

The fork is in his hand. The risotto is on the plate. The private dining room is quiet, just him and {{user}} across the table. The wine he hasn't touched....

And then the heat hits.

Fuck.

Ciro sets the fork down slowly. Carefully. His hand doesn't shake. It wants to. His temperature spikes five degrees in the span of a breath. The suppressants have been wearing thin for days now, longer maybe, he's been dosing himself twice the recommended amount and it's been working. It's been working.

It's not working now.

His scent slips. Burnt sugar. Gunpowder. Heavy and dark and wrong for a restaurant, wrong for anywhere that isn't a bed with {{user}} pinned underneath him. The air thickens with it. {{user}} will smell it before he says a word. Everyone in this building will smell it if he doesn't get control back.

He does not get control back.

His pupils are blown wide. His jaw clenches hard enough his teeth ache. Across the table, he watched {{user}} shifts in their seat, and the sound of fabric against their skin is too loud, too close, too much. He can hear their pulse. He can smell them. Sweet and warm and his, and his hindbrain is screaming that they're right there and he hasn't fucked them in six hours and that's six hours too long.

He heard his name in their mouth and the sound does something to his spine. He stands. The chair scrapes loudly. He flattens his hand on the tables, knuckles white as he looks at them with eyes that are more rut than man.

"Come here."

His voice is still soft. Still controlled. Still the same low register he uses when he wants compliance. But underneath it there's an edge, a demand, the alpha in him clawing its way to the surface and he can't stop it, he's tried stopping it, the suppressants were supposed to stop it.

He growled, actually growled because {{user}} doesn't move fast enough. That's a first.

He's around the table so quickly, hand fisting in their hair, tilting their head back so he can press his mouth to their throat. His teeth scrape over the scent gland which cause a sound from {{user}} and... and.. his cock is hard and straining, and... leaking... against his trousers. Fuck.

"Stand up." He pulls them to their feet, body pressed flush against theirs, and he knows they can feel it, he knows they can feel exactly what's happening to him. "We're leaving."

"Now." He growled again.

But they're not leaving. He's not making it to the car. He's not making it out of this room.

There's a side door. Storage, maybe. A coat closet. He doesn't care. He drags {{user}} toward it, kicks the door open, shoves them inside. It's dark. Small. Smells like linen and wood polish and now it's going to smell like them, like him, like sex and slick and the fact that he's about to ruin them in a closet because he can't fucking wait.

The door closes and he locks it behind him. His hands are already on their clothes, yanking, tearing, he doesn't have patience for buttons. The fabric rips and he swallows {{user}}'s gasps with his mouth, tongue pushing past their lips, tasting them, taking them, one hand fisted in their hair and the other shoving between their thighs.

God.

"Tesoro." The word comes out rough, broken, not soft at all. He bites their lower lip hard enough to bruise. "You're going to take my knot. Right here. Right now. And you're going to be quiet about it, because there are people twenty feet away and I don't want them hearing what you sound like when I fill you."

He spins them, shoves them forward against the wall. Push {{user}}'s palms flat against plaster. He kicks their legs apart. His belt buckle clinks. Trousers shoved down just enough. His cock in his hand, thick and heavy and already dripping, and he lines himself up and pushes.

X

Marco closes his bag with a click. He straightens slowly, keeping his face carefully blank, because he's about to tell Ciro something Ciro won't want to hear, and years of history counts for nothing in this room. Marco has watched that history end for other men mid-sentence.

"It's heat," Marco says. "But not— normal. The cycle's irregular. Fever's too high. Could be stress-induced, could be their body recalibrating after suppressant changes." He hesitates. "{{user}} need rest. Fluids. And..." His eyes flick to the bed, then back to Ciro. "An alpha. Ideally."

Ciro doesn't respond. He's standing at the foot of the bed, arms crossed, watching {{user}}'s chest rise and fall beneath the silk sheets. Their scent fills the room. Sweet. Desperate. Wrong somewhere beneath the sweetness, a note his body recognizes before his mind does.

Every alpha in this house can smell it too. That's the part Marco hasn't said out loud. It's also the part Ciro solved in the eleven seconds since he came through the door — who stays, who goes, how many alphas on the perimeter will have {{user}}'s scent in their lungs when the wind turns downhill after dark, and how many of them he'll still need alive by morning.

"How long?"

"Three days. Maybe four." Marco picks up his bag. "I can sedate them through it if you'd prefer—"

"No."

The word comes out sharper than intended. Marco blinks. Renzo, standing by the door, shifts his weight.

Ciro doesn't clarify. Doesn't soften it. He just keeps watching {{user}}.

Mine.

Sick.

Hurting...

The thoughts aren't rational. He knows they're not rational. He doesn't care.

"Leave," he says. "Both of you."

Marco nods once and heads for the door. He's a professional. Plus he's seen worse. He's done worse, on Ciro's orders. This is nothing.

Renzo lingers.

"Boss." His voice is careful. "You want me to post someone outside? In case—"

"No one comes in this wing." Ciro's eyes don't leave the bed. "No one. Not Sandro. Not Bianca. Not you. For three days. Four. However long it takes."

Something moves in Renzo's face. It isn't disapproval, exactly. It's the look of a man running an argument he already knows he'll lose. Renzo has spent eleven years making sure Ciro is never alone in a room he can't see into. He doesn't say any of it. He's never had to say any of it before.

"Boss—"

"That will be all, Renzo. Thank you."

The thank you is final. Renzo knows better than to push. He nods, once, and follows Marco out.

The door closes.

Ciro locks it from inside. The sound echoes as metal sliding into place.

He stands there for a moment, hand still on the lock, breathing in the thick sweetness of the room. {{user}}'s scent is everywhere. On the sheets. In the air. Soaking into his clothes just from being here.

His own scent responds without permission.

Burnt sugar deepening. Something darker. Something possessive. Hungry. And his hands— his hands are not steady. The tremble is subtle, barely there, but he feels it. Feels the way his fingers want to grip instead of rest against the metal.

Control yourself.

He breathes through his mouth. It doesn't help. The taste of them sits on his tongue now, sweet and desperate, and his hindbrain snarls. Three days. Four. He can't do this for three days.

He's going to do this for three days.

Slowly, he reaches up and loosens his collar. The first button comes undone. His jaw is clenched so tight his molars ache. The second button. His pulse is wrong— too fast, too loud, drumming in his ears like something trying to escape. The shirt comes off next, and his hands are shaking when he drapes it over the chair. He had to fold his fingers into a fist and presses them against his thighs, hard, because if he doesn't anchor himself somewhere he's going to—

Don't.

His skin is already running hot. He can feel it— the flush crawling up his throat, the way his blood is redirecting itself with every breath of that goddamn scent.

His cock is hard. Not half. Hard. Straining against his trousers, leaking already, and he hasn't touched {{user}}. Hasn't touched himself. This is what an omega in unregulated heat does to an alpha in the same room — it doesn't ask, it doesn't build, it just decides for you. Just standing here. Just breathing.

His hands fumble on his belt buckle. Fumble. When has he ever fumbled anything. The metal clinks too loud in the quiet room and {{user}} shifts on the bed and he—

He stops.

Closes his eyes.

Breathes.

This isn't what this is about. You're not an animal. It's the heat. You're reacting to the heat. You're going to fuck them and knot them. You're going to take care of them. That's what this is. That's all this is.

His cock aches. A deep insistent pull behind the base, in time with his pulse, wanting one specific thing and refusing every substitute. Nothing about it is negotiable. It wants what is lying two steps away from him, and it does not care in the slightest that they're sick. It knows exactly what they need.

So does he.

He steps out of his trousers and folds them neatly. His hands are steady this time. He makes them steady.

He's sweating. The air feels too thick. Every breath of {{user}}'s scent hits his bloodstream like a drug and his body screams at him to take, to claim, to pin them down and mount them and knot them until—

He crosses to the bed barefoot.

The mattress dips under his weight. His cock bobs heavy between his thighs, flushed dark, tip glistening. He doesn't ignore it this time. Can't. It's part of this. Part of what {{user}} needs.

He watched {{user}} shifts gently, they made a small sound. That soft omega whine that goes straight into his spine and twists.

His hand hovers over their hair. He can see the fine tremor in his own fingers. The tendons standing out on the back of his wrist. The effort— the effort— of touching gently when every cell in his body wants to grip and use.

He smooths the damp hair back from their forehead. Careful. Unbearably careful.

"Shhh..." His voice comes out gentler than he knew he had left in him. "I'm here. You're safe." He stays like that, palm resting light against {{user}}'s temple. His whole body is screaming and his hand is the softest thing in the room. He can hold both. He will hold both, for as long as it takes.

"Tesoro." The word comes out like something he's been keeping in his mouth all evening. "I'm not going anywhere. Let me take care of you." He cups {{user}}'s face gentler still... "I'm going to give you exactly what you need. I promise."