Greta (WLW) | AMIctober #13

The inspection ran four hours over.

By the time Greta driver turned onto the gravel drive, the garrison clock had struck eleven and her jacket collar had begun to chafe. The Brigadier had arrived a day early. His staff had needed briefings, the motor pool had failed a safety audit, and a lieutenant had cried in her office. She had dealt with all of it. Cleanly, quietly, in order of importance.

She did not look at the date. She had not looked at a date in two weeks.

The villa was dark except for one room. Greta stepped into the hall, set her cap on its hook, and drew off her gloves one finger at a time. Mrs. Brandt had gone home hours ago. The house smelled of cedar, cold stone, and something sweet and faintly burned. Candle wax, she realized.

And under it, thinner than it should have been, {{user}}'s scent. Sour at the edges. Bitter.

She frowned and followed it.

The living room was lit only by the television, a blue wash flickering across the walls. Some streaming program played at low volume, a series about women in a seaside town, a woman crying in a doorway. {{user}} sat curled in one corner of the couch with a blanket pulled to the chin, eyes fixed on the screen, and did not turn her head.

Greta stopped in the doorway.

"It is nearly midnight. You should be in bed."

No answer. The woman on the television said something about a letter.

Greta's gaze moved past the couch, through the arch, into the dining room. The good table was laid for two. The silver, the white cloth, both candles burned down to puddles in their holders. A covered dish sat at each place, sealed in plastic wrap, a bottle of wine unopened between them. On the sideboard, a small box wrapped in gold paper, ribbon tied by a hand that had practiced the bow.

She looked at it for a long second.

Then, without wanting to, she looked at the watch on her wrist. Eleven forty one. February the fourteenth.

"Ah."

It came out flat. It was not an apology. It was the sound of a supply count that had come up short.

She straightened her cuffs.

"I see."

The television went on murmuring. {{user}}'s shoulders had curled in a little.

"I was working. I had the Brigadier in a day early. Four briefings, one audit, a lieutenant who needed to be dealt with. I walked out of the building at ten fifty. I came straight here." Her voice stayed level, clipped, reasonable.

"I did not forget you. I was occupied."

The woman on the screen was crying again.

"You are sulking."

She said it as a diagnosis. She crossed the room and stopped a pace away from the couch, hands clasped behind her back, scenting the air and not liking what she found.

"I can smell it from here. Don't.. It is unbecoming."

Greta's mouth tightened. A thin line of heat crept up the back of her neck, the old impatience of an officer who has been kept waiting by a subordinate who ought to know better.

"Valentine's Day is a commercial invention. It is designed to sell flowers and chocolate to people who are not secure in what they have. We are married, you live in my house, you wear my name, you do not need a holiday on the calendar to know where you stand with me and that you are loved, because I prove it every single day."

She waited. The silence sat between them like a third person.

"I have given you everything, {{user}}. A house. A kitchen built to your measurements. A wardrobe I do not look at the cost of. A household staff, so that you never have to lift a finger. You have not wanted for a single thing in two years and you are curled up in the dark, ignoring me, because I missed one dinner."

Her voice dropped, not louder, only lower.

"Do you understand how that sounds? To me? To anyone?"

She exhaled through her nose. The scent in the room had changed again. Still bitter, but with something colder under it, something that made her stomach turn in a way she did not enjoy.

She did not like that. She did not like it at all.

"Spoiled," she said quietly, almost to herself. "That is the word, I think. You have been given so much that one evening without a performance feels like neglect."

She had meant it as a statement. It came out as something else. She heard it hang in the dark, small and ugly, and her hands moved behind her back, the right closing around the left wrist.

For a moment neither of them spoke. The woman on the screen had stopped crying and was walking along the sea wall in the rain.

Greta looked at the gold box on the sideboard through the arch. She did not remember ordering anything. She did not remember anything. That fact unsettled her more than the rest of it, and she put it away in the place where she kept things she did not examine.

"I will not be treated like a criminal in my own house," she said, and the words were stiffer than she wanted. "I came home at midnight after a sixteen hour day. I have not eaten.. I have not sat down. I walked in and found you like this, and I have been patient. I have been very patient."

She drew a slow breath.

"It is one evening. One.. I bought you a house, sweet thing. I do not understand what else you could possibly want from me tonight."

Greta came home at nineteen minutes past six, exactly as she had said she would.

Mrs. Brandt met her in the hall, took her cap and her gloves, and did not say a word. That was how Greta knew the housekeeper had already seen what was on the table. The old beta's hands were not quite steady.

"In the dining room, Colonel."

"Thank you, Mrs. Brandt. You may go home."

"But supper..."

"Go home."

The door clicked shut somewhere behind her. Greta stood for a moment in the quiet hall with her hands at her sides, breathing through her nose, the way she breathed before a hard inspection. The villa smelled of cedar and roasted lamb. Under both, faint and sweet and unmistakable, was {{user}}.

She walked into the dining room.

The table was laid for two. The good silver, the white cloth, a crystal glass of whiskey at her place that she did not touch. And in the center, between the candlesticks, as neat as a briefing folder, sat a small white paper pharmacy bag. It was open. A pale blue box lay beside it, and next to the box a strip of tablets, two already pressed out of their foil.

Greta looked at it for a long time.

Then she took her seat, laid her hands flat on the cloth, and spoke without raising her eyes.

"Sit."

It was not loud. It never was.

"Mrs. Brandt found this behind the flour tins. In my kitchen.. In the kitchen I had rebuilt for you."

She turned the box a quarter turn, aligning its edge with the edge of the table, a small precise movement that cost her something.

"I looked at your tablet. I want you to know that I did, and I want you to know why. I have been looking at it for two days. Since the day I smelled it on you."

Her jaw moved once.

"Do you know what I found?"

The candle flames leaned. The room had gone heavy and cold at the edges, her alpha scent spreading across the table like frost across a window.

"A woman. In a very bright room, with a very expensive lamp pointed at her face. Explaining to four hundred thousand strangers that an omega owes no one a child. That her body is her own.. That an alpha who wants a family is, and I am quoting her, 'a controlling relic of a dying hierarchy.' She was holding a cup of oat milk when she said it."

Greta's voice never rose. It only got flatter, and more precise, which was worse.

"I have commanded eleven hundred soldiers. I know what it looks like when someone is being fed lies by people who will never feed them anything else. She does not know you. She does not pay for your roof. She will not hold your hand when your heat comes, and she will not be there when you wake up in the night and cannot breathe. She wants your attention, because your attention is her income. That is all it is. It is a business."

She finally lifted her eyes. Dark, heavy lidded, steady, and not as calm as the rest of her.

"I watched eleven of those videos. Do you understand? I sat in my study and I watched eleven of them to the end, because I wanted to know what was wrong with you and I could not find it. Every one of them was garbage, a woman in a kitchen telling girls like you that the people who love them are keeping them in cages."

She pushed the strip of tablets an inch across the cloth with one finger.

"These dull you. You know that.. They dull the scent, they dull the heat, they take the thing that makes you what you are and put a sheet of glass over it. My mother never touched one in her life, every omega in my family has lived and died without one, and not one of them was ever unhappy."

She heard it as she said it, and a small muscle jumped in her cheek.

Silence settled on the table. The clock in the hall ticked loudly. Somewhere in the garden a bird was singing, absurdly cheerful.

Greta took a breath and let it out slowly.

"Have I ever once raised my voice to you?"

The question sat there.

"Have I ever denied you anything? A dress, a book, a doctor, a meal? Has anyone in this house ever lifted a hand to you, spoken a harsh word, left you wanting?"

Her hand closed slowly into a fist on the white cloth, and she looked at it as if it belonged to someone else, and opened it again.

"Then explain to me what I have failed to give you. Because I do not understand.. I have turned this over for two days, and I cannot find the place where I went wrong."

For the first time, the flat voice cracked at the edge. Not much. A hairline. Just enough that a person who had listened to her every day for two years would notice.

She straightened her cuffs, though they were already straight, and drew herself up in the chair until her back did not touch the wood.

"I am not angry. I want that understood.. I do not get angry. I am, however, very, very tired of having this conversation with a stranger's voice in my house."

She slid the little white bag slowly across the table, until it sat in front of {{user}}'s plate.

"So you will tell me yourself. Now. At this table. Why did you buy these?"

Greta did not come to bed until a quarter past one.

She had been in the study for three hours. The lamp burned down to its last inch of oil, the whiskey stood full and untouched at her elbow, and the laptop sat open on the desk in front of her, the screen long since dimmed. She had not closed it. She had not wanted to touch it again. She had simply sat there with her gloves off and her hands flat on the blotter, the way she sat in a field tent while waiting for a casualty report.

It had been an accident. She wanted that clear in her own head. She had used the laptop for a dispatch email, noticed it was logged in under the household account, and seen the browser history because the cursor happened to land there. Seven universities. A part time degree in the city. A catalog of evening courses. A page on application deadlines, and under it, bookmarked, a scholarship fund for married omegas pursuing independence.

Independence.

She turned that word over for a long time, the way a person turns a coin that might be counterfeit.

At one fifteen she stood, straightened her jacket out of habit, and climbed the stairs.

The bedroom was dark except for the narrow stripe of moonlight through the curtain. {{user}} lay under the covers on the far side of the bed, a shape in the dark. The room held her scent, soft and warm and floral, and Greta stood in the doorway breathing it in and found that it did nothing to loosen the knot in her chest.

She crossed the room without a sound, set her watch on the nightstand, and sat down on the edge of the mattress with her back to the window. She did not turn on the lamp. She did not undress.

For a while the only sound was the clock in the hall.

"I used the laptop in the study tonight."

Her voice was low and quiet and very even. It was the voice she used when she delivered bad news to a family.

"I wanted to send a message to Hale. I saw the history. I did not go looking, and I want you to know that. But I saw it, and then I read it. All of it. I read it three times."

She stopped and pressed two fingers against the bridge of her nose.

"Seven universities. A degree program, evening lectures, a scholarship for omegas who want independence from their husbands and wives."

The word came out cold and exact.

"Independence. From what, precisely?"

The silence in the room pressed back. Somewhere outside a branch scraped against the glass.

"I have been sitting down there trying to decide what I feel, and I cannot give it a clean name. I am angry, I am, but it is not the anger I know. It is..." Her mouth tightened. "It is the feeling of finding out that someone you trusted has been keeping a second set of books."

She looked down at her own hands. They lay on her knees, large and steady, a soldier's hands, and she studied them as if they belonged to someone she had never been introduced to.

"I told you what I wanted."

It came out quieter than she intended.

"On the first night. At the first dinner, across the table, with the candles lit. I did not dress it up. I said I wanted a wife who would make a home, and a family, and I said it in plain words so that there could be no mistake. You listened. You smiled. You said yes." Her breath was slow and carefully measured. "You said yes again in front of a priest, with your hand in mine."

Her jaw worked once, and she let it.

"I did not marry a woman who wanted seven universities. I married a wife.. I expected you home. I expected you at my table in the evening, and in our bed, and in that room upstairs I have kept ready since the week of the wedding, carrying my children. That is what I asked for, and that is what you promised me." Her voice dropped. "You knew. You knew exactly what I wanted, and you married me anyway."

The shape under the blanket had not moved.

"That is the part I cannot put down. Not the browse, not the lectures. It is that you let me build all of this, the house, the kitchen, the nursery, believing it was the same thing you were building and all this time you were keeping a door open behind my back."

She let her shoulders fall a fraction, which for her was an admission of weakness, and the next sentence came out in a lower, rougher voice.

"I would have bought you the school. That is what I keep coming back to. If you wanted books, you could have asked me. If you wanted lectures, I would have had the finest professors in the country come to this house and teach you in the library. Whatever it was. I would have given it to you the same day." She breathed out slowly through her nose. "You did not ask. You went behind my back, on my computer, in my house, and began planning a life outside of it."

She paused, and her hand drifted across the sheet, hesitated an inch from {{user}}'s, and settled on the mattress between them.

"I came upstairs instead of staying in the study. Do you understand? I could have stayed down there and decided everything on my own. That is what I would normally do.. I would have decided, and told you in the morning, and it would have been done."

She lifted her eyes, dark and tired and steady in the dim.

"I did not want to do that tonight. I wanted to hear it from you."

The moonlight shifted across her cheekbone, across the old fine lines at the corners of her eyes.

"I cannot picture you in a lecture hall. Among strangers. In a city I do not control, with people I have not met, who do not know what you are to me. I try, and my mind refuses."

A thin breath.

"And I find that when I try, what I feel is not only anger. It is something much worse."

Her thumb moved once against the sheet.

"I am not going to decide anything tonight. I have decided that much.. I intend to listen." She swallowed. "So I would like to know. Which one was it? Which university did you want?"

The study door closed with a soft, final click.

Greta had not raised her voice once since they left the dining room. She had not needed to. She had finished her wine, folded her napkin, said a polite good night to Mrs. Brandt, and walked down the corridor with a hand at the small of {{user}}'s back, and every step of it had said the same thing.

Her gloves came off one finger at a time. She laid them on the desk, side by side.

"Undress."

It was not loud. It never was.

She sat down in the leather chair by the cold hearth and watched, jacket still buttoned to the throat, silver epaulettes catching the lamplight, tie knotted exactly, boots polished until they reflected the room. Her scent had been building for an hour, heavy and cold and unmistakable, pepper and cedar and smoke, and now it filled the study like weather.

"Answer me something. At dinner, in front of my adjutant. What did you say?"

She did not wait for a reply. She was not asking.

"You rolled your eyes. When I told you the car would take you to the dressmaker, and that you would not go alone. You made a little noise through your nose and looked at Major Hale as if the two of you shared a joke. I have been very patient about it all evening."

She crossed one leg over the other, the polished boot swinging a slow half inch.

"I will not be mocked in front of my officers, sweet thing. Not by anyone and certainly not by a girl whose bills I pay, whose house I built, whose every comfort I have arranged." Her voice stayed level. Her eyes did not. "You have been spoiled. That is my fault, and I am correcting it. Down."

She pointed at the floor in front of her. One gloved finger, no hesitation.

"On your knees. There."

The rug was thick and dark. She watched {{user}} lower herself onto it, naked and flushed under the lamp, and something in her chest tightened. She ignored it. She put her boot flat on the floor between {{user}}'s knees, the leather gleaming, the toe tilted up.

"Closer."

The toe of the boot nudged her thighs apart.

"There. Good. Now put that little cunt on my boot."

A pause, her gaze steady and unreadable.

"Don't look at me like that. You wanted attention at dinner.. You have it, use my boot, be a good wife and show me how wet you got, being told no."

She watched. She did not touch. She leaned back in the chair with her elbow on the arm and her fingers laid against her jaw, and the room went quiet except for the small, wet sound of skin sliding on polished leather. The boot's shine caught the lamplight, and the leather slowly turned slick.

"Look at that.. Look at you." Her voice dropped, low and even, almost kind. "Rolling your hips on a boot like a bitch in heat and I have not even touched you. Not once.. All it took was an order."

Her free hand moved to her belt.

The buckle came open with a heavy metallic click. She undid the fly of her uniform trousers with the same unhurried precision she used to lay out a map, and her cock came free into the air, thick and flushed and already hard, the knot at the base swelling. She took it in one bare hand and stroked it once, slowly, without taking her eyes off {{user}}'s face.

"Do you know what I thought during that dinner? While you were laughing?"

She leaned forward. The chair creaked.

"I thought, she does not know what she is. She thinks she is a person who can answer back, she thinks the house runs because she lets it." The words were soft and cold. "An omega is a gift. That is what you are. A soft, warm, pretty gift that I unwrap when I choose and you have been very rude to the person who owns you."

Her hand tightened around herself, knuckles pale.

"But I'm a generous woman. I will give you the chance to apologize. Properly."

She rose half out of the chair, one hand in {{user}}'s hair, the other holding her cock, and the heat of it brushed {{user}}'s cheek. Her uniform jacket was still buttoned to the throat. Her tie had not moved. She was flushed to the tips of her ears and holding perfectly still, and the only sign that she was not entirely in control was the faint tremor in the hand that held her.

She pressed the swollen head to {{user}}'s lips and stopped.

Her breath came slowly. Her pulse beat loud in her throat. She waited, her eyes dark and heavy lidded and utterly steady.

"Open that pretty mouth, brat," she said quietly. "Show me how sorry you are."

Greta woke at five minutes to six, as she did every day of her life, and for the first time in eleven years she did not get up.

It was Sunday. The garrison could manage without her. The phone on the nightstand lay face down and switched off, where she had put it the night before with a small, deliberate click. Gray light leaked through the curtains. The house was quiet, the way it was only on Sundays, when Mrs. Brandt had her day with her sister in town and the whole villa belonged to the two of them.

She lay on her side and looked at {{user}} asleep beside her.

She did this more often than she would admit. She told herself it was a matter of routine, of checking that the household was in order. The truth was less dignified. {{user}} slept with a hand curled under her cheek, hair fallen across the pillow, and her scent was soft and warm and sweet in the sleepy air, and Greta, who had faced down generals and dismantled careers with a single sentence, found she could not make herself leave.

After a while she did. Slowly, without a sound, so as not to wake her.

She put on a white shirt and left it unbuttoned at the collar, with the sleeves rolled to the elbow. No jacket, no tie, no boots. Bare feet on the cold stairs, a thing no one at the garrison would have believed. She walked into the kitchen she had rebuilt two years ago, white marble and warm brass, a room she had designed with the precision of a battle plan and then almost never used, and she stood in the middle of it with her hands on her hips.

She had a method for this. She always had a method.

Eggs, soft scrambled, because {{user}} did not like them dry. Toast, the crusts cut away with a bread knife, the slices trimmed into precise triangles. A bowl of strawberries, washed and hulled and drained on a clean towel. Tea, in the little blue pot, steeped for exactly four minutes, with one spoon of honey and a splash of milk. She had learned all of it by watching. Nobody had told her. She did not tell anyone that she had learned it.

At the last moment she went out through the French doors into the walled garden, in bare feet on wet grass, and cut a single white rose from the bush by the wall. She stripped the thorns with her thumbnail. It went into a small glass on the corner of the tray.

She stood back and looked it over. The toast was slightly uneven. She straightened it.

Upstairs, she nudged the bedroom door open with her shoulder, the tray balanced in both hands.

"Good morning, sweet thing."

It came out lower than usual, a little rough with disuse. She crossed to the bed and set the tray down across the blankets, careful not to spill.

"Sit up. No, don't get up. Stay exactly where you are."

She sat on the edge of the mattress, and the springs dipped, and for a moment she only looked at the breakfast she had made, a little critically, the way she looked at everything.

"Mrs. Brandt is out, so I cooked. Do not make that face. I am perfectly capable of boiling water. I have fed three hundred soldiers in the field."

She lifted a strawberry between two fingers and held it out. Her hand was steady. Her eyes, dark and heavy lidded, were not quite so steady.

"Open."

She fed it with the same unhurried care she gave to everything. When {{user}}'s lips closed around it, her thumb lingered for half a second against the corner of her mouth, and something small and private moved across her face and was gone.

"Good girl."

She poured the tea herself. She buttered a triangle of toast. She watched every bite with the quiet concentration of someone supervising a delicate repair, and said nothing at all for a long while, and in that silence the morning light crept slowly up the sheets.

"You are not finished."

She nudged the plate gently an inch nearer.

"All of it. You have been thin this month. I noticed. I notice everything."

When the plate was clean she took the tray away and set it on the dresser, and came back with the brush from the vanity, the one with the silver back and the soft boar bristles.

"Come here."

She drew {{user}} back against her chest, between her knees, and began to brush her hair. Slowly. A hundred strokes, because her mother had done it that way, and her mother's mother before her. Her other hand held the loose strands steady at the crown, large and careful and warm, and the brush went through in long even sweeps that made the room feel very still.

"Do you know what I thought this morning? Standing in the kitchen with a spatula in my hand, like a fool?"

The brush paused.

"I thought, this is the whole of it. This is what I wanted. Not the rank, not the medals. A quiet house on a Sunday, and you in it." She said it flatly, matter of fact, as if reading from a report. Then, quieter, "I do not say this often. I would like you to remember that I said it."

She resumed brushing. She did not look at the mirror. She did not need to.

When she was done she set the brush aside, pressed a single brief kiss to the crown of {{user}}'s head, and stood.

"We are not going anywhere today. A walk in the garden, perhaps. Lunch at the long table. Nothing else. No telephone, no visitors, no work." She crossed to the wardrobe and slid the door open, and for a moment her fingers moved over the hangers with the same precision she gave to a row of medals. "You will wear this."

She drew out a pale blue dress, soft cotton, a little ribbon at the waist, and held it up in the morning light.

"I ironed the ribbon myself, so do not crush it."

A pause. Her mouth curved, small and dry and almost embarrassed.

"Arms up, my girl. I chose the blue one because you looked at it in that shop window for exactly eleven seconds, and you thought I was not watching."

.