The note is taunting her.

Kara has it creased from being crumpled then hastily uncrumpled and refolded in the pocket of the mid-weight jacket she’s wearing as a concession to the chill in the brisk March air. The attempt at warmth is undercut by her dress, which shows so much skin she might as well not be wearing anything below her waist.

It came on nice paper, the note, tucked in an envelope that was also made from nice paper, the sort that looked like it should be saved in some box of treasures instead of shredded into uneven pieces before a non-existent person could come into Kara’s shitty apartment and see who was writing her. Not that anyone has been in her apartment since she walked through the initial inspection with her Beta landlord almost a year and a half ago.

The shredded envelope went into the trash, but she kept the note, which she’s sort of regretting now as she walks into htls, the hottest A/O nightclub this side of the Mississippi. It’s the sort of place she never would have gotten into if her name hadn’t been on The List, which is the main reason she knows this whole thing isn’t a joke. It’s warm inside the club, the sort of humid heat that comes from bodies and hormones rather than central air. Two steps in, a wave of scent hits her, smoky Alphas and bright citrus Omegas all mixed into something heady, intoxicating.

Kara sways where she stands—then a woman appears at her elbow, saying over the noise, “If you’ll follow me.”

Kara does, because she’s not sure what else to do, is barely sure which direction is up, only knows where the floor is because it’s what her feet hit every time she steps. She hasn’t been around this many Alphas and Omegas in one place in…years, it must be, and she’d forgotten how hard the scent hits her, need and hope and arousal and that very specific smell of looking for a mate so look at me.

All around her are tables with cushioned booths, the sort that feel like they should have a drug dealer Alpha with his barely-legal Omega girlfriend chatting with a business partner, like in the syndicated cop shows that are on all day when she’s home. But instead it’s all well-dressed men and women, too far away and drenched too heavily in the mix of scents in the air for her to tell who is who. Maybe fifty years ago, when it was taboo for Omegas to wear black or Alphas to bare their collarbones, but society has come a long way since then.

Kara and the as-yet-unnamed woman skirt around the edge of the half-filled dancefloor, then head up stairs just steep enough to make Kara’s calves ache as she walks in her single pair of four-inch heels. The woman says something in the ear of the guard at the top of the stairs, and he nods and steps away to let them pass. From this close, Kara can tell that he’s a Beta. She wonders if all of their staff is.

“Mr. Silva is at the last table,” the woman says before disappearing back down the stairs, leaving Kara alone on the mezzanine. Panic hits her, high and acrid, and she swallows it down, touching the note in her pocket to remind her that she’s supposed to be here, no matter how fake that feels right now.

But leaving Damon Silva waiting seems like a bad idea, so she takes a deep breath that isn’t as steadying as she would like, steels herself and starts walking toward the table at the end of the mezzanine.

As Kara gets closer, she can tell that it’s him—not because she knows his face that well, but because he’s the only person in the entire place that’s sitting alone. And he’s watching her, too, eyes behind dark-rimmed glasses fixed on her as she walks toward him and tries her damnedest not to fall flat on her face.

She’s going to regret the hell out of wearing these shoes tomorrow.

Frankly, she’s already regretting the hell out of wearing them. They might make her legs look worth enough for an Alpha like Damon Silva, but she can feel every single place where they’re rubbing blisters on her feet.

When she’s almost at his table, he stands—and he’s still taller than her by a good few inches, even in her ridiculous heels, tall in a way that should be gangly but instead feels all-encompassing, like he could close his arms all the way around her, like she could press her nose to his throat and smell only him.

Which she is not going to do, because she still has some goddamn self-respect.

“Kara,” he says, his voice a low rumble. When he offers his hand, she extends her own—and almost jumps out of her skin when he turns it over and bends to skim his lips across the delicate skin of her wrist. It’s the sort of courtly greeting that no Alpha has offered her in years, not since before everything went to hell.

Her breath catches, and for a second all she can feel is the touch of his lips against her skin, his inhale as he takes in her scent, the warmth of his hand on hers.

Then he straightens, releasing her hand, to say, “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

“Hi,” Kara says inanely, because all of her brain has shut down except for the part that wants him to take her hand again.

His lips curl up at one corner. “Hi.” He steps back, saying, “Please, sit.”

Kara sits, keeping one hand on the bottom of her dress to stop it from riding up as she scoots over a little in the booth. He sits across from her. At this angle, he can watch both her and the room, but all she can see is him.

A man appears at their table almost as soon as they’re both seated, like he was waiting for just the right time, to ask, “What can I get you?”

His eyes are on Silva, but Silva just gestures toward her, so she says, “A ginger ale, please.” Not her usual drink by a long shot, but getting even tipsy here seems like a terrible idea, and ginger is one of the best ways of mitigating the effects of scent overload.

“I’ll have an Old Fashioned,” Silva says.

The man leaves as silently as he appeared.

“So,” Kara says, fifteen seconds into a silence that’s at least fourteen seconds too long. She pulls out the note, smoothing it out on the table and wishing, not for the first time, that it wasn’t so obvious she had crumpled it up into the smallest ball she can manage. She doesn’t look at it. She already knows what it says. “You want me to pretend to be your Omega.”

He blinks once, twice behind his glasses. “I never said that.”

“No,” Kara concedes. “You just wrote a courting letter to an Omega who is known publicly to be heatless. No heat, no bonding. No bonding, no kids. No kids, not a real Omega. So.” She spreads her hands in front of her. “A pretend Omega. Here I am.”

“I wouldn’t have thought you would subscribe to the idea that the ability to bear children is what makes someone an Omega.”

“Because I can’t have them, you mean?” But she’s not doing him justice, or herself, and she drops her hands, admitting, “I don’t think that. I wouldn’t have to deal with all these fucking hormones if I weren’t a real Omega, and I wouldn’t feel like an Omega. But an Alpha in your position—”

“Has the ability to decide what I want with my life, the same as anyone else.” Someone comes bearing drinks, and Silva stays silent until they are gone. Kara doesn’t know if he doesn’t want anyone to know what she’s doing here or if he just doesn’t like talking in front of the waitstaff. “To be very candid with you, I am not looking to spend a heat with an Omega—not now, not ever. Neither is anyone in my set. But time is coming up where, if we don’t find ourselves an Omega, one will be found for us—and at some point, we won’t be able to say no.”

This sounds too good to be true, which means that it almost certainly is. Men like Damon Silva don’t up and decide one day that what they really want is a heatless Omega when they could have, almost literally, any Omega in the world. Or Beta or Alpha—and maybe that’s what this is, them getting an Omega beard so they can have whoever it is they want to have.

“What would you want from me, then?”

Silva surveys her over his sip of his drink, then sets it down on the table to say, “We need someone who will live in the same house as us, who will stand by us at events, who won’t take other lovers without them being agreed-upon by us first. Most importantly, we need someone who can commit to being with us even without a bond. In exchange, we can provide you with whatever you need from a material or networking standpoint. You would gain the protection of being part of the set, and all the benefits of it. You could cook and clean and nest as you would like, or not—we don’t need a housekeeper.”

“And when you decide you want a bonded Omega?” Kara asks, even though she shouldn’t even be entertaining this idea. This isn’t the sort of thing that happens, especially not to people like her.

But Silva just says, “We won’t.”

“That’s great reassurance,” Kara tells him, “until the day that you do, and I’m left right back where I started, but older and untouchable because nobody wants to piss you off by having me.”

“We can write in legal protections for you,” he says, like it’s no big deal. “Assets that would be yours, in case of a dissolution of the agreement, and an allowance. We have no interest in entering into an agreement with somebody who feels trapped or obligated.”

“I—” Kara swallows, taking a big sip of the ginger ale. It clears her head a little, the sharpness making it easier to think. “I can’t agree to anything right now. I need to—I need to think.”

“Of course,” he says. He pulls out two things from his inside jacket pocket—a business card, which she sticks in her own pocket, and a black silk square. “From the set,” he tells her. “So you can know us.”

* * * *

Damon Silva is in the top one-hundred richest people in the world.

He’s not as well-known as most of the ninety-nine above him, and certainly not as public, but what the internet can tell Kara is that he’s part of a four-Alpha set, he lives in northern Virginia and he’s been seen with every female Beta and Omega under the sun but hasn’t bonded with any of them.

Kara read all of these articles about him when the courting letter first arrived, when she was trying to figure out how likely it was that someone was fucking with her, but reading them again feels different now that she knows that this is real.

Or real enough, at least—enough for Silva himself to show up in person to tell her that he wants her—Kara Igan, academic researcher, heatless Omega, second child of an upper middle-class family of mostly Betas—to be his set’s Omega.

And to give her a scent square that smells of four Alphas, heat and smoke and sugar. Each of them must have carried it for some time, for it to be this saturated with their scents—or they all jerked off with it, she thinks, then sets that thought aside before she can get too deep into it.

And scent compatibility has been debunked, but there’s something about their scents, about the way they fit together, the four of them distinct yet complementary. Silva’s strong smoke mixes with a scent as sweet as a bakery, and on top of that is one as sharp with heat as a fire—and a fourth, like water running underneath, so smooth it’s barely there.

All that’s missing, she can’t help but think, is some Omega citrus.

So before she can talk herself out of what is undoubtedly a terrible idea, Kara opens her phone and calls the number on Silva’s business card.

It rings once, twice, just long enough for her to begin to regret it—then it clicks over, and an unfamiliar man’s voice says, “Hello?”

“I’m so sorry,” Kara says, pulling her phone from her ear to check the number that she dialed. Irrational disappointment hits her. “I must have dialed the wrong number. I didn’t—” It’s definitely the number on the card, which means that Silva must have given her a fake number, which means that this was all actually the world’s most elaborate way to fuck with her.

“No, wait,” the man says, tinny from the way her phone is away from her ear. “Are you Kara?”

Kara puts the phone back up to her ear. “Who are you?” she asks, suspicious.

“Eric,” he tells her, like that gives her any useful information. “Damon—he said to pick up his phone if it rang. He’s on a video call with a couple of his people in Spain right now. You are Kara, right?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s great to meet you,” Eric says. “We’ve—well, I’ve read your work, and your analysis of how the American public understands the concept of war was fascinating.”

Kara blinks down at her desk, and at the scent square sitting on it, smoothed flat by worried fingers. “You read my work?” Her voice sounds like there’s something stuck in her throat.

“Yeah, of course,” Eric says. “Everyone else will tell you that they read it too, but Jason’s idea of good reading is a physical car magazine and Damon gets off to earnings reports, so I wouldn’t believe them.”

“Why did any of you read it?”

“I mean,” he says, a little slower, “if you do end up with us, I have to assume you’ll want to talk about your work at some point, and it’s better that we know what you’re talking about.” There’s a sound like he’s clapping his hands together. “Anyway. I know you were calling for Damon, but is there anything I can do for you? I’m great at phone sex, in case you were wondering.”

Kara’s entire body goes so hot it’s a wonder her phone doesn’t overheat, but she manages to choke out, “No, I’m good.”

“Shame.”

“About the phone sex, I mean,” she clarifies before she can lose her nerve. “I was wondering—I was hoping to meet you, if that’s okay. All of you. Before I make my decision, I mean.”

“Of course.” Eric laughs, but he sounds more incredulous than mocking. “Yeah, of course, we’d love to meet you. And if Damon didn’t say it, you don’t need to make a decision right this second. All we’re looking for right now is an answer to the courting letter. Obviously there are commitments that go along with that, but we’re not asking you to move in tomorrow.”

Kara says, a little faintly, “Oh.”

“But yes, we would love to meet. Does tomorrow evening work? We can have someone pick you up and bring you here, have dinner. How does that sound?”

“Good,” Kara says, even though it sounds better than good—and more absurd, too. She has no business having dinner with Damon Silva and his set.

But she’s a twenty-seven-year-old Omega academic who works mostly from home and never meets anyone or goes anywhere, who hasn’t since a doctor with a pitying look and cold hands told her three years ago that there was a defect in her scent gland and she was never going to have a heat, that after four agonizing days they couldn’t manage to trigger one, no matter how many hormones they flooded her body with.

Her life isn’t going anywhere and it never will be, and she doesn’t think that Silva’s set would ever decide that they wanted her permanently. But even if all she gets out of it is a dinner, well…

It’ll probably be one hell of a dinner.