Page 94 of Unmarked
He looks like someone who built his entire identity around being unshakeable, and is now being shaken by one little omega who made a nest out of his shirt and didn’t ask him to be the one in it.
I breathe in slow. Hold it. Let it out.
“You really let a girl in a stolen flannel and heat-slicked thighs get under your skin.”
And now I'm talking to my reflection.
Great.
The man in the mirror doesn’t deny it, though. Instead, he lifts a brow like,Yeah, you did. Dumbass.
I move on.
I reach the end of the gallery and shove open the door to the solarium. This house is full of rooms I don’t use, and this one’s always been the least offensive. Quiet. Shadowed. Isolated. Humid, thanks to the temperamental greenhouse system no one dares touch but the old caretaker who still insists on calling meMaster Vale, like it’s 1824.
The air smells like earth and memory. There's a slightly overgrown garden out back - the one my mother planted the year before she died.
Half the plants are probably dead, and the other half are thriving out of spite.
Fitting, really. She was like that, too.
I move past the grossly oversized sofa - imported, uncomfortable, absurdly expensive - and cross to the grand piano in the corner.
It gleams like it’s judging me.
(It belongs to my father, which means it probably is.)
I sit.
Spine straight. Shoulders squared.
As if posture can drown out the noise in my head.
Then, I play.
Not because I’m feeling particularly inspired, but because there’s only so many times you can grind your molars before someone offers you a dental plan.
The keys are cool beneath my fingertips. The notes come easy. One of the first pieces I ever learned. A nocturne. Gentle, elegant, and designed to remind six-year-old Lucian Vale that feelings were to be expressed musically, not… inconveniently.
My tutor said I was emotionally inconsistent. My father said I was weak.
Some nights, after my mother passed, he made me practice until my hands blistered. Then he made me play through them.
Ah, childhood. Full of whimsy.
The notes echo out, warm and broken, filling the high glass space like they might climb the vines and take root. Each one is measured. Clean.
Control in sound.
BecauseIam control. I am legacy. I am the product of generations of ruthless, joyless alphas who believed in empire first, affection never, and the deeply unsettling concept of leather belts as character-building tools.
And now?
Now I’m the man standing outside a heat-locked door while the Omega I’ve been anchoring for days chooses a different Alpha’s lap to collapse into.
I slam the final chord harder than necessary. It echoes like it’s mocking me.
I shut the piano lid with quiet finality. Pretend it doesn’t feel like failure.
