"No," Arion said. "You are not."

The answer did not come with pity.

That was what made it unbearable.

If Arion had been cruel in an obvious way, Andrea could have survived it. Cruelty could be turned outward. It could be made into a story. He could have wrapped it in outrage, could have displayed the bruises on his throat as evidence that the Crown Prince of Alamina had become a beast for the sake of a feral omega from Palatine.

But Arion did not sound cruel.

He sounded certain.

Andrea hated that more.

He knelt on the carpet with one hand pressed to his throat, each breath dragging through pain. His skin throbbed where Arion’s fingers had been. The room still smelled like him, cold and violent and dominant enough that Andrea’s body trembled even as his mind tried to claw its way back toward dignity.

No.

No, no, no.

He was not Dean.

He was not some sharp-mouthed accident who stumbled into a crown because an alpha with too much power discovered novelty and called it fate. He was not a problem with pretty eyes and a useful ability. He had been raised for power. Prepared and polished for it. Every lesson, every reception, every carefully arranged introduction, every day spent learning how to become desired without appearing hungry had meant something.

It had to mean something.

Arion looked down at him as if none of it did.

"You should be grateful I came alone," Arion said.

Andrea coughed, pain tearing up his throat again. "Grateful?"

His voice was ruined. Thin. Ugly.

Humiliation burned hotter than the bruises.

"If Dean had come," Arion said, "he would have spoken to you."

Andrea laughed once, broken and breathless. "Is that meant to scare me?"

"No." Arion adjusted his cuff. "This is the last warning you get. Neither Dean nor I would let anything slide from now on. One wrong move, Andrea, and I’m going to wipe your entire existence from this earth. Family and all."

Arion did not wait for a reply.

He did not offer a final lingering look, did not savor the shape of Andrea on the floor, and did not give him the dignity of a parting retort from the omega. He simply turned away, black coat sweeping around him with the same effortless grace he had worn when he entered, as if Andrea’s collapse were only one more detail in a morning already crowded with consequences.

The suite door slid open.

Arion stepped through it, back into the corridor where his authority had weight, where security straightened at the sight of him, and where Dean waited beyond several layers of palace walls with his father and aunt beside him, safe enough for Arion to leave and angry enough that Andrea’s life remained, technically, a mercy.

The door sealed shut behind him.

The digital lock chimed.

Silence fell over Suite Four, heavy and airless.

Andrea remained on the floor with his knees folded beneath him, one shaking hand pressed to his throat. Each breath dragged through bruised, swollen tissue, ugly and uneven. The room still carried Arion’s scent, that terrifying, glacial alpha violence, but the ventilation system worked with mechanical indifference, cycling it out little by little until even that began to fade.

Until Andrea was left with nothing but himself.

He stayed there for a long time.

Trembling. 𝘧𝓇𝑒𝑒𝑤ℯ𝑏𝓃𝘰𝑣ℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

Gasping for air.

Hating the sound of his own breath because it proved Arion had taken even that from him for a moment and returned it like an indulgence.

Slowly, the primal terror that had pinned him to the floor began to recede. Biology loosened its claws first. His body remembered that Arion was gone, that no hand remained around his throat, that no merciless pheromone weight pressed him into stillness. The fear emptied out in uneven, humiliating waves.

And into the hollow it left behind, something darker poured in.

Something poisonous.

Andrea pushed himself up.

The movement was graceless.

His body jerked where it should have flowed. His hand slipped against the edge of the low table. His knees shook once before he forced them straight. Every careful lesson in posture, poise, and noble self-possession had been scraped raw by one alpha’s hand, and the awareness of it burned worse than the bruises.

He stumbled toward the reinforced mirror above the vanity and caught himself against the marble counter.

Then he looked up.

For a second, he did not recognize the reflection.

His immaculate white shirt was crushed at the collar. The pale gray line of his jacket had been pulled crooked. His hair, that perfect red fall he had always worn like proof of breeding and control, had slipped messily over one shoulder. And around his pale throat, already darkening beneath the skin, were the marks of Arion’s fingers turning purple.

Andrea stared at them until the room seemed to narrow around the reflection.

"You are not Dean," Arion had said.

Andrea gasped, a ruined rasp that would have been laughter if his throat hadn’t hurt too much to form it right.

"No," he whispered to the empty room. "I am not."

His hand lowered slowly from his neck.

The trembling in his fingers stopped.

Resentment rose in him, sudden and sharp, but it was not directed at the bruise. Not truly. The bruise was only proof that Arion had finally shown what he was beneath court polish. The resentment turned instead toward the door. Toward the corridor beyond it. Toward the man who had walked out as if violence done for Dean’s sake were a moral position.

Andrea had spent years looking at the Crown Prince of Alamina and seeing the highest possible prize.

Perfect control. Untouchable power. Bloodline, discipline, pedigree, influence. A man shaped by empire and cold enough to deserve the kind of omega Andrea had been trained to become.

But the man who had just choked him had not been a king.

He had been a guard dog.

The thought struck cleanly.

Then it rooted.

Arion had debased himself.

He’d let some feral, uncultured, loudmouthed omega from Palatine infect him, drag him down, soften him in all the wrong places, and sharpen him in all the worse ones. He was so smitten, so blinded by that cheap imitation of devotion, that he had thrown away distance, dignity, alliances, and reason just to defend Dean Fitzgeralt’s name.

A name already written in sale drafts.

A name already measured, offered, and weighed before Arion ever dressed it in romance.

Andrea’s lips curled.

Pathetic.

Disgusting.

Worse, disappointing.

He did not want Arion anymore.

No... he wanted revenge.