Chapter 28: The Cost of Touch
A surge of pheromones—thick, cloying, aggressively sweet—spilled into the space between them like smoke through a closed room. Not a tease. Not a mistake.
It hit like rot wrapped in sugar.
Lucas didn’t breathe it in.
His lungs refused.
His mind didn’t go blank, but it tried—his body remembered before his thoughts did. That scent. That tactic. The way it choked the air and forced obedience from alphas too weak to fight fairly and too proud to earn consent. The kind of scent that clung to bruises and silk sheets, that slicked the skin of men who paid for silence.
Christian’s men had used it, too.
The ones he rotated in, faceless, forgettable—each one doused in pheromones so strong they drowned Lucas in heat even when he wasn’t in one. Used it to make him compliant. Make him pliable.
Make him forget, quiet.
This alpha was no different.
Entitled. Grinning. Expecting that scent to open doors, legs, futures.
Lucas didn’t respond—not with words, not with breath. He kept still, spine straight, expression unreadable. But his silence wasn’t surrender. It was calculation. Delay. A beat before the cut.
He was already parting his lips to speak, the blade of his tongue honed—