Once More, Alpha Pleads

Zeke's POV

Marta had her head between my legs and I was bored.

That was the truth of it. Shameful maybe but true. Her tongue was working overtime, two fingers curled inside me, her other hand stroking my shaft at the same time, and I was lying there staring at my ceiling thinking about whether I'd left the bathroom light on.

This was supposed to be good. She was supposed to be good. Three women I knew personally had recommended Marta like she was a five star restaurant, like she had changed their lives, like they had never looked at another woman the same way after. I had paid her good money. I had lit candles. I had even shaved, which for me meant I was genuinely trying.

And I felt nothing. Or not nothing exactly. I felt the way you feel in a warm shower, pleasant, comfortable, and absolutely underwhelmed.

"You feel so good," she murmured against me and I almost laughed.

I did not. Instead I pushed my hips down trying to chase something, trying to find that edge I could never quite reach. It was there. I could feel it hovering just out of reach the way it always did, that shimmer of something building low in my belly, teasing me, making me think this time, this time, this time.

"More," I said. "Marta. Give me more please. I need to feel it. Everything you have."

She gave me more. She worked harder, fingers pumping faster, mouth relentless, and I grabbed the sheets and held on and chased that feeling with everything I had. My hips rolled, my breath came faster, my thighs trembled around her shoulders and I thought yes, yes, almost.

And then it slipped away. Like it always did. Like it always fucking did.

I dropped back against the pillow and pressed the heel of my hand to my forehead.

Marta slowed. Stopped. She sat up and looked at me with the expression of a woman whose professional pride had just taken a serious hit. "I don't understand," she said quietly. "That has never happened to me before."

"It's not you," I told her. "It is never the other person."

She was quiet for a moment. Then she reached for her shirt off the floor and said almost under her breath, "They say you're cursed, you know."

There it was. That word. It followed me everywhere.

"Get out," I said. Not angry. Just tired.

She left. The door clicked shut and I lay there alone in my candlelit bedroom with my cock still painfully hard against the sheets and want coiled so tight inside me it almost felt like pain. I was desperate, I was so close to the edge of something and yet completely unable to fall over it.

Cursed.

Maybe that was exactly what this was. My pheromones had always been different, stronger than any other Omega's, the kind that made people stupid and desperate and hungry just from standing near me. They were supposed to heighten my own pleasure too. That was how it was supposed to work.

Instead I walked around perpetually starving with a body that refused to be fed.

I sat up. Looked around my beautiful ruined evening, the good wine, the silk sheets, the candles burning low, and I made a decision.

If Marta could not do it maybe someone trained specifically for this could. A professional. Someone whose only job was making a man feel exactly what I needed to feel.

I got dressed and went looking.

Club Nox was not the kind of place you stumbled into by accident. It sat at the edge of the city's darker quarter, no sign on the door, just a long line of beautiful restless people who knew exactly what they had come for. The bouncer unclipped the rope for me before I even opened my mouth. My pheromones did that. They always did.

Inside it was warm and dark and every single thing about it was designed to make you feel things. The lighting was low and gold, the kind that made everyone look like they were lit from within. Sheer curtains separated private booths along the walls where shadows moved slowly behind the fabric. The bar ran the full length of the back wall and in the center of the room was the stage.

That was where Dante was.

I had heard about him the same way I heard about Marta, through whispered recommendations and knowing looks from men who could not quite explain what he had done to them but had never forgotten it. He was on stage when I walked in, moving to the slow heavy beat of whatever was playing, and I stopped just inside the entrance and watched.

He was beautiful in a way that felt almost unfair. Bronze skin, a body that looked carved rather than grown, wearing nothing but a pair of low slung black trousers that sat dangerously on his hips.

He moved like he had been doing this his whole life, like the music lived inside him somewhere, slow rolling movements that were somehow both lazy and devastating at the same time.

A man at the front of the stage pressed a bill against his stomach and he caught his wrist and held it there and smiled down at him and he looked like he might actually dissolve.

I found a seat close to the stage and ordered whiskey and kept watching.

When his eyes found mine through the low gold light he smiled differently. Not the performance smile he gave the rest of the room. Something more direct. More personal.

He came off the stage and came straight to me.

"You are the most interesting thing that has walked through that door all night," he said, standing in front of me, close enough that I could smell warm skin and faint cologne. "I noticed you the second you came in."

"I know," I said. "Sit with me."

He sat. Up close he was even better, dark eyes, full mouth, the kind of easy confidence that came from knowing exactly what effect he had on people. He reached out and ran one finger along the back of my hand, barely touching, just enough to make the point.

"What do you need tonight?" he asked.

"Everything," I said honestly.