Alle Kapitel von Betrayed Omega: Chosen by the Mafia Alpha : Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 6

JulianForty-seven seconds.I spent forty-six of them standing in the hallway with my back against the wall, listening to my own heartbeat do something medically inadvisable, watching the door the way you watched a thing you knew was going to move.The forty-seventh second I spent moving.Not toward the door. Away from it.Think. The word cut through the noise in my chest like a blade. You are good at thinking. Think.Front door: compromised. Three SUVs, multiple men, at least two of them already in the building lobby, based on the timing of the knock, too fast for the elevator, which meant stairs, which meant they'd been positioned before they knocked. They knew the layout. Or they assumed a standard one and moved accordingly. Either way, the front door was gone as an option.Service exit. I had noted it on my third day in this apartment, the way I noted all exits in all spaces, a habit so old I no longer recognised it as unusual. End of the hall, east stairwell, ground floor exit on

AlastorI had not slept.This was not unusual. Sleep, for me, had always been a negotiation rather than a surrender, something I permitted my body in carefully allocated hours when the day's variables had been reviewed, the perimeter confirmed, the outstanding decisions either resolved or deliberately shelved. Last night had produced too many unresolved variables for the negotiation to succeed.I stood at the window of my private study on the thirtieth floor and watched Toronto's early morning spread itself across the horizon in grey and amber, and I thought about the sixty-two pages Serena had sent to my tablet at 4 AM with a single accompanying message: He read every word. He caught the scope clause. The amendments are sound.He had caught the scope clause.I had included it deliberately vague: not to deceive, but because the genuine extent of the internal damage wasn't yet mappable. Every previous internal review had stalled within the first two weeks. The numbers were clean on the

AlastorI watched Julian's face move through several things at once, too quickly for him to manage all of them: confusion, the edge of an argument, and below both of those, something he was not going to let me read. Something he was working hard not to name even to himself.His wrist was against the table. The patch was there, and he was looking at me, and I could see, from this distance, in this light, with the kind of attention I had been applying to him since he walked into my office, the faint colour that had risen along his cheekbones.He opened his mouth.Before he could find the argument, every speaker in the residence fired at once.The alarm hit simultaneously throughout the building, not the gentle three-tone notification of a sensor test, but the full emergency register, the one that meant the perimeter had been breached at a point that mattered.I was on my feet.Across the table, Julian was on his feet a half-second behind me, and I registered, in the peripheral part of m