The devil's omega

Chapter 3: The offer

Heaven was wiping down the last table when the bell over the door rang, and three men she'd never seen before stepped in out of the rain.

They didn't look like customers. They didn't look at the menu, didn't look at her the way people looked at a woman who might bring them food, didn't do any of the small ordinary things strangers did in a restaurant at closing time. They just spread out, unhurried, like they already knew where the exits were.

Something old and animal in her chest went very still.

"We're closed," she said, reaching for the calm, unbothered voice that had gotten her through six years of near-misses. It came out steadier than she felt. "Come back tomorrow."

None of them answered.

She was already moving for the kitchen door when the nearest one closed the distance between them faster than a man his size had any right to move, and the last thing she registered was a hand at the back of her neck and the floor tilting up to meet her.

She woke to cold water hitting her face and the metallic taste of fear in her mouth before her eyes had even opened.

The room was dark, windowless, concrete underfoot, lit by a single bulb that did more to create shadows than banish them. Her wrists were bound to the arms of a chair. Her head throbbed where she'd hit the floor.

Lucian stood a few feet away, jacket off, sleeves rolled, watching her the way a man watches a pot to see if it's finally about to boil.

"Good," he said. "You're awake."

"Charming way to invite someone over." Her voice came out rougher than she wanted, but the sarcasm was there, on schedule, the only weapon she had left. "Most people just text."

"Seraphina Lark," he said, ignoring her entirely. "Born in a settlement in the northern territories. The last confirmed omega birth on any record, human or otherwise. Your parents died making sure that fact stayed buried. Someone did an excellent job burying you along with it."

The name hit harder this time than it had in her head for six years. She said nothing, jaw tight, pulse hammering loud enough she was sure he could hear it from where he stood.

"Nothing to say?"

"Just trying to figure out if you brought me here to monologue or to actually ask something."

Something flickered in his expression—not quite amusement, not quite irritation, something that hadn't fully decided which it wanted to be. He crouched slightly, bringing himself level with her, and the stillness in him was worse up close than any shouting could have been.

"My tracker," he said. "He came through Ashgrove six weeks ago. He mentioned your restaurant in his last report. Then he disappeared."

"I don't—" She shook her head, genuinely thrown, the fear briefly overtaken by confusion. "I don't know what you're talking about. What tracker? Nobody's disappeared in Ashgrove. I'd have heard."

He studied her for a long moment, reading her the way he read ledgers, looking for the seam where a lie usually showed itself.

He didn't find one. That, somehow, seemed to bother him more than a lie would have.

"We'll revisit that," he said, straightening, voice cooling back into something flat and final. "Get her ready for questioning. I want her cooperative by morning."

"Ready for—" Heaven's composure cracked just slightly around the edges. "Hey. Hey, I answered you—"

He was already gone, the door shutting behind him with a sound that seemed to swallow the whole room.

They left her alone after that, bound to the chair in the dark, two guards posted outside the door who apparently didn't think a captive audience was worth lowering their voices for.

"—third night this week he's sent it back," one of them was saying, muffled through the door but not muffled enough. "Chef's about ready to quit. You can't cook for a man like that and get it wrong every single time and keep your nerves."

"He barely eats as it is. Now he won't touch anything at all."

Heaven, wrists raw, head pounding, filed that away with the same instinct that had kept her alive for six years: not sympathy, not yet—just information. A crack in a wall she hadn't found the edges of.

When the guards finally came in to check on her, she didn't wait for a question.

"Tell him something for me," she said, voice hoarse but steady. "Tell him if he's tired of his kitchen staff ruining every meal, I'll cook for him myself. I ran a restaurant for six years without a single complaint. Whatever he wants to do with me after, fine. But he doesn't get to starve out of spite when I'm sitting right here."

The two guards exchanged a look.

It took less than an hour for Lucian to reappear.

He didn't sit. He didn't crouch to her level this time. He simply looked at her, head tilted slightly, the way he might look at a number that had refused, stubbornly, to add up the way he'd expected.

"You're offering to cook for me," he said. "After what just happened in this room."

"I'm offering you a reason not to waste me," she said. "You clearly haven't decided what I'm worth yet. Might as well let me be useful while you figure it out."

Silence stretched between them, long enough that even the guards by the door seemed to be holding their breath.

"Fine," he said finally. "You'll cook. You'll stay in the house, watched, at all times. And Seraphina—" he paused at the door, not turning back "—if I find out you had anything to do with my tracker, no meal on this earth will change what happens next."

"It's Heaven," she said to his back. "You want a cook, you get Heaven."

He didn't answer. The door closed, and for the first time since she'd woken up in the dark, Heaven let herself shake.