The Alpha's Enemy

The trick to disappearing was doing it in a good suit.

Senna Russo had learned that at nineteen, in the month after they buried his brother, when every exit of his life grew a man with an earpiece. Nobody stopped a well-dressed omega walking through a five-star lobby as if he owned the mortgage. They stopped runners. They stopped people who looked hunted.

He crossed the marble of the Hotel Aurelia at a stroll, one garment bag over his shoulder, and let the concierge believe the shell name on the booking.

“Welcome back, Mr. Ferrante.”

“It’s been too long,” Senna said, and meant it about the entire country.

The suite was on the eighteenth floor, neutral ground in every sense—the Aurelia sat on the river between the two halves of the city, owned by a Swiss group that took money from both banks and loyalty from neither. North of the water, his father’s kingdom was waiting to swallow him whole tomorrow morning. Tonight it didn’t know he’d landed.

His phone buzzed while he was unzipping the garment bag.

Ottone: tell me you’re not doing what I think you’re doing

Senna: I’m unpacking. Very boring.

Ottone: your flight lands tomorrow at 10. the one your father’s people are meeting.

Senna: And I’ll be on it. I’m very excited to see everyone.

Ottone: senna.

Senna: One night. Nobody knows my face here anymore, I’ve been gone six years.

Ottone: if zio finds out you were in the city unguarded he’ll have me shot

Senna: He’d never. You’re his favourite nephew.

Ottone: i’m his only nephew

Senna: Then think how hard you are to replace.

The typing bubble appeared, died, appeared again. Senna hung the white jacket on the wardrobe door and waited his cousin out.

Ottone: one night. phone stays on. and you bring me the whisky from the minibar

Senna: Extortion. The family’s taught you well.

He showered off eleven hours of recycled air, took his suppressant dose from the travel case—two of them tonight, because the timetable had been mangled across three time zones and the last thing he needed was his own body announcing him—and dressed with more care than any dinner north of the river would ever get. White shirt, loose at the collar. The white jacket. His mother’s ring on his right hand, the only inheritance that had never come with conditions.

In the mirror he looked expensive and unclaimed, which was exactly the point.

Tomorrow he’d be the Russo omega again. Vittorio’s remaining son. The one they kept in glass.

Tonight he was nobody, and nobody was going downstairs for a drink.

♥♥♥

The bar on the top floor had a view that split the city down the middle, which struck him as very tactful of it. River lights ran between the two banks like a border drawn in gold. Senna took a seat at the long end of the counter, back to the window, angle on the door—six years abroad hadn’t unlearned any of the lessons that came with his surname.

The bartender built him a martini cold enough to hurt, and for a while Senna simply sat with it and let the anonymity soak in, luxurious as hot water. Nobody in this room knew his surname. He could have wept.

He was one sip in when he noticed the alpha.

End of the bar, alone. Black suit, no tie, dark hair pushed back with less product than it deserved. Big through the shoulders in an inconvenient sort of manner. There was a glass of red wine in front of him that he wasn’t drinking so much as guarding, and he was watching the room in the mirror behind the bottles rather than turning his head.

Senna knew that habit. He was doing it himself.

The alpha’s eyes found his in the mirror. Held. Moved on without theatre.

Interesting. Alphas didn’t usually decline to stare.

Senna gave it a few minutes, counted the room’s exits out of old habit—two, plus a service door—and then carried his martini down the length of the bar because patience was a virtue and he had never claimed any of those.

“You’re guarding that wine like it insulted you,” he said, taking the next stool.

The alpha considered him. Up close his face was all hard angles and a jaw that belonged on currency, and his eyes were dark enough to make the low light look nervous. “It’s from the wrong bank of the river,” he said. “I’m deciding whether to hold that against it.”

“And?”

“The grape didn’t choose where it grew.”

“Very forgiving of you.”

“It’s my one flaw.”

Senna laughed before he could decide not to. The alpha’s mouth tilted a degree, and he turned on the stool—slow, unbothered, giving Senna the whole of his attention as if attention were a thing he could afford to spend.

“Gianni,” the alpha said.

No surname. No hand extended for Senna to refuse. Just the name, set down on the bar between them like a chip he was willing to lose.

“Alvize,” Senna said.

“Is that true?”

“Not remotely. Is yours?”

“No.”

“Good,” Senna said. “I hate honest men. They always want credit for it.”

Gianni picked up the wine at last and drank, watching him over the rim. “What do you want, then?”

Most alphas asked that question with a smirk attached, like the answer was already decided in their favour. This one asked it as though the answer might change what happened next.

“One night in a city where nobody knows my name,” Senna said. “I leave in the morning for a very tedious family obligation, and I’ll be theirs for the rest of my natural life. Tonight I’m mine.”

“An obligation.”

“You want details? Careful, Gianni. That sounds like a question.”

“Withdrawn,” Gianni said gravely, and Senna felt the laugh climb up again, unwelcome and warm.

They talked for an hour and traded nothing. It was the best conversation he’d had in years. Gianni didn’t ask what he did, where he’d flown from, who his people were. He asked whether the negroni in Milan was worth the airfare and had opinions about aperitivo hours strong enough to start a small war. When Senna baited him—“You look like the sort of man who owns exactly one painting and it’s of a boat”—Gianni said, “Two paintings. No boats,” and refused to elaborate, and the refusal was better than any answer.

Somewhere in the second hour, a test arrived on its own schedule. A big sandy-haired alpha peeled off a bachelor party near the window, came over on a tide of cologne, and planted a forearm on the bar between them as if claiming coastline.

“You’re the prettiest thing to walk in here all year,” the alpha informed Senna, with the confidence of a man whose money had always agreed with him. “Let me buy your next one.”

Senna waited, out of pure scientific interest, to see what Gianni would do. This was the moment. This was where every alpha he’d ever met stood up, squared off, made it about themselves—two dogs and a lamppost, and Senna cast as the lamppost.

Gianni picked up his wine and had a sip.

“He’s not going to defend you,” the sandy alpha said, jerking a thumb, scenting an opening.

“Defend me,” Senna repeated, wondering. “From a drink.” He looked the man over once, taking his time about it, and delivered the verdict with charity. “Tesoro, you’ve mistaken the species. I’m not something you win off another alpha. Go back to your friends—the night’s young, and statistically one of them will kiss you out of pity.”

The bachelor party heard that. The alpha retreated under covering laughter, ears going red, and Senna turned back to find Gianni watching him with unconcealed enjoyment.

“You could have helped,” Senna said.

“You had numbers on him. I didn’t want to crowd the field.”

“Most alphas would’ve made it a production.”

“Most alphas,” Gianni said, “think a man like you needs rescuing. It seemed rude to insult you in a nice bar.”

And that—that—was the most dangerous sentence anyone had said to Senna in six years.

Twice more, men entered the bar and Gianni’s attention went to the mirror and came back. Twice, Senna pretended not to have watched him do it. Whoever this man was, he lived the same as Senna lived—checked, measured, aimed at the door.

Nobody harmless sat like that. Senna decided not to care. Harmless had never once been his type, and anyway, harmless men asked questions.

“Another?” the bartender offered.

Senna looked at his empty glass, then at the alpha beside him. There was a clock running on this night, and he could hear every second of it. Tomorrow was fittings and security briefings and his father’s hands on his shoulders, heavy as a verdict. Tomorrow the doors of his life started locking again, one by one, from the outside.

“No,” he said, without taking his eyes off Gianni. “I don’t think I want another drink.”

Gianni set the wine down, unfinished. “No?”

“I have a room,” Senna said.

For a moment the alpha simply looked at him, and the look landed low in Senna’s stomach and stayed there, a struck match dropped down a dry well. Then Gianni stood and buttoned his jacket, and the full size of him unfolded off the stool like an argument for making terrible decisions.

“After you, Alvize.”

The lift was mirrored on three sides, which was almost obscene, all those copies of them standing a careful eight inches apart. Senna pressed eighteen. Watched the doors seal the city out.

“House rules,” he said to the glowing numbers. “No surnames. No questions. In the morning you never met me.”

“That’s three rules.”

“I contain multitudes.”

Gianni turned his head. This close, the scent of him got past the bar’s noise of polished wood and other people—cedar and woodsmoke, banked low, an alpha keeping himself leashed and making it look easy. “Your rules assume I’ll want to forget you,” he said.

“They assume you’ll have to.”

“Why?”

Senna smiled at their reflections—the white jacket and the black suit, opposite ends of a chessboard, and wasn’t that a thought he’d be examining absolutely never.

“That’s a question, Gianni.”

The lift chimed. The doors slid open on the eighteenth floor.

Neither of them moved for one long second, the corridor stretching out ahead, carpeted and hushed and pointing at exactly one door.

Then Senna stepped out, keycard already between two fingers like a dealt ace, and the alpha followed him into the quiet, and the lift closed behind them with the soft finality of a decision that could not be taken back.