His Stolen Omega

The Exchange had two rules, and Beck had watched men die over both of them.

Rule one: no blood on neutral ground. Rule two: everything sells.

He sat in the third row of a converted cathedral with a glass of whiskey he hadn’t touched and a numbered paddle he’d used twice, and he thought, as he thought every auction season, that there was something almost funny about a room full of murderers behaving themselves because an old shifter family said so. The Exchange had been brokering deals since before the city had electricity. Its founders had drawn up the neutrality accords in an era when packs settled disputes by burning each other’s harvests, and the accords had outlived the harvests, the founders, and four separate attempts to torch the building. You could shoot a man on any street in a forty-mile radius and someone would shrug. You raised your voice under this roof and your whole pack lost trading rights for a decade.

So everyone was very polite.

“Stop fidgeting,” Charlie said beside him, without moving her lips. She wore grey, which meant business, and her hair pinned back, which meant serious business. “You look like you’re casing the room.”

“I’m always casing the room.”

“Do it with your face still.”

Around them, the city’s worst people sipped good wine under stained glass. The Nikolaevs had a full pew, patriarch included, which meant something was for sale tonight that they wanted badly. The Delgados had sent their accountant and his bodyguard, which meant they were buying, not selling. Three independent crews clustered near the back like kids who hadn’t been invited to sit with anyone. Every scent in the room was flattened by Exchange incense, a smoke that pressed emotion down into something unreadable, and Beck hated it as he’d hate losing a sense. It made the room feel like a photograph of a room. Fifteen years of reading people by what their skin gave up, and in here everyone smelled like the same church candle.

The auctioneer worked through the evening’s lots from a pulpit that had presumably once held a bible.

Lot 19: territory rights to six blocks of dockland, sold to the Delgados’ accountant with a nod.

Lot 23: theirs. A shipping contract out of the eastern port, currently held by a crew that had gotten greedy about tariffs. Silas wanted the routes, had wanted them for two years, and tonight the greedy crew needed liquidity more than leverage. Charlie raised the paddle four times with the enthusiasm of a woman ordering a sandwich, and the routes were Hollow Ridge’s, and that was the entire reason they’d come.

“Done,” Charlie said, signing the docket a page brought over on a silver tray, because the Exchange did everything on silver trays. “We can go.”

“There’s a bar.”

“There’s a bar at home.”

“There’s a bar here that Aleksey Nikolaev is standing at, and he owes Silas an answer about the marina.” Beck stood, buttoned his jacket over the shoulder rig the Exchange pretended not to know about. “Ten minutes.”

He got four.

Nikolaev was mid-lie, something ornate about permit delays that Beck was letting run because a man’s lies told you more than his truths, when the auctioneer’s voice changed. Beck had spent his working life learning rooms, and rooms told you things in their pauses. This pause had teeth in it.

“Lot 40,” the auctioneer said. “A bond contract.”

The bar went quiet in a particular way that Beck had heard exactly twice before in his working life, and both of those had ended with a family finishing. Nikolaev set down his glass. Down the counter, a woman from one of the independent crews crossed herself, which Beck had never once seen anybody do in this building.

He turned around.

Bond contracts came up maybe once a decade, and every time, the Exchange got the same look on its collective face: hunger dressed as disapproval. A bond contract was old law. Older than the Exchange, older than the city. One signature promising an omega’s bond to an alpha, transferable on death, enforceable by the Conclave itself. Modern packs called the practice barbaric, wrote position papers about it, and then leaned forward in their seats.

“By the terms of the estate of Edmund Warner,” the auctioneer continued, “the contract names no holder. Per the founding statutes, an unnamed bond contract reverts to open bidding among alphas of standing.”

Edmund Warner. Beck knew the name as everyone knew it. The Warner operation had run half the west side for thirty years, laundered money for men in office, and died with its boss eight months back. The estate had been circled by every lawyer on the coast since the funeral. There’d been a son, people said. Kept out of the business entirely. An omega, raised behind glass, seen at galas and nowhere else.

The doors behind the pulpit opened.

Two handlers brought him out, and Beck understood immediately that “brought” was generous, because the omega was walking ahead of them like they were his staff and he’d chosen the route.

He wore a suit that cost more than most of the cars outside. Ivory shirt, charcoal jacket, cut so clean it looked sworn to him. Dark curls pushed back from his face except where they refused, a beauty mark under one eye, and a mouth that would have stopped traffic on its own merits.

There was blood on it.

Not his. Beck’s eye went to the nearer handler and found the man’s hand wrapped in a bar towel, held stiff at his side. The omega had bitten him. Recently. Hard enough to need the towel, hard enough that the man was keeping a full arm’s length of distance and pretending it was procedure.

The omega reached the center of the floor, stopped where the light pooled, and looked out at the room with an expression Beck had only ever seen on men counting the money they were about to take off you.

Somebody near the front laughed, low.

The omega found the laugh in the crowd and looked at it until it stopped.

“Christ,” Charlie murmured. She’d appeared at Beck’s elbow, because of course she had. “That’s Warner’s boy.”

“Warner sold his own son?”

“Warner’s paperwork sold him. Man’s been dead since spring.” Her jaw was tight. “The estate lawyers must have found the contract and taken it to the Exchange. Legal, all of it. Ugly as sin, but legal. His own father, God. And the son had no idea, look at him, that suit’s for a board meeting, not a block.”

She was right. He’d dressed to fight this in a conference room. Somewhere between the lawyer’s office and this floor, the conference room had been taken off the table, and he’d walked out here anyway with his collar straight and somebody’s blood drying on his mouth.

“Opening at two hundred thousand,” said the auctioneer.

Paddles moved. Beck watched the room instead, an old habit, and so he saw exactly when the temperature dropped. It wasn’t the bidding. It was the man in the fifth pew who hadn’t bid yet, who set down his wine, and took up his paddle, and let the whole room see him do it.

Aldous Krane.

Krane ran the north half of everything worth running. He had silver hair and a tailor better than God’s and a smile he’d clearly bought somewhere, because nothing that smiled like that was born. His organization moved product and people and votes. And everyone under this roof knew what happened to omegas who entered Krane’s keeping, because they’d all seen one, exactly once, at exactly one event, before the omega stopped appearing anywhere at all. There had been three of those over the years. Three debuts. Three disappearances. Nobody asked, because asking Krane a question cost more than most answers were worth.

Krane raised his paddle.

“Three hundred,” the auctioneer said.

The other bidders started finding reasons to be done. That was how Krane bid. He didn’t outspend you, he outlasted your nerve, and the room’s nerve had a well-documented ceiling where he was concerned. A Nikolaev cousin pushed it to three-fifty, young enough to have a point to prove, and got a glance from Krane that cost less than the wine he went back to drinking.

“Three seventy-five.” Krane’s voice carried without effort. “Let’s not waste the evening.”

The floor went still.

It was not the silence of surprise. Every person under that roof had known within four seconds of Lot 40 being read out how the evening would end; the Exchange did not run auctions where the ending was in doubt, it ran auctions where the ending was made public. What arrived instead was the particular quiet of two hundred professionals watching a thing become official, and disliking it, and doing nothing about it, and discovering that they could live with that quite comfortably, as they had lived with it three times before.

Beck had sat through worse rooms. He had sat through rooms where the item on the block was a debt and the collateral was somebody’s family, and he had kept his face still and his hands loose and thought hard about the paperwork, because thinking about the paperwork was how a man walked out of a building like this with his standing intact and his stomach where he had left it.

Somewhere behind him a woman laughed at something that had nothing to do with any of it.

The Delgados’ accountant checked his watch. The three independent crews at the back examined their shoes with the practised sincerity of men who fully intended to tell this story later, in a bar, differently. The Nikolaev patriarch turned his signet ring once and did not look at the floor at all, which was its own tell: the old man had decided some time ago not to see this, and was seeing it anyway, and was cross about it.

Two hundred people. Not one of them a coward, taken singly. Beck could have named nine in that room who had done something in the last year that took real nerve.

Taken together, they were a congregation.

Beck looked at the omega.

The omega was already looking at Krane, and there was fury in him, banked and total, visible even through the incense flattening every scent in the room to nothing. His hands were loose at his sides. His chin was up. He’d worked out what was happening at the same speed as everyone else, and he was standing in the middle of it wearing another man’s blood, refusing to give the room a single flinch to enjoy.

Then his eyes moved.

They crossed the floor and found Beck.

Beck never worked out, afterward, why. Maybe because Beck was the only person in the building looking at him instead of at Krane. Maybe it was just the geometry of the seats. The omega’s eyes were dark-gold and clever and rimmed with the kind of exhaustion sleep doesn’t fix, and they held Beck’s across sixty feet of neutral ground, and they said, plain as a signed confession:

You know exactly what’s going to happen to me if he wins.

Beck did know.

Everyone in this room knew, and everyone in this room was going to finish their wine anyway.

“Three seventy-five, going once,” said the auctioneer.

Charlie’s hand landed on Beck’s forearm. She knew him. That was the problem, people got to know you. “Beckett,” she said, very quietly. “Whatever it is. No.”

“Going twice.”

The omega was still looking at him. Not pleading. Beck could have withstood pleading, he’d been trained on pleading, pleading slid off him like rain off a coat. This was worse. This was a man taking one last count of his options and finding the shelf bare, and deciding he’d meet it with his chin up and someone else’s blood on his mouth.

Beck’s grandmother, dead thirty years, had a saying: the worst decisions arrive dressed as the only ones.

“Sold,” said the auctioneer, and the gavel came down like a door closing, “to Mr. Krane.”

Krane rose. He was smiling the bought smile, smoothing his lapel, already turning toward the floor and the omega standing on it, and the handlers were stepping in, and the room was exhaling and reaching for its drinks.

Beck heard his own voice before he’d finished deciding to use it.

“He’s claimed.”