The week had not been a progression of days, but a slow descent into a digital purgatory. The media firestorm surrounding the Dominion enterprises, and the Ashford incident had transitioned from a sharp explosion into a lingering, toxic cloud that refused to dissipate.
Inside the high-altitude boardroom of Dominion Enterprises, the air was thin and tasted of expensive ozone. Zayn Maverick sat at the head of the obsidian table, his lilac eyes narrowed as he addressed the final remains of a grueling crisis meeting. His voice was a rhythmic, commanding baritone, but even he couldn't hide the jagged edges of exhaustion.
To his right, Isidore Davenant sat like a marble statue carved from ice. He wasn't listening to the stock projections or the legal strategies. His gaze was fixed downward, his phone a glowing rectangle of malice in his palm.
On the screen, the feed was an endless scroll of vitriol. Anonymous accounts mocked his lineage, his status as an Omega, and his supposed "orchestration" of the Ashford tragedy. The comments were poisonous—sharp, jagged needles of words designed to puncture his composure.
Zayn dismissed the last of the executives with a weary flick of his wrist. As the doors hissed shut, he slumped back into his ergonomic leather chair, letting out a long, ragged sigh.
"Oh, God-damn-it," Zayn muttered, rubbing his temples.
He turned his head toward his cousin and assistant. The sight made his Alpha instincts prickle with unease. Isidore's jaw was clenched with such terrifying intensity that the bone looked as if it might shatter under the skin. His beige eyes weren't just angry; they were incandescent, glowing with a dangerous, subterranean heat.
"Davenant," Zayn began, his voice softening into a protective lilt. "Put the phone away. Don't worry about the bottom-feeders. Everything will be fine. I swear it on the company's name."
Isidore didn't blink. He didn't even breathe. He slowly raised his head, and the dead glance he shot Zayn made the Alpha flinch.
Zayn let out a nervous, weary laugh, trying to diffuse the tension. "Calm down, davenant. It's not like they could actually humiliate you in front of me. You're in the heart of Dominion. You're safe."
The irony of the word "safe" was shattered barely a second later.
A sudden, discordant cacophony erupted just outside the boardroom doors. There were shouts, the heavy thud of bodies hitting walls, and the frantic barking of security details.
Zayn's lilac eyes widened. Before he could even adjust his posture to stand, the heavy double doors swung open with a violent bang.
Four security guards were wrestling with a man who looked possessed. He was a fanatic—a feral supporter of Tristan Ashford, dressed in a tattered jersey, his face twisted in a mask of righteous fury.
In his hand, he clutched something small and mundane, yet in this setting, it was a weapon of pure indignity.
"You Davenant trash!" the man screamed, his voice cracking with hysteria.
Zayn barked an order, his Alpha aura flaring in a surge of protective dominance. "What the hell is going on? Get him out of here!"
The man, seeing the target of his hate, lunged forward with a desperate, jerky motion. He threw the egg.
The sound was a sickening, wet thwack.
The egg struck Isidore directly on the side of his head, the yellow yolk and translucent white dripping down his perfectly tailored suit, matting his hair and staining his porcelain skin.
The room fell into a vacuum of silence. The guards froze. Zayn's jaw dropped, a cold, visceral horror washing over him.
Isidore's head was slightly lowered. For three seconds, he didn't move. He stood there, the cooling slime of the egg a mark of public shame, a physical manifestation of the digital mockery he had been enduring for a week.
Then, the air changed.
The scent of a calm Omega was replaced by something sharp, metallic, and terrifyingly volatile. It was an aura of absolute, unmitigated fury. Zayn swallowed hard, his own Alpha instincts screaming at him to step back.
"Davenant—" Zayn started, his voice a panicked whisper.
Isidore didn't hear him. He was already moving.
He bypassed the guards like a streak of lightning. He didn't use the refined movements of a CEO; he used the raw, visceral violence of someone who had reached their absolute breaking point.
He grabbed the man by the collar, the fabric groaning under the strength of Isidore's grip.
"What the fuck is your problem?" Isidore barked, his voice a serrated blade that sliced through the man's laughter.
The fanatic, fueled by adrenaline and delusion, spat at him. "You deserve it! You're a pathetic animal! You tried to harm Ashford! You're—"
Isidore didn't let him finish the sentence.
With a roar of repressed agony, Isidore landed a heavy, bone-crunching fist directly into the man's face. The sound of the man's nose shattering echoed in the boardroom like a gunshot.
The man slumped, his head snapping back, but Isidore didn't let go. He was breathing heavily, his chest heaving, his beige eyes flashing with a crimson undertone.
The guards were in a state of paralysis, watching a Davenant—the most refined name in the city—become a whirlwind of carnage.
"Davenant trash?" Isidore hissed, his voice trembling with a spiked blood pressure that was becoming visible in the throbbing vein at his temple. "I'll show you what a pathetic animal looks like."
He landed another punch. Then another. The man's head was whipped from side to side, blood spraying onto the obsidian table and Isidore's stained shirt.
"Stop it!" Zayn finally roared, finding his voice. He lunged forward, grabbing Isidore by the shoulders from behind. "Davenant, let him go! You're going to kill him!"
The guards finally snapped out of their trance, stepping in to pry the half-unconscious intruder from Isidore's blood-slicked knuckles. The fanatic groaned, his face a ruin of purple bruising and blood, as the guards dragged him toward the exit.
"Get him out of here! Now!" Zayn screamed at the guards.
Zayn didn't let go of Isidore. He felt the tremors racking his cousin's body. He felt the terrifying, frantic heat radiating off his skin. Isidore's blood pressure was spiking dangerously; he could feel the frantic, uneven thud of Isidore's heart through his suit jacket.
"Damnit, Davenant! Stop! Just listen... breathe," Zayn pleaded, his voice thick with a mix of fear and empathy.
Isidore finally let his hands drop. His knuckles were raw and split, the skin a vivid, angry red from the repeated impact. He stood there, staring at the empty doorway where the man had been, his chest still heaving with the remnants of his volcanic fury.
Zayn carefully steered him toward a chair, his hands firm but gentle. "Davenant, sit. Sit down before you collapse."
Isidore sank into the chair, the "lava-like" temper slowly cooling into a numb, hollow shock. He looked down at his hands—the hands of Isidore davenant, a CEO, and an Omega—and saw the blood of a man he had just dismantled.
Zayn moved with frantic efficiency. He grabbed his phone, his fingers flying across the screen. "Hello? Yes! Send the first aid kit to the primary boardroom immediately!
He threw the phone back onto the table and crouched down in front of Isidore. He took those red, battered hands in his own, rubbing them gently as if trying to soothe the fire out of the skin.
He looked up at Isidore, seeing the beige eyes finally starting to clear, replaced by a devastating, quiet vulnerability.
"Oh, dear," Zayn whispered, his lilac eyes full of a soft, heartbreaking regret. "You shouldn't have done that, Davenant. Not for a piece of trash like him."
Isidore stared at his hands. The crimson was vivid, a jagged contrast against the porcelain pallor of his skin. To anyone else, it was the evidence of a victory—a physical rebuke to a harasser. To Isidore, it was a visceral nightmare. The coppery tang of the blood hit his olfactory senses, mixing with the sulfurous stench of the broken egg, triggering a wave of nausea so potent it threatened to bring him to his knees.
"I need to clean this," Isidore barked, his voice cracking, a jagged edge of hysteria surfacing. "It's... it's disgusting. It's filth. Get it off me."
Zayn reached out, his lilac eyes full of a frantic, grounding concern. "Stay still, Davenant. Just a little longer. The first aid kit is coming. You're in shock, your blood pressure—"
"No!" Isidore's rejection was a physical blow. He stood abruptly, his chair screeching against the polished floor like a dying animal. He didn't just walk; he staggered, his equilibrium sabotaged by the sight of the red smears.
He lunged toward the private washroom attached to the boardroom, a sanctuary of chrome and marble. Zayn was a half-step behind him, refusing to let the Omega descend into this sensory hell alone.
Inside the washroom, the sound of the faucet was a roar. Isidore thrust his hands under the icy stream, scrubbing with a desperate, self-flagellating intensity. He didn't just want the blood gone; he wanted to erase the very memory of the contact.
"It won't come off," Isidore hissed, his beige eyes fixed on a phantom stain. "The smell... the smell is everywhere."
Zayn stood by the door, his heart aching at the sight of his cousin—the iron-willed CEO—reduced to a trembling wreck by a smear of iron and salt. "It's gone, Isidore. Look at me. The water is clear. It's gone."
But the psychological stain remained, a dark ink blot on the canvas of a week already defined by ruin.
Miles away, the atmosphere was different—hushed, clinical, and heavy with the scent of antiseptic and unspent rage.
Tristan Ashford sat upright in his hospital bed. He looked like a fallen god, his "crystalline" eyes fixed on the window, watching the sun dip below the horizon. A week. It had been an entire week since he had felt the warmth of Isidore's presence. The hospital was a gilded cage, and Tristan was a lion pacing behind bars of IV drips and heart monitors.
Joshua sat in the armchair across from him, the rhythmic crunch of an apple the only sound in the room. He looked breezy, almost irreverent, but his brown eyes were sharp, scanning the digital tablet in his lap.
"The Lockwood matter is a labyrinth, brother," Joshua said, tossing a slice of apple into his mouth. "Kay is a monument to vanity, sure, but he's not a mastermind.
Zephyr stood by the door, a silhouette of disciplined shadows. He pushed his silver-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose, his violet eyes reflective. Kay Lockwood has the beauty of a masterpiece, but he lacks the internal architecture to pull off a stunt of this magnitude by himself."
Tristan's hand tightened on the bedsheet, his knuckles turning white. "Ansel Adams."
The name hung in the air like a poisonous vapor.
"Ansel used him," Zephyr continued, his voice a low. "Kay wasn't a co-conspirator; he was a prop. He exchange the fake prop with real knife, and as we know he was forced, because someone like Kay wouldn't do anything by himself."
"Precisely," Joshua murmured. "At that moment, Kay didn't want an object. He wanted a person. He wanted validation, and Ansel provided the script."
Joshua let out a short, sharp laugh, leaning forward. "Which is why we are initiating a secret mission. We can't just invite Ansel to tea and ask him to confess. That snake would twist the conversation into a noose before we even finished the first cup."
Tristan turned his gaze to his younger brother, his brow furrowing. "Then what is the plan? How do you force a man like Adams to admit his own machinations?"
Joshua's smirk was wide, a flash of the mischievous genius that had once made him the terror of the Ashford household. He closed his eyes for a moment, crossing one leg over the other with a casual, predatory elegance.
"Have you forgotten, brother? When I was barely eleven, I hacked the entire regional investigation department just because I wanted to see my own school records. I didn't get caught then, and I won't get caught now."
Tristan's eyes widened, a flicker of shock crossing his face. "Joshua... don't tell me you're planning to infiltrate the Adams estate's private servers."
"Definitely, Boss," Joshua chirped, tapping his temple. "If the truth won't come out of his mouth, it'll come out of his hard drives. Every encrypted email, every wire transfer to Kay's secret accounts, every 'off-the-record' instruction. I'm going to tear his digital life apart."
Zephyr let out a heavy, weary sigh, shaking his head. "Joshua, stop being a child and act like a responsible officer of the law. Cyber-espionage without a warrant is a one-way ticket to a disciplinary hearing."
"But my idea is ten times better than waiting for a warrant that Ansel will just block with his legal team!" Joshua countered, his smirk never wavering. "Efficiency over etiquette, Zephyr. That's how we win."
Tristan tuned them out. The bickering of his brother and the detective faded into a background hum. His thoughts were a singular, obsessive loop of Isidore.
Is he eating well? Is he sleeping? Does he know I'll come for him?
The first thing Tristan would do upon his release wasn't to hold a press conference or sign a deposition. He would find his beautiful, Omega. He would take that cold, aristocratic face in his hands and kiss away the stress that had surely carved lines into Isidore's soul.