by Aiden Bates
Hartmann laughed and shook his head. "I'm not worried about your union."
A couple of heads turned around, and they didn't look friendly. Ben slouched in his seat. "You're not?"
"No. Everyone's got their price, and once you've claimed me and we've gotten the legal paperwork all squared away you won't need to worry about a union anymore anyway." He took a mouthful of salad and chewed it before continuing. "I'm sure as hell not worried about your employers. I mean, come on. They need me. If I tell them that you're what I want, they'll give it to me." He grabbed onto Ben's hand. "You're mine, Alpha. But I'll give you some time to come to terms with that, get used to the idea. I mean we haven't known each other for very long. Just a week." He lowered his head and blushed, all demure shyness that Ben knew was false.
Ben smiled thinly back at him and forced some light conversation through the rest of the meal. He couldn't have told anyone what the conversation was about. He wasn't really paying attention. Instead, he let his brain go blank and his mouth go on autopilot. It seemed like the only way to get through the conversation.
He told Ty about it when he got home though. He didn't want to have any secrets between them, especially not any secrets as big as another omega trying to force a relationship on him. "Okay," Ty said, running that delightful tongue ring against the back of his teeth. It was a thing he did when he was thinking sometimes. Ben thought it was adorable. "This is, like, dangerously creepy now. Before it was just seriously creepy."
"What makes it dangerous instead of just creepy?" Ben watched Ty's mouth, almost transfixed enough to forget about Hartmann for a moment.
"You mean besides the part where you told him no and he outright told you he didn't care?" Ty raised an eyebrow. "I mean, I can see why he'd be so attracted to you, but he still needs to get that you said no."
Ben grabbed at Ty and kissed him. "So what's this about sending kids off to the mines and brothels of the Old West? Is that stuff true too?"
Ty shook his head. "They found jobs for boys, when they were old enough, to work in mines, sure, just like any other orphanage at the time. As conditions became better known, yeah, they stopped letting mines recruit from Gray House. They were one of the first organizations in the country to do that. And they never sent omegas off to the frontier. Not a lot of places acknowledged that they had omegas, but Gray House did and they treated them well for the time." He shook his hair out of its little ponytail. "I don't know why he'd slander us like that; it's not like that's a common rumor or anything. Not about any similar organization."
"It seems personal. He said something about how Gray House sucks the innocence right off of people." Ben slipped his hands under Ty's shirt and put them on the bare skin of his waist, and Ty looked like his day had gotten about a thousand times better.
"Yeah, that's personal all right. It's going to take some serious work to figure out what his beef is." He folded his lips together. "Fortunately my semester ends next week, and I'll have the time to work on it. In between working on my thesis, that is."
"Doesn't Gray House have lawyers or something to do that for you?" Ben licked at Ty's neck.
"They have lawyer, singular. His name's Larry and I think he might be working this pro bono. I don't think he'd mind the help. Anyway, I want to know, and he's making eyes at something that I want."
Ben nibbled along Ty's jawline. "What's that?" he asked in between nips. Nibbling along someone's beard, even a well-trimmed beard, was a challenge but he made it work. The way Ty's body heated up against him made it worth it.
"You, goofball. I want you." Ty gasped when Ben hit an exceptionally good spot and tilted his head a bit, giving Ben better access to his neck.
Ben took Ty to bed, and if either one of them thought about Gray House or about Hartmann until much later, he didn't say anything about it. Once Ty had dozed off in Ben's arms, though, Ben couldn't help but worry. If Hartmann was so averse to the word no, what might he not try to bring Ben into his fold?
Chapter Five
The last week of the semester was exam week, and it passed in a blur. Most of Ty's classes wanted papers, not exams, but those had their own challenges. They hadn't seemed quite so insurmountable when he'd been a single guy just muddling through his days. Sure he hooked up every once in a great while, but for the most part he kept things strictly platonic and just socialized with his friends. He could always put social things off when he needed to and focus on school. Now that he was seeing someone, and that someone lived next door and seemed almost as enamored of Ty as Ty was of him, self-control kind of took a swan dive.
He still had a couple of professors who wanted exams, though, and he got that too. Social work wasn't necessarily all about theories and long treatises about how things should work. Social work was about things happening in the real world, and sometimes things happened fast. A worker had to be able to think on their feet. They weren't going to be able to ask a client to hold that thought while they thumbed through an entire library's worth of resources to maybe find the right answer.
He'd thought he was being clever when he decided to work full-time and study full-time. He'd known it would be a challenge, but he'd known he wouldn't have the distractions to make it impossible. Naturally, the perfect alpha had to come along toward the end of his academic career to throw a monkey wrench into all of that.
It could be worse, he reminded himself as he left Ben sleeping in the bed, sneaking into the living room to study on Thursday morning. If Ben had come along toward the beginning of his career, who knew what would have happened? He might never have finished.
By the end of the week, his papers had been handed in and he'd finished his exams. All he wanted to do on Friday night, and into Saturday, was sleep. Ben, because he might not technically be perfect but he was about as close as a living human could get, let him.
Once he'd paid off some of his sleep debt, he could focus on other things. He cleaned up his apartment a bit, not that it ever got all that messy but he had more laundry than he liked to let fester. He changed the sheets on the futons and on his loft bed. He cleaned out the fridge, because he had a tendency to let that slide. And he lavished Ben with attention.
Dick Hartmann hadn't forgotten about Ben. On the contrary, for all the good saying no had done Ben might as well not have said anything at all. He delivered gifts to Ben on a daily basis: chocolates, flowers, a fine linen suit. The suit fit perfectly, and both Ben and Ty were more than a little horrified by the way Hartmann just knew how to fit Ben.
Ben certainly wasn't encouraging him, not by any stretch of the imagination. The poor guy got angry every time some flunky left a new token with the reception desk. "You're going to have to start telling them to refuse delivery," Ty suggested after the suit arrived. "Just tell them to send them back. You've told him no and he's obviously not taking that very subtle hint."
Ben snorted. "You think I haven't tried that?" He ran a hand over the Norse-style dragon tattoo on Ty's thigh. "They just laughed and told me I was being shy." He shook his head. "Shy. Me. Can you believe it?"
"I can believe they said it." Ty glowered at the door, since the receptionists weren't here. "Look, that's just… well, it's wrong of them, to be honest. You need support. What Hartmann is doing is harassment, regardless of how I feel about you. Or him."
"Hey, did you ever make any headway on figuring out what was up with that whole grudge he has against Gray House anyway?" Ben rolled on top of Ty.
"Not last week. Last week was all about school. This weekend I don't think I've gotten out of bed since I fell into it on Friday night. I'll see how much progress I can make this week."
Of course, Ty couldn't focus on the Hartmann issue. He did have a real job to do, and it wasn't just glorified babysitting. The kids he worked with had real issues, and not only was he being paid to help them work on those issues he actually wanted to do it. Two of his kids moved out-of-state to go live with family members, and Ty thought those were both good outcomes. Tyrese had b
een separated from his father when he was young, thanks to his mother's youth and her angry parents. Tyrese's dad wanted him back, the courts agreed that he was a perfectly fit father, and Tyrese was happy to be getting away from the less than stellar care of his grandparents. Mike was a young omega who had been kicked out of the house, something Ty could more than sympathize with. It turned out that Mike's mother, though, had a brother in New York City who was also an omega, and who was a professor of gender and sexuality at one of the colleges there. He was happy to take Mike in, and while Mike had never known that he had an omega uncle he was happy to go live with someone "like me."
Of course with two happy endings came two less-than-happy endings, and six new cases to replace them. An alpha on Ty's caseload overdosed at school. Ty wished he could say that he was surprised that Anton OD'ed, but the kid hadn't been on board with going to rehab in the first place and wasn't coping well with life outside. He was going to have to go back to rehab once he got out of the hospital. When he got out, he'd probably bounce right back into Gray House. It wasn't like he had anyplace else to go.
Another one, Angel, had taken his own life. Angel wasn't a residential client, he lived with an aunt, but he'd never gotten over his parents' rejection after they found out about his drug problem. He kicked the habit, but the damage had been done. Ty cried about that one. All of the kids at Gray House did, and so did the rest of the staff.
All of the tears in the world didn't change the work that had to get done. He had six new cases, and now that Penny knew that he spoke Spanish five of them involved clients or families for whom Spanish was the first language. He had two homeless omegas who were brought in by ICE, so they hadn't been abandoned, but separated from their families. He had three complex, non-residential cases that were probably going to take him days to sort out but seemed to involve a lot of petty crime. And he had one persistent runaway he needed to help, all on top of his usual caseload.
And of course, Hartmann wasn't spending all of his time going from place to place looking for creepy ways to show his appreciation for the incredible alpha that was Ben. He showed up at Gray House every day. Sometimes he was outside, with a surveying team no less. Sometimes he came inside, walking through the hall and muttering about demolition. By Friday, Agency Director Wing had gotten a restraining order barring him from the property, but that didn't stop him from hovering just on the end of the property line and threatening the kids walking nearby with arrest for trespassing if they so much as skirted the line.
It had an effect on the kids, of course. Even the clients who didn't want to be there were chilled by the nasty behavior. "What is up with that mean, nasty developer?" asked Carter, a high school sophomore whose transcripts were thicker than War and Peace. "He's a dick."
"Language, Carter," Ty murmured, because they were supposed to be encouraging their clients to improve their language skills. In this case, he didn't try very hard. "I'm not sure what his particular issue is, but it's definitely not just his problem. Just ignore him for now."
Hartmann's behavior cast a pall over the whole group, though, and that was something that they didn't need. Not with everything else, like Anton's overdose and Angel's suicide. At least it gave Ty the excuse he needed to work on researching Hartmann while he was at work. Maybe he had personal reasons to do it, but there was still a perfectly valid work-related reason to dig into their enemy's history.
Penny was on board, and so he wasn't all that shy about what he was doing. He tried to think about the problem as though he were approaching a client who wasn't in the program voluntarily. How would he go about figuring out what this client needed?
There wasn't much in the public record that Ty didn't already know, so that wasn't all that useful. "Maybe it's a family thing," Penny suggested, drumming black fingernails on his desk. "Let's see what we can find for his father, okay?"
It was as good a suggestion as any. He went back a little further and did a search through Gray House records for Hartmann's father's name. He did a public records search as well, looking to see if Hartmann's father had any kind of complaint against Gray House that might stand out. Maybe he'd lost out on an attempt to buy the land and Dick was just trying to avenge the old man or something.
It took Ty two days to dig it out, during which his feeling of exhaustion grew, but the work paid off in the end. Ty found an accusation dating back seventeen years, filed by Richard Hartmann IV of La Jolla. He'd accused Gray House of "stealing" an alpha who had been promised to his son, and he wanted the boy back. The boy's name was redacted from the record, and that was fine. The guy's name didn't matter, not for Ty's purposes. "I'll be damned," he murmured, drawing Penny's attention.
"What is it?"
"I think there was an alpha. Like another forced claim." He showed Penny what he'd found. "We see those often enough, more than we do now but still. It would explain why he's still single even with all those buckets of cash."
"Whoa, regressive much?" She gave him a playful little smack to his head. "Come on, buddy. Maybe he's happy being single."
"No. He's latched on to Ben and is hassling him." Ty shook his head. "Trust me. Once you've been rejected by an alpha, and anyone knows about it, you're not going to find another one who will take you."
"That's not true." Penny sat on his desk. "I mean things are going fine with you and Ben now, right?"
Ty pulled away from the laptop for a moment and looked around to see who else might hear. "Yeah, we're doing okay. And I do like him, a lot more than I should. Don't get me wrong. But it's not… it's not going to be permanent. I'm enjoying what I have with him while I have it. That's just the way it is."
"Ty…" She sighed. "They're not all like Viktor."
"No. But they're still not going to want a reject. And that's fine. I'm building a life for myself without that, and it's better than my life ever could have been if I'd been claimed when I was young, you know?" He straightened up, stretching his back.
"You are still young, goofball. You're twenty-four."
"Dude, I am ancient when it comes to how omegas are chosen. Get off my lawn and all that." He rolled his eyes and laughed at her. "It's not a big deal, Penny. I'm happy with my life. I'm just trying to put myself into Hartmann's brain for a minute, see if I can't figure out what's really going on here, and I think we've landed on something. If he's bitter because he feels like Gray House took his perfect life away or something, I think that could explain why he's after us like that."
"Well that doesn't bode well for you, either." Penny picked up a stack of papers from his desk and flipped through them.
"How do you figure?" Ty took the papers back and put them away. Sure she was his supervisor, but she always left things a mess and that tended to drive him up a wall.
"Well, he already lost one chosen alpha to Gray House. Now he's losing another alpha to you, and you're associated with Gray House. You don't think that's going to unhinge him just a bit?"
"He'll have to deal." Ty shook his head. "I mean he's an ass, sure, but he's just an ass. He's taken what his father gave him and he's turned it into a huge fortune. He might be bitter but I don't think that he's going to be homicidal, you know?" He wrinkled his nose. "You watch too many of those true crime shows."
"Hell yeah I do." She slid off of his desk. "Come on, let's go get some coffee. The one good thing about this neighborhood gentrifying is that we can finally go and get some good frozen coffee treats; we've earned it."
He couldn't deny that, and he didn't want to. The persistent fatigue he'd been feeling for a week hadn't gone away, even though he'd scaled back the work on his thesis and made sure to get more sleep at night. He could use the caffeine hit.
He walked with Penny to the coffee shop and treated himself to something frozen and delicious. They walked back slowly, enjoying their time in the sun. When they got back, they found seven dead rats on the front step of the building, each without its head.
Penny ran for the bushes and threw up. Ty held
himself back only through sheer force of willpower, holding Penny's hair while she retched. When she finished, he escorted her to a side entrance. His teeth ground against one another so badly that his jaw ached. "Well, you might have been right about Hartmann,” he said, finding a travel-sized bottle of mouthwash in his desk and passing it to Penny.
"Why's that?" She paused, fingers on the keyboard, and looked at him. He supposed that she was messaging the groundskeeper, or maybe the agency director.
"Because when Hartmann surprised me and Ben on our date a couple of weeks ago, he kept calling me 'street rat.'" Ty managed a little grin.
"Oh jeez." Penny turned green again. "I'm calling the police."
The police weren't much help. There wasn't any proof, after all, that Hartmann was behind the headless rats. Still, they took pictures and wrote down statements, and promised that they would be in touch.
Ty tried to focus on the kids, and hoped that the whole mess would be helpful in defending against Hartmann's lawsuit.