“She gets it when I need something from her. It’s transactional, and we’re both aware of that. I ask for something of her, and she gets something of me that she knows I don’t want to share with her. It’s how she feels in control.” Mikel’s skin wanted to crawl with disgust, but it seemed to be an impossible endeavour with his little mate curled around him like a kitten.
And he meant that in a purely scientific way. She was his mate. She was genetically predisposed to soothe him, to calm him, to make him hard enough to bend other women over pieces of furniture in exchange for information. He hadn’t slept with Tilda since finding out about Carter, but that couldn’t last forever. There were only so many ways he could please her and appease her ego without fucking her before she started to get suspicious, and he could never admit to why he wasn’t fucking her. He wasn’t fully bonded to Carter and he had no emotional connection to Tilda, so sex wasn’t likely to harm the bond in any way, but he owed Carter some consideration. He was certain that if there were any repercussions through the bond, they would likely skip him and flow straight to the Sigma.
“Dump her,” Oscar grunted, perhaps reading something on Mikel’s face. “It’s not worth it, Mikki.”
“I’ve been in here too long,” Mikel muttered, gently peeling Carter away and passing her into Kilian’s arms.
Kilian took her gently, but his attention scoured Mikel’s face, taking in his body language. “I agree with Oscar,” he ventured. “You’re clearly not enjoying yourself anymore. You shouldn’t be doing this if you don’t want to.”
Mikel ignored them. He did have to.
He owed them.
He owed Kalen.
He wasn’t contributing to the game the same way they were.
He needed to do this.
Grabbing Theodore’s laptop from the desk, he left the room and dropped it off in Elijah’s room, delivering them a distracted excuse about needing a reason to go into Theodore’s room to speak to the others, and then he made his way out of the dorm.
He should have known that Kilian wouldn’t leave it alone.
That boy was a bleeding fucking heart.
“Time to end it,” Kalen grunted, appearing out of no-fucking-where with those silent footsteps of his. He fell in beside Mikel as they approached the stairs leading down Alpha Hill.
“No.” Mikel didn’t break stride.
Kalen caught his shoulder, fingers digging in, forcefully spinning him around. “Go and see her, but break it off, Mikki.” His yellow-amber eyes assessed Mikel slowly, carefully, reaching some sort of conclusion as his lips hardened. “You’re done.”
Mikel shrugged the other man’s hand off, and with it, his influence. Kalen rarely tried to overpower or outrank him, but he could already see in the older Alpha’s eyes that this would be one of those rare situations, if Mikel resisted. “I can’t. You don’t know what we’re dealing with. Go see Elijah—”
“Elijah already called me and told me everything.” Kalen folded his arms, his dark button-down stretching tight across his chest and biceps. “And I’m making the call. You’re done. We’ll find another way to deal with the Track Team.”
“Tilda is our way to deal with everything inside the control room,” Mikel snarled back, before pushing his hands through his hair, his fingers shaking.
He didn’t want to do it.
He had been putting it off since finding out about Carter: stopping short of fucking Tilda, distracting her with her own pleasure, and keeping his distance in general. Elijah had informed them all that different forms of intimacy outside of the bond could come with consequences, and he really wanted to believe that it was part of the reason …
But he had hit some sort of limit.
He couldn’t pretend to care anymore. He couldn’t play that game anymore. He needed to switch tactics.
Kalen just waited quietly, a spark of sympathy in his expression.
“Okay, shit.” Mikel shook his head. “Yeah, I’m done.”
“Good.” Kalen turned on his heel, but paused, glancing back at Mikel. “I know you’re mad at yourself, but you need to find another way to funnel it out. You need to find another way to punish yourself or you need to deal with your shit. After what happened to Elijah and Gabriel, this is the last example you should be setting.”
Mikel nodded, his jaw clenching as he gritted his teeth too tightly. Forcing it to loosen, he muttered. “I know.”
“Don’t take too long, we need to strategise.” Kalen walked off without another word and Mikel fought his way through the emotions to the cool, calm well inside him.
He had completely recovered by the time he arrived at the building neighbouring the family centre, where the on-site officials were housed, and he was focussed as he stepped out of the elevator and opened the door to Tilda’s apartment.
She was kneeling, as he had told her to, but wearing a set of lacy lingerie—always trying to push him into punishing her. She always thought she wanted to be hurt, pushed, disciplined … but Mikel knew her. She wasn’t made of the kind of material he could work with.
He needed someone who would bend, but not break.
If he ever truly punished Tilda the way she begged for—his way—the woman would shatter into a thousand jagged pieces, and Mikel really didn’t have a kink for ruining people’s lives.
“We’re done here,” he said calmly, watching as her head snapped up, her eyes narrowing.
Expectation.
Tilda was many things, but she wasn’t an idiot.
“That’s not very wise,” she warned him immediately, jumping up to her feet and reaching for the dressing gown she had tossed over the back of a bar stool. She knotted it tightly, a familiar tremble of fury shaking her full lower lip. “You’ll lose all your special little privileges, Professor Easton.”
“I’ll survive.” He stood there, waiting. Because there was bound to be more.
She rounded her small kitchen counter, uncorking the bottle of wine she had left out, two glasses already waiting.
“Sit?” She didn’t look at him as she poured out two glasses. “You owe me that much.”
He moved to one of the stools on the other side of the counter, accepting the glass she handed him, though he didn’t take a sip. He was already saturated in Carter’s scent and doing his level best to ignore it. He didn’t need to add alcohol to the equation.
“You’re fucked up, Mikel.” Tilda looked down her slender nose at him. As though she had just read his mind.
He smirked, deciding to take a sip of the wine after all. He levelled her with a cool stare as he waited for whatever else she wanted to throw at him. It was only fair that he stuck around as a punching bag for a few minutes. He had just dumped her without explanation.
“We could still play, you know.” She set her glass down, toying with the stem, the fingers of other hand tangling playfully with the sash of her gown, her mood shifting abruptly.
Tilda was the kind of woman to beg him to mark her, before turning around to the officials the next day to claim he had forced her.
She had a mind for devious strategy.
They wouldn’t give just anyone the Creative Director position for the entire Ironside project. She had a big-picture mind and a very small compartment reserved for feelings and emotions—most of which were her own.