Ten minutes.
Damian moved.
Not running. Running would draw every eye in the room, and the last thing he needed right now was attention. He walked — fast, deliberate, the empty tray a prop he no longer needed — toward the service corridor on the far side of the ballroom.
Victor's voice followed him without moving.
Your patch has about ten minutes left.
He didn't look back.
The crowd was thicker near the stage, guests still buzzing from the announcement, champagne glasses lifted, conversations bleeding into each other. Damian moved through it like water finding gaps — shoulders angled, gaze down, the practiced invisibility that had kept him safe for years.
Except his neck was burning now.
Not itching. Burning. The specific, unmistakable heat of a suppressor compound breaking down, the adhesive losing its bond, the careful chemistry of it dissolving under hours of body heat and stress.
Stay calm. Calm slows the response.
He was almost to the corridor door.
Almost.
Then the air changed.
He felt it before he understood it — a shift in pressure, a sudden sharpening of the scent around him, the particular weight of dominant alpha awareness swinging in his direction like a compass needle finding north.
Not Victor.
Different.
Damian made it through the corridor door and let it swing shut behind him.
The noise of the ballroom dropped by half.
He pressed himself against the wall and reached back immediately, fingers finding the edge of the suppressor patch. It came away too easily. Far too easily. The adhesive had gone tacky and weak, the edges lifting, the seal already broken in two places.
He stared at it in his palm.
Okay.
Okay.
He had a replacement in his jacket pocket — he always carried a replacement — but the jacket was at the service station on the other side of the building. He had nothing. He had a failing patch, a corridor that wasn't far enough away, and six dominant alphas within thirty feet of where he'd just been standing.
He pressed the patch back into place with two fingers, knowing it would hold for maybe five minutes now. Less, if his pulse kept doing what it was doing.
Think.
The building's side exit was at the end of this corridor. If he could reach it, he could get outside, get distance, call a car. The shift manager would mark him as a no-show. He'd lose the work. That was fine. That was survivable.
He pushed off the wall and started moving.
He made it four steps.
"Damian."
He stopped.
Kendrick Walker stood at the corridor entrance behind him.
He hadn't heard the door open. He hadn't felt him coming the way he should have — the early warning system that the suppressor provided was gone now, the buffer dissolved, and without it his senses were doing the opposite of what he needed. Instead of tracking threats, they were pulling toward the nearest dominant alpha presence like a tide that had forgotten how to go out.
Damian turned slowly.
Kendrick stood in the doorway, one hand still resting on the door. He wasn't out of breath. He wasn't urgent. He looked, as he always seemed to look, like a man who had decided to be somewhere and arrived.
But his eyes were different.
Something in them had changed since the last time Damian looked directly at him.
Sharper. More focused. The composure still in place but pressed thin over something that hadn't been there an hour ago.
"You need to not be in a hallway right now," Damian said.
"And yet." Kendrick stepped inside. The door fell shut behind him. "You're the one who ended up in one."
"I'm leaving."
"I know." He didn't move to stop him. He just stood there, taking up space the way powerful people did without noticing, the alpha presence of him filling the corridor in a way that wasn't aggressive but wasn't nothing, either. "Victor told you the patch was failing."
"Victor told me a lot of things."
"He wasn't wrong."
Damian pressed his fingers to the back of his neck again. "I'm handling it."
"You don't have a replacement."
"I have a plan."
"What plan?"
"Leaving." Damian gestured toward the far end of the corridor. "Through that door. Into the street. Away from this building and every alpha in it." He met Kendrick's eyes. "Including you."
Kendrick was quiet for a moment.
"You came to my engagement party," he said.
"I came to work a catering shift. There's a difference."
"And now you're in a hallway with a failing suppressor and nowhere to go."
"I have somewhere to go. I just explained it."
"Alone."
"I've been alone my entire life." The words came out harder than he intended. Damian exhaled. "I don't need your help."
"I know you don't."
The simplicity of that answer was disarming enough that Damian didn't respond immediately.
Kendrick stepped closer. Not fast. Not crowding. Just — closer. The way the tide came in.
"You're afraid of me," Kendrick said.
"I'm afraid of what happens when alphas like you decide something belongs to them."
"I haven't said anything like that."
"You didn't have to." Damian held his ground. "I've seen that look before. I know what it means."
Kendrick stopped.
"What look?"
Damian shook his head. "Don't."
"Tell me."
"It won't help either of us."
The corridor was very quiet. Distantly, through the walls, the party continued — music and laughter and the sound of a world that had already decided what both of them were for.
Then the patch gave up.
It wasn't dramatic. There was no signal, no warning. One moment it was holding, and the next the last of the adhesive released, and Damian's natural scent slipped free into the enclosed space between them.
He felt it happen.
And he watched Kendrick feel it too.
The alpha went completely still.
Not frozen. Not shocked. Still — the particular stillness of a body that had just received information it didn't know how to process and was doing everything in its power not to react visibly.
The scent that filled the corridor was Damian without the suppressor. Warm. Complex. The specific signature of a prime omega's pheromones in a small enclosed space, pressed up against the instincts of a dominant alpha who had already been reacting to traces of it all evening.
Kendrick's breathing changed.
Just slightly. Just once.
His eyes found Damian's and didn't move.
And somewhere beneath the control, beneath the composure, beneath every year of discipline and training and the carefully constructed life waiting for him on the other side of that door —
Mate.
One word. No warning. Arriving not as a thought but as a certainty, the way gravity arrived, the way recognition arrived, already true before the mind caught up with it.
Kendrick didn't say it.
He wouldn't say it.
But it landed in him like something permanent.
Damian pressed the failed patch back against his neck uselessly and stepped back.
"I need to go," he said. His voice was steady. He was proud of that.
Kendrick didn't answer.
"Whatever your instincts are telling you right now," Damian said quietly, "you need to let them be wrong."
"Damian—"
"You have a fiancée." The word landed between them with deliberate weight. "Three hundred people on the other side of that door just watched you announce your future." He held Kendrick's gaze. "I'm not part of it."
Kendrick's jaw tightened.
"You should go," he said finally. Low. Careful. Like a man holding something heavy and choosing where to set it down.
"Yes," Damian said. "I should."
He turned toward the exit.
"Be careful," Kendrick said behind him.
Damian pushed the door open.
Cool night air hit his face — real air, open air, the city stretching out ahead of him and no walls closing in.
He didn't look back.
He walked.
The door swung shut.
And Kendrick stood alone in the quiet corridor, the scent still warm in the air around him, the single word still echoing somewhere beneath every rational thought he had.
Mate.
He pressed one hand flat against the wall.
Exhaled.
Outside, Damian Roberts was already gone — moving fast through the city streets, jacket pulled close, not letting himself think about the way Kendrick had gone still.
Not letting himself think about what that stillness meant.
He had spent his entire life staying invisible.
One night. One party. One man who caught a glass he dropped.
And the careful, quiet life he had built — slowly, deliberately, at considerable cost — had just developed a crack he didn't know how to repair.
He kept walking.
Behind him, the city lights glittered.
Somewhere in the building he'd just left, Victor Hale was finishing his drink and thinking.
And Kendrick Walker was still standing in a corridor, hand against the wall, not moving.
Because some things, once known, could not be unknown.
And some words, once arrived, refused to leave.