"Hey, Nelea?"

Mircea's secretary turned with a questioning look. "Yes, sir?"

"What do you think would happen if an omega started working at the office? A male one?"

There was a crash as Nelea let go of the tablet she was holding in shock. Mircea raised an eyebrow at her, but the normally composed woman was too busy staring at him in utter shock to notice. "What are you saying, sir," she whispered, as if they were speaking of something extremely taboo. "There would be total chaos! Scandal! We'd lose all our investors!"

"Because of one guy?"

"An omega!"

Mircea sighed and propped his head on his desk by his elbows. "I wonder," he told her. "What do you think about an omega makes them so scandalous?"

"Where is this coming from, sir?"

"No, I am not considering employing an omega. I'm just curious."

"Well, sir, omegas have no morals. They'd use their bodies to get their own way and seduce perfectly good people who are on the right path. Even if that weren't the case, they don't have the level of education needed to work here."

"Hmmm, I see your point about the education." Mircea saw Nelea visibly relax and hated it. "But that thing about seducing people and having no morals - where did you learn that from?"

"S-sir?"

"Don't worry, I'm not scolding you or anything. Alphas learn about the reputation of omegas purely by word of mouth, so I want to know if it's different for you."

Nelea wondered why her boss was being so open and nice today, but decided not to question it. "It's common knowledge," she told him. "My parents told me, friends discuss it, it's all over the internet...it's everywhere."

Miza fixed her with his characteristic penetrating gaze, and she suddenly felt very uneasy - as if he could read her innermost thoughts. "So it's hearsay?" he confirmed, voice filled with uninformed innocence but laced with something darker. "No solid evidence? No established fact?"

"W-well, it's documented in a way," Nelea responded, breaking into a cold sweat. "Omegas have been known to use their bodies to achieve their goals in the past. These days omegas are found working only as prostitutes."

"I found one."

"Sir?"

Mircea straightened up again, placed his hands on his desk and wove his fingers together. His I-mean-business pose that more often than not succeeded in bending the person before him to his will. "I found an omega," he repeated, "that doesn't work as a prostitute and won't let a single person touch him."

"H-Him?"

"Yes. During all the time that I've visited his workplace, he hasn't shown any immorality or desire to sell his body. That was why I got curious about where the talk about omegas came from, because their promiscuity doesn't seem innate to me."

"I see. Sir, you make sense, but you do not know what that man might be up to behind closed doors."

"Touché."

"Besides, it's dangerous to your reputation to socialize with that person too much, sir. It's different for us commoners: I don't think the employees here would personally mind working alongside a male omega. But there's bad guys everywhere. If something happens - and considering that we're still fresh out of the genocide era, something will - everyone will victim-shame the omega just to keep face. Plain old bystander effect. But for you, sir, simply being seen with an omega is asking for avoidable trouble. Not all Alphas have accepted omegas, and if you were to face action, we who agree with you wouldn't be able to protect you despite our numbers."

Mircea couldn't tell what was sadder: that a blatant line between himself and 'them' was so common it was part of regular conversation, or that he hadn't minded that line before. "I understand," he said. "Thanks, Nelea."

Nelea left the room with a rather unsteady gait, forgetting her tablet on the floor. Mircea stared unseeingly at his computer screen, depressed. It was extremely frustrating that he couldn't find a person who had a remotely favorable view of omegas. He felt terribly guilty for even seeking such a person: in the end, his beliefs were still shaped by societal pressure and he was looking for a pro-male omega person only so he wouldn't feel like a criminal.

"Damn it," he swore. It was so hard. He wanted to change, but it wasn't as easy as waking up one fine day and starting to act upon his changed beliefs. His power ultimately hinged largely upon what other elites thought of him, especially his father, and he had worked too damn hard to risk his position for one man. Besides, he'd be able to do little to help Thief's case if he lost everything and ended up a shunned, powerless fool.

Through the rest of the day he sported an impressive scowl, prompting his subordinates to fear for their jobs and increase their productivity two-fold. It made his jaw drop open in surprise as he reviewed the day's progress. As he made his way to Ezra's rehearsal dinner that evening, he absently wondered if his father had forsaken his smile for that kind of efficiency.

"Shit," he muttered. "Father." The elder Quartz's hatred for omegas bordered upon insanity. This hatred led him to endorse any action against omegas with disturbing glee: he loved, for instance, to aid operations uprooting brothels and escort services not because of any breach of law, but because they turned out large numbers of omegas. Now that Mircea knew (and quite liked) the company of an omega, he could only feel relief those raids had never turned out any male omegas.

But then again, omega men were extremely rare. Evolutionarily the youngest sub-sex, they had always been rare in the human population before anti-omega sentiment triggered a purge in one country about a hundred and fifty years ago. Poorly studied, those small, fragile and easily sickened men did not stand a chance as the movement snowballed into worldwide genocide. They were deemed unclean and unholy, less than human creatures that needed to be eradicated from the population. Omega male fetuses were aborted, newborns killed; those who survived longer were captured, trafficked, raped and abused till they died of malnutrition and disease. Families who fought back by hiding their young were slaughtered. Teenage boys who got their heat were often murdered by their own parents, who knew that their child would be better off dead than living in captivity.

The oppression turned people against their radical governments, and nations were consumed by riots and civil war. Other social issues came to the fore, and eventually people lost sight of what they were fighting for. There was only violence - mindless, apocalyptic violence. Fringe groups suddenly had free reign, extremist views circulated unchallenged, and so many people died every day that prosecuting murderers became logistically impossible.

In the aftermath of that bloodbath, millions of people were dead and male omegas were driven to the brink of extinction. Even today, a century later, their population was yet to recover. Most countries had not reported the birth of even one male omega in a hundred years. In a population of billions, there were only eleven known omega men.

But Thief, incredibly, was not one of them. He, by carving out an honest niche for himself in a world that never let omegas emerge from the nightlife, by living a quiet life when he could bring the world's most powerful people to their knees through his beauty alone, had become a rebuttal to everything that had been used to justify the genocide and indeed, to justify the treatment of omegas today. Mircea respected him deeply for it, and that was why he wanted to change people's views on omegas. Because badmouthing omegas meant badmouthing Thief, and that was wrong.

"But you have to grow a pair to say that, don't you?" he mumbled to himself as he entered the groom's suite.

"Exactly! See? Even Quartz says you're a sissy!"

Mircea blinked. Ezra and his other groomsmen were staring at him, all in various stages of aggravation. "What? What did I say?" he asked. "Aren't we late?"

Elwynn and Emory, Ezra's twin younger brothers, bristled. "Fuck that," spat the former, turning back to the mirror on which they were playing hangman with bright red lipstick. "That bitch doesn't care, so why should we?"

Mircea sighed. "That's Maya's lipstick, isn't it?" he deadpanned. "And that's her screeching I hear in the background."

"Damn right! I hope she screams till her vocal cords snap!"

"Whoa. What happened?"

This time, it was Ezra's turn to sigh. "We couldn't find the bouquet Maya ordered for practice-"

"Why does she need a practice bouquet-"

"-until Emory's son threw them up onto the train of her gown."

"He's only two," Emory explained sheepishly. "He'll eat anything."

"How dare she make my precious nephew cry!" Elwynn blustered, belligerently adding embellishments to the gallows' podium. "I keep telling Ezra to tell her to tone down her bitchiness, but he won't listen-Emory! It's your turn!"

"Ah! Eh? Um... is it S?"

"Good boy!" Elwynn proceeded to draw a noose, complete with a highly detailed knot. "If Maya looks at my Lily with anything short of adoration, I will pour wine down her wedding dress! Damn it, I hate her!"

"I don't know why Mr. Carter approved of her," agreed Sage, the best man. "No offense, Mircea."

"None taken," Mircea responded. "Maya is...well, let's just say she's lucky Ezra is so patient. You're her eighth fiancé, Ezra."

"Dad's an orthodox old fart," Emory answered Sage. "If it's heirs he wants, Nico and Tiago are right there."

"They know?" Mircea asked Ezra, surprised.

"You know?" the twins asked Mircea, even more surprised.

Ezra smiled proudly at the mention of his sons. "Yes, they're both so smart," he gushed. "You know, Nico won the state science fair. And Tiago's teacher says he's the best writer in the grade-"

"Yes, we know," his brothers groaned. "For the twenty-first time this week."

Mircea left the brothers to their arguments. He'd seen some staff from the Carter household around and thought he'd go looking for Thief. As he wandered around the venue, he marveled at how close the Carter siblings were and how accepting they were of Ezra's sons. Mircea himself did not get along with his siblings, he had never met his sister Marie's kids and he was sure Zach had twins of his own whom he himself had not seen, forget introducing them to their uncle.

Mircea didn't like kids, and he pitied the future spawn he was obligated to produce. He was sure he'd avoid them to spare them the treatment he had received from his own father. The best he could do to compensate was find a wife who would be a doting mother.

"Looking for me?"

Mircea whipped around. Thief grinned mischievously at him over a large stack of dinner plates. "How did you know?" Mircea asked, grinning back.

"Who else would you look so eagerly for?"

"You're real confident, aren't you? Here, let me take those plates. They're blocking my view of your beautiful self."

Thief raised an eyebrow but gave in with a chuckle. "I can't stay long," he informed him. "I have to lay the table and get going before dinner starts."

"Aw, but I can't get enough of looking at you! My time with you is never enough. Now stay still: I want to check you out from top to toe."

Pain saturated Thief's eyes even as the smile remained on his face. "At least someone wants me around," he mumbled.

"Eh?"

"Nothing. I was having a shitty day, but I got to see you so I'm feeling better."

At that very moment, Thief's hair tie broke. His luxuriant locks immediately caught the breeze, and Mircea got treated to the lovely scene of Thief glowing in the moonlight beneath a lattice arch, hair dancing around his face as he turned it away to hide his rosy cheeks. Mircea's breath was taken away.

"I want to do it more," said Mircea, enchanted. Putting the plates down, he took Thief's hand and placed it on his own chest. "I want to make your days better all the time."

Thief opened his mouth before something crossed his mind and he shut it. "We make each other happy," Mircea pressed on before he could argue. "What wrong have we done to deny ourselves each other's company, then? Do you know how horrible the things Alphas say about omegas are? If I stay away from you because of it, it's like I'm agreeing that all those things apply to you. And that's unacceptable."

"And what if all those things they say about me are true?"

"I'm not going to believe that unless I see it for myself, but you won't let me be around you long enough for that. Come on, Thief. Do you want me to keep believing a bunch of lies about you?"

"No! No." Thief clutched at Mircea's shirt in desperation. "You're the first person to think I'm a good thing. It feels nice. I thought I could get by without it, but God, now that I know..."

"Then don't let anything stop you. I'm not asking for your hand in marriage. I just want to get rid of this constant nagging in my head of being overly familiar with a stranger."

"I shouldn't say yes! I know I shouldn't, but...ugh!" Suddenly furious, Thief thumped Mircea's chest with both fists. "I'm tired of being so alone!"

"You're not alone anymore. I'm here. Even if it's just as someone who smiles as they pass you in the street."

"But-"

"Please. These clandestine meetings in the shadows are not enough for me. You are so good for me, Thief...you make me want to become a better man. You opened my eyes to so many wrongs I was too high up the social ladder to see. Thanks to you, I have become more humble and considerate and open-minded. Yet I don't even know your name."

Thief said nothing. He only stared up at Mircea with a tremulous smile on his face, nose and ears reddening as his bottom lip trembled with emotion. Disbelief and pleasure warred in his dark brown eyes. Mircea smiled to himself, knowing the battle was half-won.

Time for a final, grand push. Taking Thief's left hand in his own, he got down on one knee. "Thief, you beautiful enigma, you broke me out of the little opulent shell I lived in and showed me a world where I can be so much more than a pampered Prince." As Thief sputtered incoherently, Mircea took off his tie slide and placed it in the former's palm. "So, Darling Thief, will you befriend me?"

Thief stared for a second. Then he giggled. And giggled some more. And then burst forth overwhelmed half-laugh, half-cry as the omega got completely overwhelmed. "Everything has to be so...so dramatic with you!" he guffawed, shaking his head. "Gosh, you are so cute!"

"Is that a yes?" asked Mircea, pleased.

"Yes! Yes, you pushy little - God, yes!"

"Alright!" Mircea punched the air as he leapt to his feet. Gently, as if Thief was the most precious thing in the world, he brushed a few strands of Thief's hair to the back of his head and pinned them in place with the tie slide. As he did so, Thief closed his eyes and buried his face in the Alpha's chest, smiling blissfully. "...is my name," said his muffled voice.

Mircea pulled back. "Sorry?"

"You wanted to know my name, right?"

"Heck yeah!"

"Evinori. My name is Evinori."