Dean woke up with the unsettling awareness that he was almost nineteen years old and therefore had absolutely no excuse.
This realization did not help.
He lay still, staring at the ceiling of the guest suite, and waited for reality to correct itself. He gave it a generous thirty seconds. A full minute, even. He was responsible now. Patient. Reasonable, in the way people claimed to be right before making life-altering decisions.
Reality remained aggressively intact.
Suddenly, the memories came back sharp and unadulterated, disregarding personal comfort, sleep, or denial.
Dean Fitzgeralt. Second son of a family with so many titles attached to it that even official documents occasionally gave up halfway through. But the titles weren't the important part, at least not the part that ruined his life on a daily basis.
Lucas, for one, was already a walking diplomatic incident. He was one of the illegitimate children of the former Emperor of Palatine, Caelan Mikael-now retired, officially uninvolved, and inexplicably a full-time grandfather. That alone should have been enough.
It wasn't.
Lucas was also the adopted son of Serathine Anna D'Argente, a duchess. Yes, another title. Yes, another inheritance. And yes, Serathine was alive, healthy, politically terrifying, and in a relationship with the aforementioned former emperor. How that happened was a mystery Dean had no intention of solving. Some knowledge was simply not worth surviving.
Trevor, by comparison, was straightforward.
He was the Grand Duke of Fitzgeralt, and what remained of his extended family stayed as far away as possible by mutual agreement. The contract was simple: Trevor provided financial support and asked no questions, and in return they never appeared. It worked beautifully.
There had been Cressida, Dean's great-grandmother, who had passed away three years earlier at ninety-five, with the same dignity and quiet menace she'd wielded in life. She had been a terror to everyone who met her and was deeply missed by those who survived her.
And then there was Sebastian, Dean's older brother, already twenty-five and already a marquis, carrying the kind of exhaustion that came from being competent, responsible, and permanently surrounded by politics. Diplomacy had aged him at least a decade ahead of schedule, and it showed in the way he moved through rooms like someone who knew exactly how many battles were still waiting.
So yes, his family was complicated.
And that was before the detail that actually mattered.
Both of Dean's parents were dominants-one omega, one alpha. Sebastian had inherited the same dominant alpha genes, fitting neatly into a role the world already understood.
Dean had not been so conveniently predictable. He was a dominant omega in a very high-standing house.
Which was, unfortunately, exactly why he was in this situation to begin with.
'I accept the Alaminian proposal.'
Dean rolled onto his side and buried his face in the pillow.
"No," he said calmly into the fabric. "That was… theoretical."
Dean stayed facedown in the pillow for a full minute after that.
Then another.
Then he rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling again, like it might confess something useful if he looked long enough.
"This is not happening," he told the empty room, calmly and with conviction. "I do not make empire-shaping decisions because of a face."
Silence disagreed.
Dean pressed his hands over his eyes. The problem wasn't that he hadn't thought this through. He had. For an entire month there were briefings, compatibility reports, political forecasts, long-term projections. He could recite the strategic advantages of an Alaminian alliance half-asleep.
What he had not accounted for - what none of the reports had prepared him for - was the moment he had actually looked at Crown Prince Arion of Alamina.
Dark hair, worn with military elegance but stubborn enough to fall out of place anyway. Golden eyes that matched the golden skin tone in a way that insulted Dean on principle. There was a clean, old scar along his cheek that looked like claws snagging skin.
Dean groaned softly.
"Oh no," he muttered. "Absolutely not."
He turned his head into the pillow again, as if suffocation might solve this. Because that was the part he had been very carefully avoiding naming.
He hadn't accepted the proposal because Arion was competent. Or terrifyingly calm and politically unavoidable. Those were reasons, yes, but they were clean reasons that everyone understood, and respected him for them.
He had accepted it while standing across from a man who looked like that and spoke like that and held himself like the world had tried to break him once and failed.
Dean dragged the pillow over his face.
"This is mortifying," he said into the darkness. "I am almost nineteen years old. I was raised by two of the most emotionally literate people alive. I am not supposed to fall for…" he waved a hand uselessly, "bone structure."
Unfortunately, his biology did not care about his principles.
Dominant instincts waited for moments of weakness, like standing in the middle of a diplomatic confrontation while a man with golden eyes looked at him like he was a problem worth solving.
Dean exhaled slowly.
He hadn't fallen in love. He wasn't that far gone, or so he wanted to believe. This wasn't romance or destiny or any of the dramatic nonsense people liked to attach to power.
But attraction?
Yes.
That part he couldn't deny.
It had crept in quietly, unwelcome and persistent, settling somewhere he hadn't been guarding closely enough. Annoying in its timing, inconvenient in every possible way, and stubbornly undeniable all the same.
He flopped an arm over his eyes and laughed once, short and incredulous. "I am never living this down."
The knock came almost on cue.
Dean froze.
He lowered his arm slowly and stared at the door like it might vanish if he concentrated hard enough.
'Why does fate hates me?' He thought, already knowing who was on the other side.