Santos's scent spikes hot through the room, voice dropping lower and rougher in a way that's somehow worse than shouting.
"She woke up alone in an empty suite with cash on a table. Do you understand what that communicates to an omega?"
"We didn't know her."
Every line of Matteo controlled, armored, immovable.
"We knotted her," Santos bites each word off clean. "So think harder about what you did."
I get to my feet because staying seated any longer means doing something that costs more than this office is worth. My scent has already gone wrong, silver and white pepper sharp in the air, anger sitting high in my chest where focus usually lives.
"You left her alone," I say.
Matteo's gaze moves to mine.
"Cleaner that way."
"For who."
His jaw tightens.
"All of us."
I laugh once. The cold kind, the kind that isn't a laugh at all.
Matteo's gaze cuts to mine.
"We said no more omegas. Chiara left three years ago. She was with us for five years before that and she chose to leave. That was her decision and I have not spent three years wishing it undone."
"No more women playing angles." I look at him steadily. "Jennifer lied about nothing. She walked into our suite carrying heartbreak like hand luggage and still managed to be funny. She flinched when complimented. She blushed when she was wanted. She offered trust with both hands and asked nothing for it."
Santos plants both palms on my desk.
"Do you know what she thought when she looked at us looking at her."
Matteo says nothing.
"She thought we'd find something wrong." Santos's voice has dropped to something rough and quiet. "She was standing there trying to joke her way through humiliation, and you watched her scent go sharp and thin, we all did, and then you went ahead and confirmed every rotten thing someone had already taught her to believe."
Something shifts in Matteo's eyes before he gets the shutters up. A fraction of a second. Enough.
"You knew," I say quietly.
"She'd lost her job," he says. "I thought five grand would help her."
I shake my head.
"She must have really got to you, because what you did was low, even for you."
We're close enough now that only fifteen years of history keeps this from becoming something else entirely. He doesn't retreat. I'll give him that.
"I thought you'd move on," he says.
"I can't."
The words come out rougher than I intend. No artifice in them, no calculation. Just the truth, which I've been keeping at arm's length for three months and apparently ran out of distance to do so.
No one speaks.