Sebastian had a plan. Rain knew that much from the particular shine in his eyes after the first rehearsal, from the brisk authority in his voice, from the way he kept shepherding him forward without ever quite answering the question at the center of it all. It was never a comforting sign.
Sebastian with a half-explained idea usually meant trouble dressed in expensive shoes.
The car pulled up before the Mediva Agency headquarters, its mirrored façade swallowing the late afternoon light and throwing it back in cold, polished planes.
The building rose with the severe confidence of institutions that believed themselves untouchable. Glass, steel, black stone, too clean to feel human. Rain stared at the entrance and felt something inside him recoil.
The driver came to a stop beneath the awning. Before Rain could gather another objection, Sebastian had already reached for the handle.
"Let's go."
Rain turned to him sharply. "What are we doing here?"
Sebastian unfastened his belt and gave him a quick look, impatient and pleading at once. "I told you. I have a plan, so just go along with it."
"My instinct is telling me this is a terrible idea," Rain said, his hand still resting on the leather seat instead of the door. "Why are we at Mediva?"
Sebastian exhaled through his nose and tipped his head back for half a second, as though appealing to a god that had long ago stopped returning his calls. "To meet someone, okay? Just trust me for five minutes. That is all I ask."
That alone was enough to make Rain suspicious.
He stepped out anyway.
The lobby greeted them with a hush so curated it felt artificial. Marble floors caught the light in pale, creamy veins. Tall arrangements of white lilies stood on black pedestals near the walls, fragrant enough to irritate. A receptionist sat behind a curved desk of smoked glass, immaculate in posture and expression, her smile arriving at once when she saw Sebastian.
"Mr. Fredson. Good afternoon."
"Afternoon," Sebastian replied, far too easily.
Rain cut him a glance as they crossed the lobby. "Why does the receptionist know you?"
Sebastian pressed the elevator button and kept his eyes trained on the glowing numbers above the doors. "Please, for the love of everything holy, just go along with it."
"That was not an answer."
"No, it was a plea."
The elevator arrived with a soft chime. They stepped inside. The doors slid shut, sealing them into a chamber of brushed metal and muted light, and Sebastian selected the tenth floor with the air of a man approaching his own execution.
Rain folded his arms. "Sebastian."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yes."
"Do you actually?"
Sebastian turned to him then, both hands rising in surrender. "If I told you before bringing you here, you would have refused in the car, then you would have yelled at me, then you would have made the driver turn around, and then I would have had to listen to you be furious all evening."
"Good. That means I would have been right."
The elevator climbed in perfect silence except for the low mechanical hum beneath their feet. Rain felt his pulse grow more aggravated with every floor.
When the doors parted, his irritation sharpened into something heavier.
The corridor was quiet, carpeted, expensive, with framed photographs of Crownspire athletes mounted along the walls in exacting symmetry.
At the far end stood a door of dark wood and frosted glass, and on the plate fixed beside it, in restrained silver lettering, was a name Rain would have preferred never to see in a professional context again.
Kieran Fredson.
Rain stopped dead.
"Kieran?"
Sebastian turned, already bracing for the impact of the reaction. "Look, if I had told you who we were meeting, you would never have listened to me."
"There is no universe in which Kieran helps us. He can barely stand to speak to me without sounding personally offended by my existence. I still do not understand how he is your brother."
"That is a mystery I ask myself daily," Sebastian said. Then he stepped closer and lowered his voice. "Listen to me. Put on your PR face. You know the one. Civilized, media-trained, glowing with restraint.
We go in, we speak, we ask. If he refuses, fine. At least we tried. If he says yes, then we walk out of here having accomplished something impossible. I need you to be nice. Just this once. For me."
Rain looked away.
He did not promise anything.
Sebastian took that as the nearest available form of cooperation and knocked.
A voice came from inside, even and cool. "Come in."
Sebastian opened the door and walked in first.
Kieran sat behind an enormous desk of black wood, a screen glowing off to one side, a neat stack of papers arranged before him with the rigid precision of habit.
He was in shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled once, reading glasses low on his nose, his attention carrying that infuriatingly measured stillness Rain had already come to despise.
There was something almost theatrical about the office itself. Glass walls looking out over the city, shelves lined with trophies and framed sports editorials, quietly engineered to flatter authority.
Sebastian spread his arms with false warmth. "Hello, dear brother."
Kieran did not rise. His gaze moved over Sebastian's expression first, then sharpened almost at once. "I do not like the way you just entered my office. Something about it feels suspicious."
Rain stepped fully into view.
Kieran leaned back in his chair, the faintest trace of satisfaction touching his mouth. "Ah. There it is. I knew I was right."
Rain's brows drew together. "Excuse me?"
"Please," Sebastian cut in quickly, already moving to salvage the room before it caught fire. He put a firm hand at Rain's back and steered him toward one of the chairs across the desk. "Sit down. Both of you, preferably with minimal bloodshed."
Rain sat because he wanted this over with, not because he had accepted the premise of the ambush. Sebastian took the chair beside him.
Kieran removed his glasses, folded them with unhurried care, and placed them on the desk. "Well," he said. "You have committed too deeply to this performance to leave now. Speak."
Sebastian clasped his hands together. "We're here to propose an idea. A business collaboration."
Kieran's face remained exquisitely unimpressed. "A business collaboration. How thrilling. I am already bored."
"Just hear us out," Sebastian said. "It matters, and it matters for a good reason."
Kieran rubbed at one temple and let out a long breath, the breath of a man tolerating family out of old obligation rather than present enthusiasm. "Fine. Brief me."
Sebastian turned to Rain. "Do you want to explain?"
Rain did not even look at him. "No."
"Excellent. Then I shall." Sebastian shifted in his chair and faced Kieran fully. "You know Rain has been working on the development of a new medicine. It functions as a suppressant, yes, but that description barely covers what it does.
This is not simply about reducing one's own pheromonal output. It also reduces involuntary susceptibility to surrounding pheromones, which means an omega can enter wider spaces, remain there safely, and function without being biologically cornered by the atmosphere around them."
Kieran said nothing. He only watched.
Sebastian took that silence as permission to continue.
"It has real social and professional value. Substantial value. You work in sports, so think of it there first. Imagine how many omegas have the talent for competitive athletics and never make it past adolescence because the environment is structured to push them out. Imagine how many are lost before anybody can even test the limit of what they could do."
Kieran's fingers tapped once against the desk, then stilled.
Sebastian pressed forward. "You remember the Crownspire under-sixteen volleyball team two years ago? Their libero was exceptional. Reflexes, anticipation, movement, everything exactly where it needed to be. He carried that back line like he had been born reading the game. Then he manifested as an omega, and suddenly nobody cared what he had been before that moment. He was cut loose.
They never found a replacement who performed at his level. They found bodies for the position, yes. They never found his standard. And that did not happen only once. Versions of that story have repeated themselves again and again over the years. Three times in the last decade that I know of directly. Probably more."
Rain said nothing, but his shoulders had gone rigid with attention. He hated that Sebastian was the one speaking for him. He hated even more that Sebastian was speaking well.
"Omegas can perform in sport," Sebastian said. "They already have. The issue has never been capability. The issue is that society has built every corridor leading there to close in their faces—"
Kieran lifted a hand slightly, and Sebastian stopped.
"Excuse me," Kieran said, his tone still smooth, though a cooler register had entered it. "You are speaking as though I personally hold the machinery of the sports world in my hands.
I do not. It is not up to me to bring omegas into football, volleyball, basketball, or any other competitive structure. Those policies are shaped through federations, boards, committees, and years of institutional agreement. You are asking the wrong man to overturn a social framework."
"Yes," Sebastian said at once, "but you are one of the few men influential enough to disturb that framework. That matters. There is no law that explicitly forbids omega participation across every space you are thinking of. A great deal of it rests on stigma, on custom, on fear made respectable by repetition. Someone has to disrupt that first."
Kieran reclined slightly, his expression deepening into something more appraising. "And you have decided that I should volunteer my name, my reputation, and the structure I manage as sacrificial offerings in that experiment."
"It is not an experiment," Sebastian said. "The medicine is approved. Medically, legally, in the lab. We are not asking you to gamble on nonsense. We are asking you to stand beside something that has already been built."
"Built for whom?"
Rain's gaze snapped to Kieran.
Kieran met it without flinching. "That is the real question beneath all your polished language, is it not? Built for whom, and at whose cost?"
Sebastian's voice sharpened. "Built for omegas. Obviously."
"Yes," Kieran replied. "And do you believe that answer makes the rest disappear? I run an agency that carries a substantial portion of Crownspire's sporting apparatus. Every gesture I make is read ten times over. Every public alignment becomes a statement, strategy, challenge, provocation.
You are asking me to attach my name to a controversy the federations have spent years avoiding. You are asking me to antagonize a system I once belonged to. Do you understand how that reads? Do you understand what sort of taste that leaves behind?"
"A bitter one, perhaps," Sebastian said. "Progress usually does."
Kieran's mouth curved, humorless. "How noble. You get to call it progress. I get to absorb the backlash."
Rain had listened as long as his temper allowed. The room had grown too airless, too adorned with the language of caution and cost and influence, all those elegant euphemisms men used when what they meant was that omega suffering remained acceptable so long as it stayed convenient. He turned toward Sebastian, fury brightening his face.
"Can you stop begging him?"
Sebastian fell silent.
Rain stood.
"He is not the only alpha in the world," he said, his voice low but edged enough to cut. "This conversation is over."
He pushed his chair back and strode toward the door.
Behind him, Kieran muttered, "This son of a…"
Sebastian rose at once and threw up a hand. "Please. Don't."
Rain did not stay to hear more. He opened the door and walked out into the corridor with his pulse beating hard against his throat, anger moving through him with the clean violence of a struck match.
The carpet muted his steps. The silence outside felt almost obscene after the office, all that restraint lacquered over contempt. He did not look back.
Inside, Sebastian remained standing, one palm pressed briefly to the desk, trying to leash his own frustration before it became useless.
"Kieran," he said, quieter now, "please. He is going through hell. We all are. We need a sponsor, someone with reach, someone with enough weight to move this medicine to the front. That is all we are asking for."
Kieran's eyes remained on the closed door for a moment longer before shifting back to his brother. "You are asking for much more than that."
Sebastian ignored the remark. "It is approved. It is real. Rain put his body through a year of testing for this. Do you understand what that means? Money, time, side effects, scrutiny, risk. He has bled for it in every way available without actual blood. If I had your influence, I would not hesitate."
Kieran gave a small, incredulous laugh. "Yes. Because you do not have my influence."
Sebastian stared at him.
Kieran folded his hands. "And since I do, I am telling you plainly that I have no interest in this medicine. It offers nothing to my teams. My largest share, and my largest concern, remains football, and football is performing exceptionally well. We are not searching for omega athletes. We are not restructuring our systems around this. I do not intend to make myself the face of your crusade."
Sebastian's expression hardened. "That is vile."
"That is practical."
"That is cowardly."
"That," Kieran said, "is why I still have a seat at tables where outcomes are actually decided."
The words landed with a softness that made them uglier.
Sebastian drew in a breath through his nose. "You know what disgusts me? You speak about this as though he asked for vanity, not access. As though he came in here selling cosmetics."
Kieran's patience thinned. "I am telling you to keep me out of it. Entirely. Do not bring him back into my office. Do not put campaign material with his face in front of me. If he fronts the product, I will not buy it. If he turns up on my screen, I will turn the screen off. I do not want him attached to me, my work, or any division under my oversight."
For a second Sebastian only looked at him, his expression emptied by disbelief.
Then contempt arrived, slow and complete.
"You really are a bum," he said softly. "He was right. I do not know how you ended up my brother."
Kieran said nothing.
Sebastian grabbed the back of his chair, shoved it aside with a scrape against the floor, and walked out before the room could witness anything more humiliating than it already had.
The door closed behind him with a measured click.
Kieran remained where he was, eyes fixed on the grain of the wood before him, jaw set in hard stillness. The office had returned to silence, but it was no longer the polished silence of corporate calm. It had thickened into residue. Irritation, pride, something far less manageable moving below both.
On the other side of the corridor, Sebastian was already walking fast, anger riding close beneath his skin. Rain stood near the elevator, arms folded, gaze turned toward the windows at the end of the hall where the city spread out in distant glass and concrete and the pale beginnings of evening.
When Sebastian approached, Rain looked at him once.
"Well?"
Sebastian pressed the button for the elevator. "He is exactly as charming as expected."
Rain gave a humorless laugh, brief and sharp. "I told you."
"Yes," Sebastian said. "You did."
The elevator doors opened. They stepped inside together, and neither of them spoke on the way down. The descent felt longer than the climb had. Heavier. Beneath the quiet, humiliation glinted like metal.
By the time they crossed the lobby again, the receptionist had the discretion not to look too closely.
Outside, the evening air met Rain's face with a chill that felt cleaner than anything inside the building. He got into the car without a word. Sebastian followed, closing the door behind him.
For several moments, all that moved between them was the low thrum of the engine and the city beginning to gather its lights.
Then Rain turned his head toward the window and said, very softly, "Next time you have a plan, warn me before you drag me into a lion's den wearing a smile."
Sebastian leaned back against the seat and shut his eyes. "Fair."
Rain looked ahead, mouth set, his reflection faint in the dark glass. Mediva headquarters receded behind them, all steel arrogance and expensive indifference, shrinking with distance and remaining enormous all the same.
Some buildings did not merely house power.
They perfumed it.