Page 84 of That Defining Moment

Heart was the second criterion, and the hardest to quantify. He’d spent years trying to define what separated a competent documentary from one that crawled under your skin and lived there, and the closest he’d come was this: heart was the moment when the subject stopped performing and you heard the actual person underneath. Most interviews never got there. The subject stayed behind their talking points, and the interviewer stayed behind their questions, and the result was two people maintaining adjacent monologues in the same room.

Lysander got there inside the first ten minutes. His voice cracked on the word “heat,” and instead of covering it or cutting around it, he sat in the crack and kept talking. The rawness wasn’t decorative.

Dane was good too. That was the part that set his jaw aching. The man was articulate, charming, entirely without shame, and his refusal to apologise created a tension that no amount of scripting could have manufactured. Here were two men with fundamentally incompatible versions of the same history, neither willing to concede. The podcast’s audience would be unable to stop listening.

Cassian shifted beside him, adjusting Tala’s position against his chest, and Hamish reached over without looking and tucked the blanket tighter around the baby’s feet.

Structure. Lysander had an instinct for it that Hamish wouldn’t have guessed at. The recording built in clean, escalating beats — how they met, how the content started, how it evolved — with each stage raising the stakes without overselling them.

There was no narrative commentary between sections, no voice-of-God telling the listener what to feel. Lysander asked a question, Dane answered, and the horror of the man’s answer did its own work. By the time Lysander said “twenty alphas,” the listener had already arrived at their own revision of everything Dane had presented as reasonable, because the escalation had been so gradual that the line between consent and coercion had blurred without anyone drawing attention to it.

That was craft. Whether Lysander knew it was craft or whether he’d simply told the truth and the truth had arranged itself into good architecture, the result was the same. The piece worked.

Hamish pulled up the mental checklist and ran the rest. Originality: a male omega interrogating his own exploitation, with the exploiter sitting across the desk and cheerfully confirming every accusation as a business decision. Nothing like it existed. Replay value: he’d already listened to it twice, and the Dane sections revealed new layers on the second pass. Audience: built-in and massive, between Lysander’s existing subscriber base and the press coverage from Stephen’s stalker.

He pulled off his headphones and stared at the ceiling as he held two things in his head at once.

The first was that listening to the man who’d pimped out his omega describe the operation with fondness had been one of the most repulsive experiences of his professional life.

The second was that it was fucking good.

It was the kind of debut that would chart in its first week. Meredith would know exactly what to do with it, and the industry would fall over itself to hail Lysander as a rising star.

When Lysander woke up and asked him what he thought, Hamish would have to tell him the truth, even if Hamish wanted nothing more than to make this recording disappear from existence.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Lysander surfaced when the mattress dipped behind him and the duvet lifted on a draught of cool air. Hamish slid in, and instead of settling on his back the way he usually did, he gathered Lysander in and turned him, so that Lysander came fully awake already tucked under his chin with his face against the warmth of Hamish’s throat.

Then came the kisses to his forehead, his temple, the arch of his cheekbone, the corner of his mouth, in a quick flurry that Hamish only ever gave when something had got under his skin and he needed reassurance. Lysander went pliant in his arms and let him work through it, and by the time Hamish reached his jaw, he already knew the alpha had listened to every second of the recording.

“What did you think?” he asked, his voice still rough with sleep.

Hamish pressed one more kiss to his hairline, then spoke into the crook of Lysander’s neck, his beard rasping on the skin there. “It’s brilliant, Lysander. Content-wise, it’ll make waves.”

“I fucking hate it,” Lysander said. “It’s heaps better than the solo recording. I know it is. Meredith’s going to hear it and lose her mind, and she’ll be right to. Dane in the room is the whole show. That’s the difference between a decent podcast and a number one, and now I’ve got it, sitting on a hard drive.”

Hamish waited, the way he always did, letting the quiet do the drawing out of his words.

“But it feels slimy.” Lysander made himself say the word. “Sitting across a table from him, working him, angling for the take I needed. That’s the exact job I used to do for him, except I’ve swapped one camera for a microphone. Point it, get the shot, cash the cheque afterwards.” His fingers curled into the front of Hamish’s shirt. “Only now the shot is me telling the truth about what he did, and I still had to make content with Dane to get the best thing I’ve ever recorded. I hate it, Hamish.”

Hamish’s thumb traced a slow line down the knobs of Lysander’s spine and back up again.

Lysander waited.

This alpha was one of the smartest people he knew. He’d built a career on sitting across from people who’d done terrible things and finding the question that cracked them open. Lysander trusted him the way he trusted Stephen and his daddy.

So Hamish would know what he needed to do. He’d listened, heard Dane charm his way through ninety minutes without once sounding sorry, and he’d know whether the right move was to use it, to take the guaranteed hit, or to bin the lot of it and go back to the solo take.

“Tell me what you think,” Lysander said.

Hamish kissed his forehead instead.

“Hamish!” Lysander said insistently.

Another kiss, to the bridge of his nose this time, soft and deliberate and absolutely fucking useless as a response to the question Lysander had asked him.

Lysander pulled back far enough to see his face. Hamish’s expression was entirely neutral.