The contract is forty-two pages long. Elias has read every word.
He knows Clause 7 requires him to move into Thomas Ashford's apartment for twelve months, minimum. He knows Clause 19 outlines the terms of dissolution, should they seek it after that time. And he knows Clause 14(b) — the one he's read most carefully, alone at two in the morning — requires him to come off his suppressants within thirty days, so that his body can do what the contract needs it to do.
What forty-two pages can't prepare him for is Thomas himself. Controlled, private, and nothing like the Alpha Eli expected, Thomas is a man who asks before he touches and says Eli's name like it means something. When Eli's first heat arrives and leaves them both wrecked and changed, it's not the biology that undoes him. It's the moment Thomas had everything he wanted and chose to stop.
Now the bonding timeline is on the table, their families are watching, and Eli — a man who has spent his whole career behind the lens, composed and observing — is running out of ways to pretend he isn't already in the frame.
An explicit arranged marriage story about two men who were given no choice, and the one they make anyway.