"No," he says, immediately, though he cannot help the small stab of horror, that what had happened happened at all, and that it was his own fumbling attempts that brought them there. "If I am appalled, it is at men who would pay coin for one so young, though you did have need of it. Appalled, perhaps, that so little has changed since your first time around. Men, children, still relegated so much to chance and circumstance. I am not disgusted."

Should like to say; I would have liked to see you, beating up an unruly alpha, yet he knows he should not have. That the affair must have been desperate, and left its own scars, even if Hamilton had delivered a solid thrashing. Should like to have been there so Hamilton had not been alone. Always friends, they had been, with that underlying tension, when politics and power had not factored in. Burr should have liked to save him. Hamilton would not have had it.

There should have been no different for him, born on that island as an omega or as an alpha. He should have rose regardless, and yet. Both of them had caught the rise of fate's wave at the right time, and born with it until it crashed, a cataclysm, on progress' shore. No war, now, for Hamilton to rise. Perhaps it is worse now than it has ever been, each relegated to their place, with so little chance of advancement.