Page 32

Della

When the sex eventually stops, I’m more turned on than I should be in a room this filthy.

I’ve spent the last several minutes trying to identify a light-colored stain on the wall. Anything not to think about the loud sex and the hot alpha lying beside me.

In the hallway, a door creaks open, and I scramble to my feet, rushing to it.

“ Hey !” I bang on the wood. “We’re locked in. Can you open our door?”

I press my ear to the door.

Footsteps pause.

“We’re in room number?—”

Shit. What room are we in? I dart a frantic look at Levi. He shrugs from the bed where he’s sitting with his back against the wall. “We’re over here!” I yell again.

The footsteps head this way.

“Yes. Yes. That’s it. Right next to?—”

The footsteps hurry past.

“ Noo !” I glare at Levi as if he’s responsible for all this. “They heard me and they just ignored me.”

“Maybe they thought we were doing something they didn’t want to see. Or maybe they were afraid we’d recognize them. They must be using this place for a reason.”

Like married people having an affair. “Maybe.”

“And you yelling out yes, and that’s it, didn’t help.” His voice is dry.

I scowl at him even though he’s right. “Why didn’t you stop me?”

He crosses his arms, raking his eyes over me. “Maybe I didn’t mind hearing you shout yes. They might have thought I was doing something very exciting to you.”

I roll my eyes at him. “Whatever. I still can’t believe I got such a tepid groan.”

“That was pretend,” he says softly. “Tepid groans belong in the land of pretend.”

If the bed wasn’t so filthy, I’d be tempted to walk over there and see what I would need to do to turn tepid groans into something more.

“You want me to call you Daddy?” I tease, curious about his response.

I can’t have been the only one getting all flustered with the sex next door.

He closes his eyes. “You are not calling me Daddy.”

I recall the omega and alpha video at the academy, and a hot flush sweeps over me at the thought of Levi putting me on my knees like that.

“Maybe she was sitting on his face that last time?” I peer innocently at him. “Or was it the fact he had her on her hands and knees that?—”

“ Stop ,” he grinds out, voice husky and eyes still closed.

I smile, but my amusement is fake. I’m still seriously turned on by what we spent the last several minutes listening to.

He opens his eyes and studies me, his head cocked. “You’re doing that on purpose, aren’t you?”

“Doing what?” I bat my lashes at him.

He snorts. “Vincent calls you a menace.”

“He does?”

“Xavier says you’re a squirrel of destruction.”

I can’t help but laugh at that. “And what about you?”

His smile fades as he looks at me. “Something special. That’s what you are, Della Jackson.”

I turn away to hide my blush, pretending I’m busy trying to get the door open.

Guys don’t flirt with me. If they do, it’s because they struck out with someone else, or they want something from me.

I’m not used to penetrating stares from stupidly hot guys, and I’m not sure I ever will be.

With a frustrated sigh, I slump onto the filthy carpet with my back against the door, dreading the wait for the next person to walk past. “At least we only have this room for two hours. If we don’t leave, the clerk will come to kick us out."

Levi gets up and approaches, sitting on the floor next to me with his legs extended. “I saw you, you know?”

“You saw me doing what?”

“Sleeping behind the couch.”

I focus on the disgusting bed with strange stains. Anything to avoid looking at Levi. “You didn’t see what you thought you did.”

Out of the corner of my eye, Levi has his head angled toward me. “Okay.”

“ Okay ?” I’d thought he would have more of a reaction than that.

He nods and turns to examine the bed.

After a moment, I refocus on the stained sheets, biting my lip as a sudden urge sneaks up on me. Not to kiss him or engage in any intimate behavior. My gaze shifts to his neck and the tattoos hiding a pain I wouldn’t have known if he hadn’t told me.

“Have you ever had a thought that…” I swallow my words as I ask myself what I’m doing.

“A thought that what?” Levi’s voice is quiet but serious.

I dart a rapid glance at him, wanting to confirm if I’m making a monumental fuck-up of a decision by saying something I shouldn’t. He doesn’t seem like the type to laugh in someone's face.

I hope.

“It stays between us,” he adds. “Anything you say. I won’t tell anyone.”

“You, Xavier, and Vincent are a pack, though.”

“We are,” he confirms.

I slowly nod. “Who shares secrets after sex?”

“We’re pack and we’re close, but we don’t sleep together. Any whispering of secrets happens when we’ve gotten shitfaced and someone has fallen over or walked into a wall.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not about the sleeping together or walking into a wall while shitfaced. Ask Xavier about it.”

“Have you had a thought that doesn’t feel like you?”

I’m still not sure if I want to tell him what drove me to sleep behind a couch like a madwoman. I’m afraid that insidious thought is still in my mind, waiting to sneak up on me.

“Once. A long time ago.” He gives me a long, searching look.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Trying to decide how much to tell you.”

Same .

“About?”

“Me.”

When he refocuses on the disgusting bed, I figure the answer is nothing.

“I was living in Michigan with my parents when they died on a boat trip when I was thirteen. I had an uncle in some distant city I’d never met, and social workers decided that was where they’d send me.”

From his reluctance to tell me this at all, I gauge one thing. “I’m going to assume things didn’t work out well.”

From the belt marks on his back and the scars on his body, things turned out fucking terribly.

His lip curls in a smile, but his eyes are flat.

“My uncle was a piece of shit who drank all the money the state handed him to raise me. Once he was through beating the shit out of me and using me as a human ashtray, he took off one night, and pretty much left me to starve in his filthy house. My parents likely cut him out of all our lives for good reason.”

Those small, round burns suddenly make sense. “What a fuckhead.”

A hint of a smile filters across his gaze, and he raises an eyebrow. “ Fuckhead ?”

I shrug. “It works. What’d you do?”

“Didn’t tell anyone he’d left. I was still underage and could only get a weekend job, so I worked as much as I could. Went to school. Raised myself.”

“You didn’t tell anyone?”

He snorts. “And have social workers ship me to another estranged relative in some other part of the country to fuck me over again?” He shakes his head. “I learned my lesson. I rely only on myself.”

My mind flashes back to the house and the way Levi dragged Vincent out of the kitchen and into his office, to warn him about him telling me his real name.

“But things changed. You have Xavier and Vincent now.”

He nods. “I do. It wasn’t easy to let them in, but they’re family. They fight harder for me than I do for myself, and I know how to fight.”

“Is that how you learned how to fence?”

He shakes his head. “I learned anything that meant no one could use me as a human ashtray ever again. The fencing was just a way to get inside the school. I really am sorry about that.”

“About what?”

“The fencing lesson. You were getting in the way of us finding Aly’s killer. We were trying to get rid of you.”

“And teaching me how to fence after?”

“I realized I didn’t want to get rid of you after all.” His voice is soft.

“But you did,” I remind him.

He looks away, and I’m not sure why until he says, “And look what happened to you.”

“I don’t blame you for that.”

“You should.”

“If it hadn’t been me, it would have been Mercy, and I don’t want to imagine what they would have done to an actual omega. Better it was me.” I shrug as if the experience didn’t nearly break me. “We betas are a dime a dozen.”

“Betas might be a dime a dozen, but you’re not.” He slides his arm around my shoulder and draws me close, surprising me.

“What are you doing?”

“Side-hug. Tell me to fuck off or elbow me in the kidney if you want it to end.”

I do neither of those things.

We return to staring at the bed for the next couple of minutes.

“I thought about giving up,” he says so quietly I have to strain to catch his next words. “That was the thought that didn’t feel like me. I pulled myself out of the grief of losing my parents, then my uncle fucked me over when I was running on empty.”

“I didn’t care.”

I feel him looking at me, but I keep talking, my voice small. “Back in the house, I wasn’t okay after the hospital. They…” I swallow hard as the back of my eyelids burn. “I woke up and one of the alphas was doing up his pants. They did things to me that I will never forget, and I wasn’t okay.”

“You will heal.”

I blink back tears. “I saw a little bird on my balcony, and I had one leg over the railing to look for it before I realized what I was doing. A part of me didn’t care if I fell. I didn’t care about anything. That’s why I was sleeping behind the couch. In case I stopped caring again.”

“Come here.” He moves me into his lap and kisses the top of my hair. He tucks me so close to his heart that I never want to move again. “We’ll get them.”

I’ve never cared about being a beta before. It’s just a part of who I am. For the first time, I wonder what it would be like to have a pack that adores me the way Pack Ashe adores my sister.

It’s stupid.

Sure, betas have packs, but the center—the heart—of the pack is always the omega.

Always .

I hug him back. “Do you know how to put nails on a baseball bat?”

He laughs and squeezes me, careful of my back. “Nah. But it can’t be that hard to figure out.”

I stop desperately wishing we could leave this nasty room and start hoping Xavier will take a little longer to free us.

No one has ever held me as if they’re shielding me from the world.

I’m not sure I’m ready to let this feeling go so soon.