Page 188 of Incompatible

A long moment of silence passes before I mumble, "Will you help me?"

I can’t believe I just asked a stranger alpha to fuck me through a heat.

He seems to stare at me through his mask.

Both his hands are under Oswald right now, but the fingers of one hand make a small patting motion, like he’s tapping Oswald on the shoulder.

I try to guess what it means, maybe something like"I have a more urgent problem first."

Then he turns and walks out.

Fuck.

I run after him, because I realize it’ll be hard for him to open the door while carrying a body, so I don’t say anything, I just push the door and he steps out into the darkness.

I look at the broken lock.

"Hey, the lock is busted…" I mumble, but the wind drowns out my words.

To my surprise, the stalker doesn’t head toward the street but toward the back fence where the cables from the torn-down cameras are fluttering, and I watch him lift Oswald up and toss him over the fence before jumping after him with surprising ease for someone with such a massive body.

So I’m alone now. In an open house. In heat.

And I killed a man, though what scares me most is that I don’t feel enough guilt, even if maybe I should, because I’m sure Oswald wouldn’t have tried to rape me if he hadn’t slipped into rut, and alphas have a hard time breaking free of it, especially young ones when the hormones hit and reason goes dark.

I killed him.

He had parents, maybe siblings, he was twenty-two with his whole life ahead of him, but he made the mistake of coming here, to the house of a fucking… who?

Who the hell am I?

What just happened, and why…

I slam the door shut, but the lock won’t catch. I brace the handle with a chair to secure it at least a little. I need to call some kind of carpenter service, but there’s a more urgent problem.

I go back to my phone and stare at it with focus.

There’s only one person who might know something about my past, it’s more intuition than certainty. I grab the phone and look at the name.

Lake Nolan.

But then another wave of cramps hits my lower belly, folding me in half as the phone slips from my fingers.

Quickly, I need to find my dildo or I’ll lose my mind! If I hoped the stress would stop my heat, it really didn’t.

I return to my room, but the moment I look at the bed, at the ruined nest and the place where Oswald’s dried-out corpse lay, a full-body shudder goes through me.

Shit, I can’t be here, I can’t lie on that bed.

My poor dildo is somewhere near the pillow where he threw it, so I grab it and flee that awful room, heading up to the second floor.

Dereck’s bed is still there, covered with a throw, empty and untouched.

I fall onto it and spread my legs, pushing the dildo into myself to quiet this awful, pulsing ache.

I masturbate while tears spill down my face, wanting to howl, wanting to scream, unable to understand why my life can’t settle into anything calm, why something is always happening, why I can never be happy?

As the wave slows down, I close my eyes and a memory drifts in, the time when I was with Bay, when we sat on the beach in front of his house playing chess, me teaching him a few useful beginner strategies. Bay was a natural, not passionate about it, but not stupid either, and sometimes he pulled off a clever move or two.