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Chapter Seven

Ryder

S he was gone. It was the right thing to do, but now I was standing in the bedroom alone, heart pounding in my chest, hands clenched at my sides, resisting the urge to go and hunt her down.

She would be out of Desparion by now, beyond the gates, driving towards safety and a place I was no longer allowed to go.

Not officially, anyway.

Despite my earlier determination to wash her scent off, I hadn’t. It filled my lungs and set a fire in my belly. No point in trying to fight it. I loosened the buckle on my belt, pulled the zipper down carefully, shoved my pants out the way, and fisted my cock with a weak groan.

I tipped my head back. My grip was bruising, but it felt so fucking good.

It took three rough strokes before my spine tingled in that little telltale sign, my balls tightened, and my mind emptied into bliss as I came.

It hit the covers where she’d been laid out a short time ago in a rain of heavy splats.

My hand kept jacking up and down roughly, my growl rumbling.

My legs started to tremble, but I locked my knees and kept pumping. I’d been so close to rutting her, to flipping her to her hands and knees and filling that too tight pussy with every inch of my cock.

A beta couldn’t handle this without preparation.

It would have torn her pussy up, and I wouldn’t have given a shit.

My ardor cooled, and my pumps slowed. Thinking about hurting her brought a much needed reality check.

I heaved a breath, but it only drew more of her heady scent into my lungs and my dick jerked.

My hand was covered in fucking come, and so was the bed.

I was standing with my pants around my knees and my dick in my hand.

I sighed and yanked up my pants as best I could. My cock was still hard, but I didn’t think it was going to go fucking down anytime soon.

I headed into the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror.

In my mind was the image of her standing before me in front of the window.

She was so fucking tiny and vulnerable, and I looked like an oaf next to her with my big terrible hands more suited to violence.

It wasn’t my hands that was the problem, though, was it?

It was the beast, the underlying part of me that I kept so tightly under control.

I’d been accused of being distant. I fucked the omegas under our care when they needed it, when they asked for it.

I was just scratching an itch, one that satisfied both of us. How was it possible for a beta to get me this aroused this swiftly?

I washed my hands, dragged my T-shirt over my head, and tossed it into the laundry basket, then I kicked off my boots, shucking my pants down, and got into the shower.

I didn’t want to wash her off, but it was the right thing to do.

I pressed my palms flat against the cool tiles and let the water fall over my head.

“You’re a fucking animal,” my sister had taunted. I was, and that was the truth. I’d been thirteen when I went through the change. They’d thought I was wild then, when I was just big for my age and athletic.

I’d put on fifty pounds of muscle and at least seven inches since then. I’d thought I was a monster before, but the betas put us here for good reason—we couldn’t be trusted. We lived perpetually on the brink, teetering between truth and anarchy. It was a slippery slope from one stage to the other.

I’d told her the truth when I said we didn’t force women.

Would it always be like this? Would I always be fighting my instincts?

It hadn’t been a difficult fight before today.

Maybe I should stay away from the club for a while, stay away from hot little betas with big doe eyes and a fucking magic pussy that I was sure with a little training would be perfect for my fucking cock.

I washed up, getting plenty of soap on me—the kind that neutralizes omega scent.

I kept a bottle in there all the time. If I’ve been with an omega, afterward, I always wanted to get rid of the scent.

I slept better because of it. She wasn’t even a fucking omega, though.

How had she driven me so close to the edge?

Done, I turned the shower off and stepped out of the stall. I picked up a big fluffy towel and dried myself off.

It was late, the gray dawn peeking over the horizon. I should get changed and check that everything was fine downstairs, but I was so fucking tired. Fuck!

I didn’t think about the past much. I’d put it behind me where it belonged, for the most part.

“Is that even your name?” she had asked.

I didn’t like to think of my other name. It was a pretentious name for a pretentious prick, and that was what I’d been.

I padded back into the bedroom and over to the big bed, my cum splattered all over it. I went to the closets and got some clean sheets, then I stripped the bed and re-made it.

I could smell her on the fucking sheets, so I dumped them straight into the basket. This wasn’t normal, but then again, neither was I. As I lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling with my hands behind my head, I wondered what life I might have had…

If it hadn’t happened. If I’d been a beta. If the pond of my life hadn’t been rippled by the arrival of a massive fucking brick.

There would’ve been fast cars, plentiful women, and a career waiting for me at my dad’s real estate business, buying land and properties and redeveloping them.

My father was a ruthless bastard. I didn’t claim to have ever loved him, but he knew how to cut a deal.

Power was a commodity to my father, and my mother was right there beside him.

I wondered if they were still married. They were bound to be.

Families like that didn’t have messy things like divorce.

They picked themselves up from whatever life threw at them.

The family always stood together. I missed it at first when they tossed me here, rolling from one bad situation to another. I didn’t know how many times I got a beating and was left bleeding in the gutter. The survival instinct was strong in an alpha. Well, so I learned.

I always picked myself up. That was when Jace found me, lying in a bloody heap in the alleyway, half unconscious. I remembered him testing for a pulse and jerking back when I blinked.

“Fuck! I thought you were dead,” he said. “What the fuck happened to you?”

I tried to open my mouth. The words wouldn’t come out.

“Don’t try to talk,” he said. “I’d ask how long you have been on the streets, but I already know long enough.”

He pulled a cell out of his pocket and punched some buttons.

“Dane, I’m going to send you my location. Get your ass over here.” He looked back at me. “Yeah, some poor newbie bastard. Someone’s kicked the shit out of him.”

He turned off the phone. I started shivering.

They racked all the way through my body.

My eye socket was busted, my ribs broken, and I had layers of bruises after days on the streets.

Days? It had been weeks, maybe as much as months.

I didn’t know how much longer it was when a car pulled up, since the shivers had racked me and I was jerking uncontrollably on the ground.

I thought it was that moment of kindness. I’d never experienced that. My parents didn’t have empathy, not for their own fucking kids, and not for the people they ripped off. I didn’t think I’d had a genuine experience of empathy in my entire fucking life until that moment.

And then he’d swooped in, a rough around the edges alpha from the wrong side of town.

He showed me more compassion in that weak, low moment of my life than my battered soul could deal with.

I passed out. When I woke up, I was in a basic room, lying in a bed big enough to fit all of me.

The rest of it was scruffy and worn, with grubby curtains pulled across the window.

Another guy was there, not as big a bastard as Jace, but something about him seemed a little unhinged. Dane, I presumed.

“Well, he’s not gonna fucking die then,” Dane had said.

“Don’t be a prick,” Jace said. “Get him some water.”

“What the fuck am I? A babysitter?” Although he grumbled, he snagged a bottle from a nearby table.

I tried to sit up, but Jace put a hand on my shoulder. He was a few years older than me. He just held me there.

“Steady,” he said, taking the bottle from Dane and passing it to me. “You’re safe here. I know you’ve been on the streets, running, hiding, doing whatever you need to survive. But you don’t need to do that anymore. Not on my fucking watch.”

Jace was a man of his word, and that was how they became my friends.

I didn’t understand these new feelings ripping through me.

I wanted to go find her, as ridiculous as that was.

We did go on the other side of the tracks every now and again, when it was necessary, but we did it carefully.

It wasn’t like we could just walk up to a fucking apartment block, or a house or wherever the fuck somebody lived, and knock on the door.

She’d come from money. I saw the clothes she and her sister had—classy, expensive.

I could get away with being an alpha in the rougher parts of town, where the police didn’t patrol as frequently, where there were fewer cameras and those cameras that were busted and broken down, but I couldn’t get away with it in the rest of the beta zone.

Not in the fancy places—places I’d once belonged to. The place where Emma was now.

I wondered what she was thinking. Was she upset?

Did she think I was a bastard for sending her on her way?

Was she thinking about me in a good way, about how I’d made her come?

Or was she already ticking me off as an item on her bucket list and getting ready for tomorrow, when a sensible beta man would claim her affections?

I growled and rolled over, shoving my face into the pillow, willing myself to forget how she’d come for me, the feel of her ass under my palm.

I couldn’t believe she’d asked me about fucking safe words.

“What if I want to say no but I don’t want you to stop?”

My cock began to thud against the bed.

“Baby, I’ve got so much I want to do to you. I’ve not scratched the surface.”

If she came back again, I’d work something fucking out. I’d coax that little pussy for me, open her all up, take the time to make her perfect, and drive her so fucking wild with pleasure. No beta man would ever be enough.

“I don’t fuck inexperienced betas, no matter how pretty they are, or how sweet their pussies.”

It was a fucking delusional fantasy, even if I hadn’t acted like an asshole at the end.

Betas like her didn’t come to live here.

I’d be her dirty little secret—the man she’d come to when she needed a fix.

I growled and thumped the pillow, willing my mind to go blank.

No, I had a terrible feeling if she showed up again, I’d never let her fucking go.