Page 27 of His Captor

I grimaced and gripped my steering wheel hard, fighting to ignore the inner voice that screamed at me.

GO BACK!

“I’m not going back!” I shouted at the windshield.

The guy stopped at the light in the car in front of me as we waited to turn onto the highway must have thought I was yelling at him for some reason. He glared at me in his rear view mirror and gave me the finger.

I huffed through my nose and ignored him. As soon as the light turned green, he hit the gas and zipped onto the highway, like he had something to prove to me. I just drove on, gritting my teeth and breathing hard.

Go back! Stop him from getting on that plane. Stop him from disappearing from your life.

But I couldn’t go back. The voice inside me was unreliable. This wasn’t some movie where I could run through theairport terminal, shouting Billy’s name and flattening myself dramatically against a glass wall somewhere before he turned around, saw me, and came running into my arms.

My insides lurched at the emotion that came with that image. I would have done it if I thought it would work.

Billy was already gone. The second he’d stepped into the airport terminal, I’d lost him. All I knew was his first name. I didn’t know what flight he was on, what city he was flying to, or who he was, really.

I just knew that I would never be the same without him.

By the time I made it back to the play apartment, I tried to force myself to laugh. I was being a sentimental fool. I knew omega heat hormones were strong and that they affected alphas, too, but this was ridiculous.

The apartment really was a mess. Billy and I had been so into each other, so into heat-fucking, that I hadn’t done any of the tidying up as the scene went along that I usually did with omega playmates. The whole place smelled, too…like sex and Billy. It made me groan, lean back against the door, and breathe it all in for a second.

I only let myself have a minute. It was over, done. Billy was long gone. I needed to clean up, put myself back together, and think about things that really mattered.

Like Colin’s flood of calls and texts that I’d ignored for the past few days. From what I gathered as I’d read and listened to the messages he’d left me while Billy was still in his heat, things had gone well at the party for Victory Holdings. At least, well from Colin’s perspective. He was furious with me for not attending, but I’d never promised I would.

I scowled as I stripped the sheets off the bed and made a pile in the living room. I didn’t want to do business with Victory Holdings. Colin might have wooed them and won them, but Ihad the right, as developer of the tech they wanted to buy, to shut down any deal with them.

It was Billy who had finally tipped me over from being suspicious of Victory to flat-out wanting nothing to do with them. The moment he’d pointed out that the gadgets I’d tested on him felt like sex toys to him, and that the magnetic cuffs bruised and chafed his wrists, I’d had visions of the things I’d invented being used in sex trafficking and other nefarious dealings.

If I was going to continue developing my tech, I would make damn certain the only people who bought it were the police or the military, or someone else with definitively charitable aims. Did I think either entity was entirely innocent and wouldn’t use my inventions to hurt people? No, not at all. But I trusted them more than I trusted the thugs Colin had apparently been drinking scotch with on Saturday night.

I hated throwing the sheets and towels into the supposedly public laundry room in my apartment building. I didn’t want them to come out smelling mountain-fresh, I wanted to keep smelling Billy. I’d lost track of the number of times I’d sniffed him and breathed him in while he’d been asleep between heat waves.

I didn’t want to clean up the dishes and cutlery left in the sink in my kitchen. Billy’s mouth had touched those things, and I still craved that mouth. Kissing him after that breeding orgasm had been the most beautiful thing I’d ever done.

“Cut it out, Mace,” I growled at myself as I loaded the dishwasher, then slammed it shut a little too hard. “You’re soaked in hormones. The feelings are exaggerated. It was the omega’s heat, not any great love story.”

I huffed as the dishwasher started to run, then moved to wipe down the counters and the tables.

I kept cleaning, kept moving, trying not to let myself think, for another hour. I scrubbed the entire apartment, vacuumed, switched the laundry from washer to dryer. My phone rang a few times, but every time I ran to it, hoping Billy was calling me, it turned out to be Colin.

I didn’t answer. I was in the wrong mood to deal with Colin’s anger that I wasn’t at work.

I did come up with one brilliant idea after dismissing one of Colin’s messages. I pulled up the Dark Fantasies Club app, accessing Billy’s profile. Just seeing his smiling face in his pics had my heart beating faster. It wasn’t the pics I was after, though.

“Barrington?” I asked aloud when I saw the region his profile listed as his home territory.

Barrington was all the way over on the East Coast. It was a huge city, too. One of the largest in the country. Any hope I had that I’d be able to find Billy by showing up in his home town and asking around withered. “Billy” was such a generic name, and no surname was listed, as per Dark Fantasies Club protocol. For all I knew, Billy went by William in his everyday life. That might not even be his real name.

Again, the hopeless feeling that I’d lost the most wonderful omega I’d ever met sank down on me. I’d blown it. My one chance to maybe keep Billy in my life was gone.

I finished with my play apartment then drove into town to the apartment I actually lived in. It should have felt good to be around my normal things, to shower again and to change into work clothes. It was mid-afternoon at that point—Billy’s flight wouldn’t leave for another few hours—but I decided to make an appearance at the office anyhow.

As soon as the elevators opened onto our floor, I knew everything was wrong.

“There you are, Mr. Canton,” Rachel, our indomitable beta office manager said, jumping up from her desk. “We were all so worried about you.”

---