Page 5 of The Alpha Experiment
I hung up and tossed the phone onto the couch next to me, flopping back with a sigh. The couch didn’t offer much by way of calming comfort, what with the spring poking me in the back of the knee. My mom had offered to buy me new furniture, but I was too proud to accept it.
Gods. I’d be turning thirty in a few short months. And I had this small, dingy apartment, with its beige carpeting and scuffed off-white walls, a threadbare blue corduroy couch with the springs sticking out of it, and an old computer monitor repurposed as a TV kind of thing for when I wanted to stream crappy old sci-fi in the living room as opposed to lying in my single-guy twin bed.
At least my sheets were clean.
Not that it mattered, since—single. My last relationship, if you could even call it that, had ended a year before. She got a postdoc in Boston and never looked back.
I stared at my bag, still sitting on the floor where I’d dumped it when I came inside. I couldn’t see the envelope, but I could feel its presence. The image of Fiona in front of the arts building, with her coffee and her backpack and her carefree college-girl smile, had been burned into my retinas.
Not that I wanted to be stalked myself, obviously. But my little sister…my hands balled into fists. I wanted to kill whoever had taken that photo of her. Rip his throat out with my fangs and claws.
Fangs and claws I didn’t have, not that the lack bothered me every day of my life or anything.
But I could always get creative. Humans had invented knives for a reason, after all.
My phone beeped at me. I picked it up, expecting another message from Meredith. She’d already acknowledged my message telling her I’d gotten home in one piece, but I knew she’d have more advice and more worries; she always did. Or maybe a follow-up from Fiona, chewing me out—again—for waking her up with the text I’d sent as soon as I got in my door. She’d gone to bed early so she could be all bright-eyed for a study group in the morning. I’d apologized, and I’d drawn a huge breath of relief that she was all tucked into her bed in her dorm room, behind several sets of locked doors.
It wasn’t Meredith or Fiona, though.
Map says 2hrs 34min to your apt. Be there in 2hrs or less.
I blinked at it. Colin.
Something warm unfurled inside me, something I couldn’t quite name. Gratitude, maybe? Definitely surprise.
Affection, for sure. And yeah, bone-deep relief. Colin had been my best friend for…sixteen years? Seventeen? Something like that. And while I knew logically that in a friendship that long, sometimes one or the other of the people in it wouldn’t be able to devote quite as much time to keeping in touch, it’d still hurt when he took a step back. Hurt a lot more than I’d wanted to admit, until right then when I was too raw to suppress anything.
My thumb hovered over the keyboard. Should I tell him not to come? Of course I should—he had way too much on his plate to come running to my rescue. But I didn’t think I had the moral fortitude.
See you soon, I typed back.
And then I got my ass in gear to clean up a little. Colin wasn’t exactly picky, but I needed something to do, and I could at least make sure I had a couple of blankets for the couch and enough clean cups for us both to have coffee in the morning.
It was a quarter after twelve. Colin would get there around two-thirty.
I still had those midterms to write, and Colin and I wouldn’t go to bed right away.
Who was I kidding—we’d be up all night and I probably wouldn’t end up actually sleeping until the next night, fueled by coffee and junk food and Colin’s presence.
Colin was coming! That thought bubbled up in my stomach and made my chest feel oddly light. I’d missed him so damn much. He was the only person I could be completely, one hundred percent myself with, including how I felt about being the only human in a litter of werewolves. I kept that from my family, partly out of pride and partly out of not wanting to put up walls between me and my siblings, but I’d always been able to confide in Colin. He’d always defended me, and vice versa.
And now he was on his way to do it again.
By the time two A.M. rolled around, I’d washed the dishes, dusted, swept, and cleaned up the bathroom. I still had some time to kill, unless Colin broke every speed limit in two states. I glanced at my bag again, where those photos lurked like a monster under the bed.
What next? Nothing left to clean…and then I heard heavy but supernaturally quick footsteps on the stairs.
I’d have recognized those footsteps anywhere. I flung the door open and found Colin with one hand raised, ready to knock. He filled the whole space at the top of the stairs with his presence, solid and strong and safe.
My breath whooshed out of me, taking so much tension with it. Unless you knew what he was, Colin didn’t look any more powerful or intimidating than your average well-built gym rat: handsome face, ridiculously well-muscled shoulders and chest, fairly tall—for a human, although not for an alpha were; he scraped over six feet, but didn’t tower—and all wrapped in jeans, a t-shirt, and a backward baseball cap, of all things.
Maybe it was because I knew him. Maybe I just couldn’t judge what other people saw when they looked at him. But to me, he was a fixed, sturdy point in a spinning universe.
“You look like shit, dude,” Colin said with a grin, and pushed his way into the apartment, a hand on my shoulder to guide me out of the way.
He smelled like an alpha, and I inhaled deeply. I might be human and unable to pick up the complexities of pheromones that a shifter could detect, but I had enough of my family’s heritage—and enough years spent living in a pack—to be able to tell an alpha from anyone else. Earth and spice and something hot and vital, like a banked campfire in a breezy pine forest.
A lot of humans were wary of alphas. But I’d grown up surrounded by decent, honorable alphas who used their strength to care for those around them.
