Page 23 of The Alpha's Gamble
I’d been coming to the Morrigan for ten years—obviously, given my history with MacKenna, and that was clearly my first mistake—and it’d undergone some changes. It’d been your typical tarnished-tinsel Vegas hellhole then, had gotten shabbier and shabbier over the years, and now appeared to be in the middle of something of a makeover.
MacKenna must have only become the owner very, very recently. That probably accounted for my brief residence here as a welcome VIP; the paperwork hadn’t gotten sorted out yet, and I was still on the books from the previous management.
Well, I’d almost gotten away with it. Shitty fucking luck. But not all of MacKenna’s changes were bad, I had to grudgingly admit. The staff universally wore black pants, black shirts, and surprisingly tasteful red vests, not too cheap-looking and tailored differently to fit the women without being turned into corsets. The previous owners, whoever the hell they were, had put all the female staff in these tiny electric-blue skirts that would’ve been embarrassing for one of the ten-dollar hookers you could find a few blocks away from here. The girls had all looked so uncomfortable I couldn’t even appreciate the view. They seemed a lot happier with the new uniforms.
And the carpets were new, and clean, and the place smelled less like a festering ashtray stuffed into someone’s armpit and then half-heartedly washed with a bottle of vodka and a dirty rag.
With the nearly unlimited budget I used to have, I could’ve chosen any fancy place at the newer and more upscale end of the Strip. But I’d picked the Morrigan on that first visit. Something about it called to me, and I followed my instinct. Maybe because it’d always been a more supernatural-centric establishment than some others. They had a higher than normal proportion of shifter employees, for one thing.
And after that, I’d kept coming back, because of something that most people didn’t know about me, something I hid almost fanatically: I was kind of sentimental.
The Morrigan was where I’d popped my Vegas cherry, the place I’d learned how to play blackjack, where I’d gotten my first legal drink. And the Morrigan had been my casino, my hotel, my Nevada home away from home, ever after.
Now MacKenna had popped my real cherry in the Morrigan. What sweet irony.
Ugh. I stepped out onto the Strip after running the final gauntlet of penny slot machines and a set of double glass doors, and immediately looked up at the sky, sucking in the deepest breath I’d ever taken. No stars, of course. Mere celestial objects couldn’t compete with a billion mega-powered LEDs glaring up and drowning them out. But real sky, nonetheless.
And real air, even if it came with mostly car exhaust and the stink of unwashed streets and the pervasive stench of booze and boozy sweat that no shifter’s nose would’ve been able to tune out.
A white stretch limo pulled up, vomiting out a gaggle of young women in dresses so short I couldn’t help ogling for a second, one of them with a veil-thing precariously dangling from the side of her hair.
“Oooh!” one of them called out, giggling and stumbling into her friend and shooting me a wide smile. “Want to come up to my room?”
The rest of them burst into laughter.
If I still had my own suite, I’d have invited them up to it. Sent down for a bartender to come up and make everyone fruity cocktails for what was left of the night and all morning. Maybe gotten a private party room with a DJ.
For a second, I considered accepting her offer, even though I didn’t have anything to bring to the table but myself. MacKenna hadn’t made me promise to be only his fuck toy. I could be this pretty blonde’s fuck toy for a couple of hours while he was sleeping, right?
But even if I could’ve gotten away with it, and I probably wouldn’t, the way he’d fucked me had left its mark. I wore his possession of me like a brand no one else could see. If I fucked her, I’d be thinking the whole time about how his cock had filled me yesterday. Every flex of my ass when I thrust inside her would engage muscles I’d never had a reason to think about much—before MacKenna.
I gave the bridal party a smile and a wink. Probably not my best work, but an effort all the same. “You’re out of my league, ladies. Have fun tonight. And congratulations!” I added, smiling again at the sloppy bride-to-be.
I made a break for it, heading down the sidewalk, followed by their friendly catcalls.
As soon as I’d turned my back, the smile fell off my face like a too-heavy mask. Shit. This was my life now. Making up excuses to get out of having fun and sleeping with attractive women, in case it pissed off my blackmailer.
Those girls wanted me. Or at least one of them did. They saw something appealing in me. Why didn’t MacKenna?
I needed a drink, and a cigarette, and to maybe go jump off a bridge.
The far north end of the Strip, where the Morrigan guarded the border between glitzy Vegas and seedy Vegas, didn’t have much to offer. A parking lot across the way half full of construction trucks. A guy with an armful of strip club flyers slogging his way wearily to the gods knew where. In the distance, the lights and the clubs and the very expensive good times.
I ended up wandering down the block and then turning right, heading off of Las Vegas Boulevard and along a lonely, dusty side street past a diner and a cluster of the most horrifyingly run-down beige apartment buildings I’d ever seen. Those were on the other side of the street. On my side, I had the back of the Morrigan and its dumpsters, delivery bay, and earsplittingly obnoxious…loud things. Condensers? Air filters? Whatever. They were loud. And huge.
A dour-looking man in overalls, maybe maintenance, had leaned up against a wall to smoke a cigarette, thumb flipping at the screen of his phone.
A second later he’d let me bum one and I’d taken up my own position against the wall, staring dourly in my turn at the condenser-things since I didn’t have a phone of my own to scroll.
Honestly, I didn’t miss my phone that much. I mean, I did, in the sense that I felt like I was missing a limb. But I didn’t in the sense that I couldn’t think of a single person I’d want to communicate with, or whose lives I’d want to be caught up on. And the news could go fuck itself.
The maintenance guy dropped his cigarette butt and vanished around the side of the building. I took a long drag and gazed up at the pinkish-white glare that was all I could see of the sky from here.
“This doesn’t seem like your natural habitat.” The light, neutral voice startled me so badly I flailed, fumbled my cigarette, caught it, cursed as it burned me, and managed to wedge it between my fingers again, all while spinning wildly to see who the fuck had spoken to me.
It was the fucking weirdly handsome guy, the too-smooth one MacKenna had with him when he came to interrogate me. The one who’d stunk of magic and had given me the glare of death. His short dark hair was slicked back, his bland black suit neat as a pin. Four in the morning, and he looked like a cut-rate Ken doll who’d just started his nine to five. I hadn’t heard or smelled him approaching. Getting snuck up on like that had my hackles up so fast I was almost growling.
“The fuck do you want? And where the fuck did you come from?”
