Page 5 of The Alpha's Gamble
“I’m one more outburst from handing you over to the cops after all, Castelli. Watch your fucking mouth.”
The absolute, imperative alpha command in his deep voice withered the words on my tongue and struck me completely, horribly, obediently silent.
Instantly.
As if I hadn’t been an alpha at all.
I’d never been so ashamed in my life—and my family had really done their best to set the bar high.
MacKenna drained the last of his drink and set it down on the table with a clunk, leaning back into the sofa at his ease, knees spread in the universal posture of a man in command of the situation.
Those tailored trousers didn’t have enough fabric to hide the bulge in the front of them.
He was half hard, it looked like.
A totally new type of shudder made my spine do a tango.
MacKenna was getting off on humiliating me. On having me in the palm of his hand.
And I could scent his arousal as well as see it, now that I was paying attention to it. Was that why my body had started to go haywire? Another alpha’s powerful sexual pheromones wrapping around me, seeping into my body and my magic.
Making me react. Because my own cock had thickened. Not hard, not yet, but interested. Responsive.
Subjugated to his stronger shifter magic.
“Good,” he said, startling me out of my horrified realization of the situation I’d gotten myself into. “I don’t give a toss about your abilities or lack thereof when it comes to blackjack. I do care about your debt. And it doesn’t matter how many watches you sell, or phone calls you make begging your family to pay me off. You’re a criminal, I can prove it, and if you want to get out of that? Well, you’ll be paying that off, too. Call it a moral debt, if you like.”
I’d torn my eyes away from the front of his pants and forced them up to meet his, even though it went against every atavistic instinct I had to face him down with my body and my magic teetering on the brink of yielding to him already. Those deep, dark eyes, like black pits…nothing moral there, I’d be willing to bet. His expression didn’t give anything away.
“A moral debt.” I couldn’t help the sarcastic twist I put on the words, even though playing it cool and pretending to be completely unaffected would have been a lot smarter. “Right. You mean blackmail.”
Another casual shrug. “Call it whatever you want. But you owe me. And you’re going to pay. Come here.”
My hair felt like it was standing on end, and I stiffened my legs, rooting my feet to the floor.
No way would I move so much as an inch. He couldn’t tell me what to do.
He shifted a little in his seat, spreading his knees a tiny bit wider.
And then he said it again, this time with a resonance in his tone that throbbed in my skull and made my eyes water. “Come. Here.”
I resisted with every cell in my body, but it didn’t matter. One foot moved, and then the other, MacKenna’s alpha magic pulling on me like a rope tied somewhere inside my sternum. Did my own werewolf magic reside around there? It felt like it. Like he’d somehow wrapped his own more powerful will around mine andyanked.
And yet he was still just sitting there, expression neutral, waiting for me to do his bidding.
As if this moment that was costing me everything, the last of my pride and my self-respect, meant absolutely fucking nothing to him.
One foot, and then the other, soundless on the plush carpeting.
I didn’t stop until I stood between his feet, my legs almost brushing his. He had to tilt his head back against the sofa to look up at me. Shouldn’t I have felt at more of an advantage, looming over him like this? But I didn’t. I’d never felt so insignificant, so much at a disadvantage. Jail. Disowned. Fraud.A moral debt. He had me right where he wanted me, because he had all the cards that I’d always been able to play at will: wealth, power,choices.
“What do you even want from me?” I asked, even though I was starting to think I knew, and the pit of my stomach had clenched into a tight, churning knot. “And why? What—what could you possibly want from me? I’m an alpha!”
That last came out a wail, as un-alpha-like as a tone of voice could possibly be.
He had the audacity—and the cruelty—to chuckle, shaking his head at me, eyes faintly glowing. Mine were too, I thought, but I could hardly feel my magic anymore, it’d been so subdued by his. His scent had thickened even more, suffocating me: rich and powerful, a hint of sweetness underneath bitter darkness, like sugared Turkish coffee.
It was so unfair. So fucking unfair, that he hadthis, this innate power, when I couldn’t even claim that after losing everything else.
