Page 19 of Lucky or Knot
“I’m sorry.” Declan’s voice came from behind me, echoing as if he spoke to me through a tunnel whose walls were closing and opening and pushing the sound through at odd angles. “This isn’t what you wanted to hear. And you need to be careful. Tony. Focus.”
I stopped, vibrating down to my toes, and closed my eyes. One rasping breath in, then out, then another, until my blood pressure dropped and my urge to rend and destroy and maim simmered down to a low-level pounding in my veins, my alpha magic ebbing enough that I could see more than the golden haze of my own fury.
Magic. He’d enchanted me and made me want him, then enchanted me to knock me out. My rage had to be at least half due to that, and the same with my headache. Shifters didn’t fucking get headaches unless someone hit us over the head with a steel beam—or magicked us.
I had to get it together. None of what I felt was real, which meant I could push it aside.
But it sure seemed real. Turning around to face Declan took effort. Controlled motion was so much harder than simply remaining still. But I gritted my teeth, tasting blood as my lowered fangs pierced my lip, and managed it.
He’d taken up a position between me and the office door, poised and wary, his own eyes glowing and a couple of inches of claw gleaming at the tips of his fingers.
Guilt hit me hard enough to almost drown out the rest of my churning emotion.
“I won’t lose it,” I rasped out. “I apologize for the—I’m sorry. You don’t need to protect your staff from me.”
Declan nodded, and the tension slowly eased out of his big body, his hands flexing as his claws whispered back in.
“All right. You’re paying attention?” he said, taking a step towards me and lowering his voice, even though the office’s glass door was shut. I nodded. “Good. Because Cunningham’s a prick and a right bastard, and he’s at least as possessive as the average alpha. More so. And vindictive. And he’d hate you on principle simply for what you are, but if he found out what his pretty boy had been up to last night, he’d hate you more than he hates me. You understand?”
Oh, I understood. Vegas had always had a vicious, violent undertone to it, because huge sums of money made people crazy and ruthless. The mob was bad enough. Add magic and alpha weres to the mix…
Christ. My head spun, from the magic and from literally fucking everything.
Hockey and beer. Why the ever-loving fuck hadn’t I taken the night off for hockey and beer?
And then I’d never have looked into his glossy black eyes, seen him pout with those flower-petal lips. Never have kissed his sweet, hot, forked-tongued mouth, licked his satin skin, filled him with my come and my knot and made him cry while he tookwhat I gave him.
I rubbed at my temples. “I need a fucking drink.”
Declan sighed and shook his head. “That you do,” he said heavily. “I’m—look, I can’t skip this meeting. I wish I could. But I’m out of time for this tonight, much as I hate to send you off with this shite hanging over you. You want my advice?”
The quirk of his lips suggested he knew damn well what I’d think of that.
“You mean your advice to drop it, let it go, and walk away? The advice you’d never take in a million years if you were in my shoes?”
“Precisely,” he replied. “That advice. It was one night, Tony. You got a good fuck out of it, that coin was probably worthless anyway, and the fairy’s not worth it, either. It’s a funny story you can tell when you’re drinking in a few years.”
“And if you were me?” I pressed. “Don’t bullshit me. I know you can get more information for me about him, if you want to.”
After a long, reluctant pause, he said, “I’ll text you later once I have someone look into it. But you’re going to get yourself killed.”
That didn’t seem worth arguing about. It didn’t actually matter, because I wouldn’t, and couldn’t, walk away, and we both knew it. So I thanked him, shook his hand, and showed myself out.
Chapter 7
Thrifty budgeting be damned, I picked up a mid-shelf bottle of Scotch on my way home, parked myself on my dilapidated couch, and settled in to brood. From my sprawled position, I had a view through the living room window of the tall sign for the gas station next door, with its blue glare illuminating the top of a scraggly palm tree.
Somewhere out there, through that window and a few miles across town to the more expensive parts of Vegas’s environs, Cunningham had his own no-doubt luxurious lair. A view of the whole Strip. Much better Scotch. A hundred comfortable rooms. And in one of them, a beautiful, deceitful little fairy, who probably took all of the opulent trappings of his lifestyle for granted.
The hotel room last night had been more of a slumming-it experience for him than I’d realized at the time, I guessed.
Maybe so had I.
He might be spreading his legs for Cunningham in a plush, silk-sheeted, king-sized bed right at that moment.
The Scotch went down pretty quick. I poured another.
One drink became maybe-six-or-more, and at last I slumped all the way into the corner of the couch, some of the tension in my body draining away. It took a lot of alcohol to get an alpha relaxed, what with our incredibly fast metabolisms and high muscle mass, but it felt fucking incredible when I could afford enough booze to accomplish it.
