Page 43 of Lucky or Knot
That mood lasted until I’d tossed my towel and padded into my bedroom. The phone I’d left at the foot of the bed had lit up like a Christmas tree.
I grabbed it immediately, heart lurching—it could be Raven.
It wasn’t. I had two messages from Sean and one from Louie.
I opened Sean’s first.
Hey.So I just got to work and heard about it. Boss had a fit last night, threw a chair through a penthouse window and barely missed a tourist down on the ground. He’s moving out of the hotel and into his house in the hills
The second read:I’m out of anything for my break so hit me up
That muffled roar had to be my own blood pounding in my ears, and the faint creak…shit, I’d nearly broken my phone. I loosened my grip with an effort, forced my claws to retract, blinked against the gold haze of the alpha glow. The few droplets of water left on my skin felt chilled, congealed, like chunks of ice.
Cunningham knew. That had to be it.
Raven had been gone too long, or he hadn’t managed to magic away all the traces of my scent or his tears or his orgasm. Cunningham had gotten a clue. And somehow, last night, he’d become certain.
What had he done to him? In that plush, luxurious penthouse, full of chairs heavy enough to go through windows that were probably unbreakable without an alpha’s strength.
An alpha’s strength, up against a small fairy who couldn’t use his magic to defend himself.
I’d done that to him, as surely as if it’d been my alpha strength he couldn’t fight. Tracked him down, forced him to talk to me, touched him, kissed him, fucked him with my fingers, made him cry, put him in danger.
My fault. My responsibility.
The blood boiled in my veins, the pressure unbearable, and I roared with it, raged, black and crimson and gold flashes like lightning, and came back to myself at last, shaking and running with sweat, one clawed and orange-furred armembedded in the wall by the bathroom door. Bits of drywall peppered the floor like snow. The silence rang around me. My rasping breaths punctuated it.
Fuck. Fuck me. I dropped my forehead against what was left of my bedroom wall and forced it down, all of it, the fur retreating, the claws pulling in, tugging my arm from the wreckage, my vision starting to go back to normal.
The sound of my own hollow laugh made me jump.
Yeah. An exception, Raven had called me, and I’d lived on those two words ever since, treasuring them up. Some fucking exception. If I’d been in a penthouse, I’d have thrown a chair through a window just now myself. Violent, and uncontrolled, and selfish. Too focused on what I wanted and what I arrogantly thought I could do for Raven to understand how much of a risk he’d taken every time he saw me.
No, he was right to hate alphas. Including me. Especially me.
He might be hurt right now, bruised and broken, crying again—although I suspected he’d die before he cried in front of Cunningham, and it broke my heart all over again, leaving me breathless and twisted up inside, to know that he’d trusted me so much and then I’d let him down.
My fault.
And any time that I’d imagined I had to come up with a plan had run out. If Cunningham meant to move to his house, which I’d be willing to bet more resembled a fortified compound, it was because he wanted to lock Raven up somewhere he couldn’t come and go freely, the way he could at Audacity. What would he do to him there? What was he doing to himright now?
I swallowed down bile and swayed against a wave of dizziness.
Cunningham wouldn’t be alone, he wouldn’t be vulnerable, and yes, maybe I could fight my way through hissecurity with their magic and claws and guns and get to him and tear him to bloody shreds…but maybe not.
And if I got myself killed in the attempt, Raven would truly be alone.
Even a stupid, selfish, arrogant alpha had to be better than no one at all.
The urge to call Raven, to run out the door naked, to do any number of ill-considered things, rose up strong.
I resisted. From this moment on, I had to think everything through carefully, plan it like a game of chess.
Fuck, talk about playing to my own weaknesses. My favorite board game had always been Monopoly, and I usually lost.
So I got dressed, and I texted Sean, and I told the club scheduler that I wouldn’t be in later, and I glanced at Louie’s message, which told me to call him or he’d call my parents. Christ, hadn’t had one like that since high school. What the hell kind of regressed mess had I made of my life? Raven had been right not to take me seriously.
Of course, Raven had also been right that I couldn’t help him, that I’d put him in danger.
