Page 2 of The Beast's Betrayed Mate
He glanced at his wrist again. At the distinctive row of puncture marks visible there.
There was no way the dream was actually a memory.
Was there?
His alarm blared again. A loud reminder that he had to leave for work in ten minutes. Also, he had set this second alarm in case he ever rolled over in bed and went back to sleep. Or in case the first one didn’t wake him. Or in case he was taking too long having his morning coffee. He enjoyed the multi-purpose of it, not that he had ever really needed it until today.
Well, he sure wasn’t sleepy anymore.
He was wide awake.
But he should get a move on.
He showered in a rush, changed his clothes and put a half-assed bandage around his still healing wrist. He should probably get something antibacterial to clean it with, but there was no time. He made a point of arriving earlier than most so that he was in his office when his team began to trickle in around 8 am. He knew they appreciated him leading by example.
It was a standing joke between him and his closest friend, Michael, that they were eternal opposite. Michael seemed to constantly fight the clock, no matter how he tried to make it work, by setting an obscene amount of alarms; Peter simply breezed into work, always with a handful of minutes to spare.
Michael…
Peter had a very distant feeling that what he’d been up to last night had had something to do with Michael but, checking his phone, he noted that there were no new messages from the bastard. It was as though the man had gone up in smoke, which was unlike him. A few days had gone by now with no word. Even though Peter was sure Michael could take care of himself—there was every possibility he’d skipped town with some hot piece of ass or other—Peter was starting to worry.
He entered the premises of MRM Pharmaceuticals, flashing his ID to the security guard even though there was no real need. They greeted each other by name, seeing each other every other day of the week depending on Steven’s schedule. Flashing the ID and checking the ID was a habit for both of them. It didn’t matter that they knew each other’s faces, not to the security department of MRM Pharma.
Peter entered beyond the security point, heading across the black granite floor toward the elevators. The lobby of the building was a gigantic bubble; glass surrounded him on three sides as well as forming the domed ceiling high above his head. To his left were stairs leading up to the first floor, the black granite railing continuing along the walkway lining the office spaces of the first-floor departments. The railing distinguished each floor like black bands stretching all the way to the top, which was the twenty-fifth, where all the big decisions were made.
Peter wasn’t going anywhere near it.
In fact, he was going down two floors into the basement levels that went down twenty-five floors.
He stopped by the elevator, nodding at a few early-bird colleagues. He’d be stepping into the laboratory spaces he’d gotten to know and love over the past three years with three minutes to spare and a full day of work ahead. It wasn’t great that he could feel a headache creeping on, or that his shirt was plastered to his back as though it was the middle of summer, and he was severely overheating.
He wished he’d brought a bottle of water with him. He was parched.
“Wow, you look like something that got dragged behind a car half the night,” Olive chirped behind him.
Peter didn’t want to turn around to see what sort of shit-eating grin she was wearing but did it anyway. He concluded that the grin wasseverelyshit-eating. He wasn’t going to take the bait. He didn’t feel in shape to verbally spar with her. Not today. So, he accepted the barb and ignored her.
“Okay,” Olive said. “Guess someone’s not having a good morning.”
“Could we just not?” he asked, stepping in through the elevator doors. “I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Noted,” she said meaningfully, looking him up and down.
She was wearing a blouse with bright flowers all over it and black slacks that managed to be stylish and yet casual. She was always so well-put-together. He lowkey hated it. He wished he could undo that braid she always sported, mess up her straw blonde hair, unbutton her blouse. Make her look as disheveled as she usually managed to make him feel. He had behaved like an ass towards her once,six years ago, but she had been behaving like an assevery dayfor the past four month and, at that moment, he felt even less than he ever had that it was warranted.
He wished she’d never transferred into his division.
Why couldn’t she have had the decency to stay the fuck away? He had already rebuffed her advances once and now she was behaving like a boy wanting to pull the little girl’s pigtails to make her admit she liked him too.
Unsure of how he had managed to turn himself into the girl in the scenario, he eagerly waited for the elevator doors to open and, once they did, he fled to his office. Shutting the door behind him, he hoped that would be that, but unfortunately that was only the beginning of what had already established itself as a crappy day.
Sighing, he leaned back against his door, sticking his hands in the pockets of his blazer and pausing as his right hand closed around something.
He brought it out to confirm that it was, indeed, a USB memory stick.
“What the fuck?” he murmured.
Then he remembered that he had used the memory stick to save something from a laptop.
