Page 45 of Depraved
That won’t do. I reach behind me and grab onto his arm, pushing his finger into me. The tight stretch, the burn, that’s what I need. I fall over the edge, convulsing against him and screaming his name.
My alpha chuckles, letting me ride out my pleasure before he lays me down sideways on the back seat and takes his own.
12
ELENA
We’ve been down southfor four days, and I’ve learned that southern hospitality quickly turns to southern hostility when shifters realize that we’re from the Lobos.
Oh, they’ll talk a good game, and they wouldn’t dare do a thing to Black, knowing he’ll strip the skin from their belly and leave them to bleed out holding their guts in their hands. But me? As soon as some of them smell the omega on me, they get these cruel little grins. Not all, but enough of them to make me dislike being here.
I told Black about the first shifter to lash out at me, a chef at a diner with an open kitchen window. The guy poured what had to be an entire cup of salt into my pancakes. He was staring out of the kitchen, watching as I took that first bite.
But after Black stomped over and smashed the guy’s face into a hot griddle, I lost my appetite for vengeance. I’ve been letting the smaller offenses slide. The little comments. The disdainful looks. I’ve been trying to be the magnanimous omega instead of a petty bitch.
I don’t know how much longer I can last.
Case in point, my mojito tastes like shit. I’m not sure what the bartender put in it, but it’s way too sweet. I simply stir the mint leaves around the bottom of the glass and stare off through some bouncing colored lights at the country line dancers, trying to spot the waitress we’re here looking for. Kendra dated Thomas Stone three years ago. Only for a couple of months if Black’s sources are correct. But she’s a wild party girl, and that’s why Black wants to question her. He thinks she’ll know some of Thomas’s kinks, maybe even some of his personal party locations—places he’d be comfortable holing up in.
We’ve been here for an hour already, and I haven’t seen her blonde-haired, blue-eyed face appear yet. She was supposed to be working tonight. Unless, of course, the neighbor we questioned at her apartment building was lying.
Black says he didn’t smell a lie on that shifter, but I don’t know how to sniff out a lie yet, so I’m skeptical. I also wonder sometimes, if Black’s nose is fully functional around me. My omega scent has him always operating on a high-intensity intimidation mode as he tries to stake his claim with any and every alpha we walk past.
It’s led to lots of hot sex, but I don’t think it’s helping with our investigation into Thomas. I regularly tell him that I think we should be looking closer to home, that Thomas would stick around after the bomb. Black disagrees. Mason’s parents had a different scent on them, tropical coconut or something. One of Thomas Stone’s henchmen did that dirty deed for him.
I don’t like that. It means that there are other freaks out there still supporting this crazy fucker. I don’t understand how they can support a guy this terrible. But Black doesn’t seem surprised, not at all. He’s been living in this shifter underworld a lot longer than I have.
“I’ve known plenty of shifters like little Thomas before. He’ll have come right back to hide where he’s comfortable,” Black had told me yesterday, utter certainty in his tone. “He knows I’m coming hunting.”
I’d argued that meant that Stone Jr. would set traps. But Black hadn’t cared. He’d given a stupidly arrogant shrug, a dark smile crossing his face as he said, “That’s half the fun.”
I do not find our little hunt fun. Not at all.
Yesterday, Thomas’s mother had all but thrown us out of her mansion when we went knocking.
The epitome of a debutante, she was everything I loathed. Girlish, perfectly curled, wearing a dress. She also had that bitter nature of a woman who’d once been beautiful and invested far too much of her self-worth into her looks, which were now abandoning her. Even plastic couldn’t completely erase the signs of age.
She’d been having what appeared to be a primarily liquid brunch with a few close shifter friends. Black had tipped an invisible hat to her and said, “Madam. Just came by to …” his voice had shifted from polite to alpha command, “tell you that if Thomas contacts you in any way, shape or form, you will let me know.”
She’d scathingly replied, “You clearly know nothing about my son. I’m the last person he’s gonna talk to considerin’ I wanted him institutionalized at eighteen.” Her angry declaration was followed by her gulping down the remainder of her mimosa.
“Explain,” Black had demanded.
I try to block out the rest of the conversation from my memory as I watch the line dancers kick and turn, but I fail. What happened next is too gruesome and vivid in my memory, and it rises up inside my head, her voice narrating as my imagination runs wild.
“Thomas went backpackin’ across Europe after high school. Only, he didn’t sleep in any hostel. He’d hang around the fancy hotels at night to findsnacks.”
She’d taken us upstairs, following after her in her heels and maxi dress as she’d showed us to his old bedroom at the house, which was pristine. Nothing about the perfectly made navy bedspread or the bare shelves gave a clue that anything was amiss about the man who’d grown up here. The life detritus—old photographs of him smiling with his arm slung around his friends stuck in the edges of his dresser mirror—made him look deceptively normal.
All until his mother brought a box out of his old closet. It was a trophy box with wooden edges, glass sides, a glass lid, even a little display light that Black clicked on.
Inside were fifty fingers, each wearing a different ring, all pointing upright. Every finger had been screwed in place on top of a red velvet cushion. Five perfect little rows of rotting flesh and exposed bone contrasted with polished gold and silver bands sprinkled with sparkling diamonds.
His mother’s lip had curled when I looked over at her, unable to keep my eyes on them. “That’s when I knew for certain the boy was more wolf than human. And yet his father had insisted, ‘Alphas will be alphas,’ just like ‘boys will be boys.’”
Black kept the trophy case. It’s in our hotel room underneath the bed, and I can’t walk by it without shivering.
So, we’re working with avery healthyfamily dynamic and an even better pack one. The southern annex, as Black insists on calling it, has been about as easy to navigate as a swamp full of alligators. Some parts look nice, but you never know whose eyes are peering out of the water, staring at your back, and measuring you up so they can make you their next meal. Maybe even literally.
