Page 27 of Frank's Felon
She nodded. Her alpha sullied her name every time he asserted his power over her. She didn’t want Frank to see her as William had, as a piece of ass to fuck or bring in money. She liked when Frank called her by her given name, like her mom had. Hearing her name from Frank made Delilah feel whole again.
Frank gave a curt nod. She had made him uncomfortable. Too much truth, perhaps.
“Explain what happened with your alpha, please.”
Please?Had she ever heard Frank say please before? Huh.
“Costs money to live in the human world. More than we had when we moved from the woods in North Carolina to the suburbs in Florida. Everyone not in school worked. Except our alpha, William. He managed the pack. Any adults who couldn’t find a job on their own had to make one.”
“You said you were fifteen. You should have been in school.”
“My dad couldn’t find a job. He sort of checked out from life when my mom died. Blood-bond.”
“Was his dissent gradual or sudden, back when your mom was murdered in North Carolina?”
“Tess told you about that?” she asked, surprised, but not entirely.
“Your sister’s open, easy to talk to.”
Unlike me.
“Dad couldn’t work. He didn’t do much of anything. William said I had to contribute in his place. He laid out my choices. Even offered to break me in so I wouldn’t be so skittish with clientele.”
Frank’s fists clenched, but he quickly shoved them behind him. “Go on.”
“I made William a deal. No one from the pack would touch me. I’d find my own johns. But first, he had to pay for me to take self-defense classes.”
Frank still wasn’t saying anything, but the muscles along his shoulders rippled, as if he were ready to shift. “I had to convince him that if I got beat up or worse, it would interfere with my ability to make money. He agreed. Gave me a year’s reprieve to learn to fight. He also figured while I went to martial arts classes, he’d personally train me on what men liked. I stayed away from home and the pack a lot that year. Tess thought I was hanging with gangs, being rebellious. I avoiding William and his son.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“And go where? The police would have returned me. I couldn’t tell them we were shifters, and there was no porno or anything else illegal in William’s house to rat him out.”
“You were in his house?”
The horror on his face made her heart skip a beat. Frank was enraged by William’s behavior. Which was more than her father had been. Her dad’s pearl of wisdom was that if she didn’t agree with their alpha, she should leave, become a lone wolf.
“I didn’t sleep with him.” The relief on Frank’s face heartened her. “I stole drugs from a guy in the neighborhood and planted them in William’s house with the intent of calling it in and getting him busted, but Barry, his son, found the stash, removed it. Long story short, Barry figured out what I had done. He had leverage over me at that point. Barry was only three years older than me, but he was as sleazy as his dad.”
“What’s the worst that he could have done? Told his father and had you exiled? Sounds better than prostitution.”
“Exile would have been bad. Really bad, but not only for me. For Tess, because then there would have been no one to watch over her. She was only twelve. Running wasn’t a choice. I didn’t know how to be a lone wolf, let alone take care of a twelve-year-old girl on the run. And if you think her age would have stopped him from going after her next, then you’re dead wrong. It didn’t.”
“Tess never said––”
“She doesn’t know any of this, Frank, and you can never tell her. I stuck around, did what William said, sort of, and watched over her, even when I was legally old enough to leave. And why do you assume the worst of me about everything? Because I sucked your cock in that office? Because I did what I had to do to get information about my sister after a year of thinking she was dead? I have news for you, Mr. Connelly, I never prostituted myself, except that one time with the WSSO guy and it was just a blow job, like what I gave you.”
Frank winced at that. And turned green. And looked down at the floor. She had to get this out because any minute she was going to shut down, probably cry, and she couldn’t cry in front of Frank. She couldn’t.
“I lied to William, so he’d pay for those lessons. Then I learned how to steal. I became a common criminal, taking risky jobs to give William the money he demanded and to keep his paws off me and my sister. It was the best I knew how to do. For as despicable a pack as we had, I wanted Tess to finish school, to be happy, and most of all not to know what a slime ball alpha we had. There you have it. The life and times of Delilah Matthews, common thief and whore. Are you happy now?”
Delilah didn’t wait for an answer. She shifted and ran. There’d be no more questions, no more explanations. She was done. Tomorrow, after she said goodbye to Tess, she’d leave and never look back. Not even for the one shifter beside her sister she had started to care about, the one shifter who had started to make her feel like herself again.
Her wolf ducked beneath low hanging branches, finding the most direct path, instead of skirting trees. She must have felt Delilah’s need to escape Frank.
Delilah hadn’t made it more than a mile when Frank’s wolf cut her off. The tan wolf deftly brought her to a halt, without body-slamming her, or biting at her legs, revealing his skill and finesse as a guard.
Delilah shifted to human form. “What the fuck’s wrong now, Guard?”
