Page 1 of Claimed By Two Alphas

Chapter One

Shane

I know you’re cheating on me. I found the proof. How could you do this to me? I’ve given you five years of my life and you’re with that whore every time you claim you have a business trip.

I gritted my teeth as I stood there, trying to make the voices go away. They were like tiny little needles inside my head.

“Are you just going to keep standing there?” the guy in the booth asked. His wife sat quietly across from him.

What is this guy, a moron?

That was what the husband thought of me. I had to pull myself together, so I plastered on a smile. “What can I get you guys to drink?”

I wrote down their order then hurried away. This had been happening to me my entire life. Since I was a little boy I could hear others’ thoughts. At first those voices were whispered, like faraway chatter in my head. As I’d gotten older, they’d become clearer, stronger, and I’d developed coping mechanisms to deal with them.

I could still hear the voices, but I’d learned how to dull the pain of those needles. Learned how to stop the nose bleeds. I just wished I’d learned how to stop the voices. It amazed me how nice some people could be and how their wicked thoughts contradicted their outside manner.

There were very few whose voices hadn’t broadcasted to me. Like Nezat, the demon who’d kidnapped me four weeks ago. I hadn’t been able to hear his thoughts, and a part of me was thankful. I wasn’t sure I could have dealt with thoughts from a demon. Casey and Dillon had been in the room with me, and I thought I would be able to hear what they were thinking, but that nasty reverend had been outside the door. All I could hear was his voice in my head, his twisted thoughts about what he wanted to do to Dillon.

Then Delvin had come into the room and rescued me, and all thoughts had quieted. But I’d still been too shaken to focus. I’d just wanted to get out of there. Delvin had placed me in the backseat, and I’d curled up, covering my face and wishing I’d never gotten out of bed that morning.

“Hey, you okay?” Misty asked. She was one of the servers at Bailey’s Bar and Grille where I worked. She had kind eyes. Pretty eyes. She was a bit shorter than me, slim with wide hips and ample breasts. If I were into girls, she would have been my type, and I might have asked her out.

Only, I could hear her thoughts, so that wouldn’t have worked. There was nothing like dating someone when you could hear what they were thinking. Some might think that would be a godsend. In reality, it was a curse. There was a reason that thoughts were private. You weren’t meant to hear everything.

He seems so stressed. He needs to take a day off once in a while.

I smiled at Misty. She was one of the few who always worried about others and rarely had a mean thought about anyone. Still, I didn’t want to hear about how stressed she was over raising a child, her lame boyfriend, or how she was going to pay her bills.

“Yeah, I’m fine.” I smiled at her. “Just another one of those headaches.”

And that was what people thought. That I suffered from painful headaches. I had to let them think that, because no one could know about my curse. My parents and sister knew but pretended they didn’t. Or, at least, they knew I used to have a curse. When I’d hit puberty, I’d declared that the voices had vanished. The relief in my family’s eyes told me I could never tell them that the voices remained, could never tell them how wicked most people in Hungry were. They loved this small town. If only they knew the truth.

I could hear the woman on my right sitting at the bar. She was contemplating sleeping with her boss. The guy next to her was trying to come up with ways to get back at his neighbor for mowing his grass at a godawful hour.

“Shane.”

The voices disappeared as soon as Delvin rested a hand on my upper arm. I took a deep breath, wishing I could keep his hand on me forever. I was also thankful his mind was blissfully quiet. I couldn’t hear anything coming from him, not unless he spoke the words out loud.

It was the same with his brother. I couldn’t hear anything when Joshua touched me. For those brief moments, I felt normal, as if I wasn’t cursed to suffer through everyone’s problems.

“Yes?”

“After you finish with your table, go on break.”

“Okay, sure.” A break was exactly what I needed. As long as no one was outside, I could have a moment’s reprieve.

Let me set one thing straight. It wasn’t like I could hear all the voices in the place at the same time. The person had to be close, and I could usually manage to keep my distance, but working in a popular restaurant/bar, I might as well have suffered painful headaches, because my head always killed me at the end of my shift.

Delvin’s hand slid down my arm and stopped at my elbow, lingering there. That was another thing. Ever since I’d started working here, I’d noticed how my bosses looked at me, how they were always touching me. Not in inappropriate ways but innocent touches, like Delvin was doing now. Still, the touches had a way of making my body spark to life.

I had the hots for Delvin and Joshua Bailey. Who in their right mind wouldn’t? Delvin was all dark looks with the prettiest dark blue eyes I’d ever seen. He exuded masculinity, like he would rip someone to shreds if they crossed him. Not that I was into that type of guy, but he’d always been nice to me, kind, giving me as many breaks as I’d needed when my “headaches” became too much.

Like now. I knew he could see how stressed I was as I stood there holding my order pad.

“Everything okay?” Joshua came up on my left, touching my shoulder. The voices were still at bay, and my head was an empty space right now. Wonderfully quiet.

“I just told him to take a break after he finished with his last table,” Delvin said.

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