Page 7 of Running on Empty

That’s why the timer was ticking every time I went out with an alpha pack. I felt too much, too raw, too needy, too much of bloody everything, so I managed that by getting in and getting out, my ironclad control saving me a lot of embarrassment and heartache.

Well, mostly.

This time, as we strode up to the door, a woman in a severe black uniform looking us over, I felt like I was a part of something. It wasn’t real, but right now I could convince myself otherwise. That these were my alphas and they were taking their omega out for a night on the town, that they were clustered close because they didn’t want anyone else looking at me. Rock’s arm was wrapped around my waist, his thick fingers playing with the small band of bare skin revealed by my top. With the artificial lassitude simmering in my blood, I could well imagine his fingers shifting southwards.

“Name?” the woman said, looking down at her tablet with barely contained hauteur.

“Jack Spencer.”

I watched the woman’s eyes widen, the door bitch attitude dropped so suddenly it was as if it had never been there.

“Mr Spencer… Oh! Your father—”

Jack cut her off with an outstretched hand.

“You must be new here, so I’ll forgive you this once.”

“Thank you—”

She was going to babble something, but Jack brushed her off, stepping up to the front door and holding out his smartwatch. As he did, a sensor lit up and then the door slid open. Into what? I was about to find out.

The place sounded,looked, like hell. Raucous music pounded both far too loud and not loud enough. The whole place glowed dimly red with concealed lighting. As I looked around me it was the bodies, so many bodies that captured my eye.

I’d tried to Google what The Viper Room was. When sensible Stevie was at the wheel, she liked to know exactly where she was going, for how long, and what she was likely to do while there. But the internet had very little to say about the place apart from a string of photos of the beautiful people partying inside. I now knew why. As I looked, I figured it must be a high-end strip club, because naked bodies, both male and female, swirled around brass poles with a kind of languid grace I could feel in my bones, amplified by the pulsing of the music and the power of the weed. But then I realised it was more to it than that. Because some of the performers swung into each other’s orbit to touch and others…

“Oh.”

I looked up to find all four of the alphas watching me with the same lupine smile on their faces as they waited for me to react. I felt like I had somehow walked into a game of chicken and they were waiting to see who would pussy out first.

Well, it wouldn’t be me.

I shrugged Rock’s grip off, feeling him swipe for me as I stalked forward, my bones feeling like they were one part calcium, one part liquid as I went. People were clustered around the stage but they parted as I approached, allowing me to get up close and personal.

And what did I see?

This was a sex club, obviously, a sophisticated one at that, but this? I watched two men swirl, each one around his own pole. As they bent down to close the space between them, each leaned into the other, fingertips trailing over skin as they moved to the music. Then they stopped. Every muscle was on display as they held themselves aloft with only their thighs, the whole of their upper bodies bridging the space between them as they kissed. Softly at first, the movements just as stylised as their dance moves, until something cracked.

Somehow I caught the rapid intake of breath when each one of them stopped performing and just surrendered. Their hands grasped for each other, not in any pretty way but with a hunger I recognised well. This was need, real need, I could see it in the way they kissed, the way they touched, the way they smelled…

Omegas?

I pulled back at that, and it felt like the eyes of the patrons ringing the stage were on me now, not the performers. But when I went to stumble away, I found that the alphas I’d come with had caught up with me.

“Welcome to the Viper Room, little omega,” Jack said, helping me find my footing, like a gentleman of old. He even tucked my arm in his, escorting me deeper into the club. People danced, fucked, or did some strange combination of them both, an encyclopaedia of kinks on display around me. “All the world’s pleasures can be found here. I look forward to discovering the ones you respond to.”

For some reason this conjured an image inside of my head of the five of us walking through a supermarket, selecting what we wanted off the shelves, and that idea had me giggling. Rather than trawl the aisles, Jack took me upstairs towards a velvet rope, an attendant nodding and then unclipping it for him and his brothers as he walked me over to a capacious booth. He flopped down on the seat, bringing me with him. When I fell into his side, his arm went around my waist, his other hand tracing small figure eights along the skin at my throat. A waitress scurried over the minute he lifted a finger.

“A bottle of Patron and five glasses,” he told her and she nodded, taking off to do his bidding.

And that was the appeal of this sort of thing.

I didn’t go out of my way to hook up with cashed-up alphas, but I didn’t hate it when they were. To be on the other side of the bar for once, to have someone else do the serving instead of me, was a heady thing. As was he. I tilted my head to take Jack in and his head dropped down to run his nose along my neck, sucking me into his lungs.

“Your fucking scent,” he growled.

His wolf seemed close to the surface, and that was confirmed by the sharp nip of his teeth on my skin, a feeling too close to something far more intimate. At some point in my life, I was supposed to beg for the bites of a pack of alphas, to be dying for them to mark me. I was supposed to turn to omega goo in the presence of my fated mates, willing to tie myself to them forever.

And Ihadwanted that, once.

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