Unleashing His Alpha (5 page)

He never listened. Before he could swing his fist at Shane, it was like the world flew into slow motion. His fist was coming fast and hard for Shane’s face and she could feel the terror rising up inside of her as she watched it rising, watching it coming hard and fast. It was going to shatter his glasses and probably break that perfect nose of his.

Why did she ever go out with Jake? Why couldn’t this end civilly? But, before Jake’s fist could reach Shane’s face, Shane’s right hand shot up and caught his wrist before the fist came within inches from colliding with his face and shoved it aside. There was a moment there that Jake was caught off guard and she could see the horror in his eyes, the terror of what had happened and he knew that something was going to happen.

And something did happen. Shane swung his head forward with all his strength and crashed it into Jake’s nose and broke whatever will or strength Jake had inside of him. Releasing Jake’s wrist, he let the man fall backwards on his ass and land on the ground. Katie could see that he’d pissed himself in the sudden impact of Shane’s forehead with his nose.

Shane’s glasses had fallen off and he quietly reached down and picked them up, scooping them off the floor and sliding them onto his face without a second thought.

“Stay down, Jake,” Shane told him. “You attempted to strike me and they have that on cameras. If you stay down, I won’t press charges against you. But if you get up, I’ll have you locked in jail.”

Katie watched as Shane took a couple of steps toward Jake, who was blinking, trying to recover his sight as he rolled around on the floor, bewildered and stunned by the aggressive repercussions of his drunken actions. Shane crouched by him and whispered something to Jake that made Katie curious and terrified at the same time.

She wasn’t sure that she would ever know what it was that Shane told him, but she liked to assume that it was in the defense of her, that he was trying to take care of her.

When he stood up, Shane walked over to her and didn’t have the most pleasant expression on his face, but he clearly wasn’t mad at her about what had happened.

Either way, she felt horrible about putting him through that and she knew she’d been in the wrong about ever trying to do this with him. She was in the middle of a messy break up and separation that was bound to blow up eventually and she had just dragged him through all of it. She felt like a monster right now and she shook her head, already feeling sobriety coming her way.

“I am so sorry about that,” she said, trying to find the words that would make all of this better, but she was certain there were no words that would make this better.  She had screwed up big time and now she was going to pay for it.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, leaning in and kissing her. “I’ll see you as soon as you want me to.”

CHAPTER THREE

  There were things about Shane that weren’t adding up to her and over the following days, she couldn’t get him off of her mind. Sure, it had started out with her just having this nagging feeling that there was more to him than she knew, but as time went on, she stopped fantasizing about him and began to really dig at her mind, trying to figure out what it was that made him so different to her.

Well, that wasn’t true at all.

In truth, she was fantasizing about him a lot.

There wasn’t a day that went by where she didn’t close her eyes and picture him, trying to call back the sensation of having him inside of her. She couldn’t get over him and she didn’t want to. She wanted to be stuck inside of him, obsessed by him forever. There was something willful inside of her begging her to just give in to him and let him be the one that she fantasized about for ever and ever.

But there were thoughts beyond that, as well. In fact, there were a lot of thoughts about Shane that she didn’t usually have about people that she was looking to date or even really interested in. The one thing that she did know was that there was nothing she truly cared about right now more than Shane. He was the kind of enigma and riddle that dug at her brain over and over again, demanding that she think about him and try to figure him out.

She wasn’t sure what it was she was trying to figure out, though. There was so much about him that was mysterious and part of that was the beauty of him and the mystery that she loved and wanted to have more of. As she lived her life the next several days, she wondered how much of his time was wasted thinking about her. She hoped that it was proportionate or equal. Heck, maybe it was even more than it currently was for her, but she wanted him to be thinking about her as much as she was thinking about him. She couldn’t handle it otherwise.

Eventually, she started to look up his blogs and would binge read them on her breaks at work and when she was home at night. She kept the lights off and the doors locked out of fear of Jake showing up and trying to profess his love to her again. She didn’t want to have to deal with it, so she spent most of her time under the covers with the blinds drawn and the curtains covering the windows.

She read about Shane's taste in food, clothing, tourist spots, and hotel chains until she felt like she couldn’t read straight. He’d been everywhere and she could actually draw a map of where he’d been, leading up to the point that she had met him. He was mysterious and enigmatic when she met him, but it only grew with each post that she read. It got worse and worse with each passing blog and eventually, she knew that there was something up with this.

There was no mention of a family, no mutterings about friends, and there definitely wasn’t a statement about what a date had when he was going to restaurants. These were things that were starting to make her scratch her head. Why would he be writing about all of these places and never mention that his girlfriend or his date got something and it was equally as good or equally as disappointing?

It was almost as if Shane didn’t have a life outside of his blog and moving around. She started to think that maybe Shane was on the run from something, which would have made a lot of sense. After all, he paid in cash at the bar, never told her any facts about himself that might let her trace where he he’d come from, and there was the matter of his strange sort of panic attack when he'd rushed to the bathroom. What had that been all about?

That was when Katie knew she was about to cross a line that was inevitably unavoidable. It was the stalking threshold. It was too much to avoid and she knew she was going to cross that line and start spying on him to find out what she needed to know. She didn’t like flying blind and not knowing about the man she was crushing on; it was something that backfired on Katie often. So, she was going to know about everything she could before she met him again and if anything fishy turned up, she was walking away from this right now.

Sure enough, something fishy popped up almost immediately, but not in the form that she was expecting. As far as she could tell, outside of his blogs, there wasn’t a trace of Shane Blackwood on the internet. He was an enigma and a ghost that was running around in the form of a man, laughing at the confusion and the absurdity of the chase she was setting up.

However, any accounts that came from him were probably the most useless things ever. Sure, someone had built profiles for him at places, but all the information was locked behind heavy security protection that rendered the whole social media idea obsolete, or there just wasn’t anything put on the websites.

What did come up was a woman named Rayne who on a rather random and tucked away website, easily thirty pages into her extensive Google mining expedition, appeared before Katie and she finally found something that was strange about it. It was a simple post and she knew that there was something strange about it, something that rang true to her even though while she was looking at it, she knew that there was something wrong.

It was a single post in a forum and it struck her as something completely off the wall, but it answered something to her. It read:

“I met a guy at a bar a couple blocks from my apartment. He was drunk and crying. He looked like shit. I remember getting pretty drunk, too, and finally started chatting with him. He was super nice, but after a bunch of drinks, he starts to tell me that he’s actually a werewolf, or that he was one, once upon a time. I thought it was weird and kind of played along with it. He said he was going to start a blog about something. God, I hope it’s about being a werewolf.”

Katie read it and immediately started searching for what the forum was actually about. She made a quick study of it, looking up and down at the posts until she gathered that it was a website built around the idea that there are actual werewolves out there in the world. Well, they weren’t werewolves, because that implied that they became wolves and that wasn’t the case.

What was the case was the fact that they could turn into multiple different creatures, depending upon who they were. They were called Shifters on this website and apparently it was an entire world that was hidden in plain view. Katie was immediately sucked in.

Not only was this the secret fascination that she had been more than eager to eat up and devour with regular intervals, but it was also validation to everything that she already knew. She knew in her heart of hearts that there was an unseen world where magic and the strange were actually part of the living world.

She liked to think that there was plenty more out there that she wasn’t privy to and this was the first validation of that which she had actually found. This was everything she was looking for. This was a lot like finding out that God was real. She blinked as she looked at the screen and tried to put it together.

She thought about the loner lifestyle that all of these posts talked about when they said that they’d met these Shifters in groups or alone. They talked about a charismatic charm they had in their isolation and their lonely, lost appearance that was so intriguing to them. They talked about how they would travel often and always had jobs where they were on the move, which was blown out of proportion by discussions of Shifters being territorial nomads or that they were at war with others. But regardless of the reason, they were always on the move. That was something they were uniformly in agreement about.

There were other things, though, that made her think that this was something more legitimate than a series of misguided people turning on loners who were in their areas. They talked about an intense sexual attraction they had toward them and that their skin radiated enormous amounts of heat, that there was something fiery within them.

She thought about Shane and how hot his skin had been and how quickly she had wanted to jump on top of him. Sure, maybe that was the alcohol taking over, but she didn’t think so. She thought that even if she didn’t have the alcohol in her system, she would have wanted him. But they also talked about when sexuality came into play, most Shifters couldn’t control their emotions and needed to gradually be brought into it or the animal side of their mind picked up and took over.

That struck home. She thought about how Shane had needed to be alone for a minute and had fled to the bathroom. He had practically run away from her when she had started getting physical with him, but when he came out of the bathroom, he was fine. No, fine wasn’t the right word. Fine was not what Shane had been when he had entered that booth like a fiery god of sex and had given her the fastest, fiercest fuck in her entire life. That was the quickie to end all other quickies.

She was never going to be able to move on from that amazing event that had unfolded behind that curtain. She wanted that kind of fast and passionate fuck every time she was with him and they were pressed for time. She wanted to be able to ravage his body that quickly and thoroughly any time she wanted. That had been animal. That had been the definition of fierce.

The more she read about it, the more Katie began to think that she was the one who was getting duped here and that she was going insane. There was no way the handsome, charming, and sexy man she had met at the lounge was a werewolf. That wasn’t possible. That wasn’t something that was real and she wanted to punch herself in the face for thinking about it.

For days, however, it haunted her and as she got ready for work, she shook her head and tried to snap out of it. If he was a werewolf, apparently he would be on the move soon to find his mate and she would be left in the dust like all those other sad, bitter women who had been abandoned by their men and left in the sanctuary of the internet. That was a fate far more terrifying to her than anything else that she could think of.

When she made it to work, she was glad to see that Faith was coming on with her and that April was going to be off soon, which meant she wouldn’t have to listen to her talk about how slutty or fat she looked in the new costumes that they were supposed to wear for the Christmas party.

Katie walked into the break room and saw that all of her clothes were placed in a box on the cubbyhole that was labeled for her. She looked at it and she already knew that she hated it. The black shiny pumps were enough to make her want to throw up.  She looked at the red tights, the white, fur trimmed red miniskirt, the white fur trimmed corset, and her own little Santa hat.

When she got to the bottom of the box, she found her white gloves that went all the way up to her elbows and she thought that she was going to die from the humiliation.  This was what they were going to wear when they waltzed around town acting like Mikey’s harem of sluts.

There was no doubt or question that Mikey was a pervert and that most of the girls would sleep with him for an advance. She knew that April had and Sarah had given him a blow job so that she could get an advance to pay off a dent that her car got in a crash. Most of the other waitresses and hostesses had done something that had involved compromising themselves for him to give them something in return. So, when he asked them all to dress up like his sluts and parade them around town, no one really questioned it.

One day, Katie knew that she was going to be done with this place and everything that it put her through and as she changed, she looked at herself in the mirror and knew that she looked damn good, but that it was the last thing she wanted to wear at work or go out on the town in, but she thought about Shane and she thought about wearing this for him. God, she wanted to see the look on his face when she showed up wearing this. She thought about his throbbing cock and she thought about the feeling of it inside of her and she knew that was what she wanted.

She knew this was everything she was going to want tonight. Who cared if he was a Shifter or that there was a rumor of him being a Shifter on the internet. She knew that she was being paranoid and that was the reward of being a stalker. All she needed now was to shoot herself in the foot with a good thing when she needed to just embrace it and ride it to the end.

“I look like a Playboy Mrs. Claus,” Katie said to Faith who was adjusting her corset and trying to stuff it so that her breasts looked bigger. Katie was so thankful that she didn’t have this problem and that she would probably have the exact opposite problem by the end of the night. Keeping it all in was going to be tough with this.

“Santa’s little whores,” Faith agreed.

The shift seemed to take forever and there was a larger number of perverts and jerks in the restaurant than she was used to. They were all coming out for Mikey who was actually around today and who was always flanked by one slutty Mrs. Claus or another who was smiling and laughing at whatever stupid or inappropriate joke he was telling. He was the kind of slob that had once been hot shit and had been the top douche, but his life was starting to get its revenge upon him, slowly trying to kill him.