Page 18 of Ryder

Done, I turned the shower off and stepped out of the stall.I picked up a big fluffy towel and dried myself off.

It was late, the gray dawn peeking over the horizon.I should get changed and check that everything was fine downstairs, but I was so fucking tired.Fuck!

I didn’t think about the past much.I’d put it behind me where it belonged, for the most part.

“Is that even your name?”she had asked.

I didn’t like to think of my other name.It was a pretentious name for a pretentious prick, and that was what I’d been.

I padded back into the bedroom and over to the big bed, my cum splattered all over it.I went to the closets and got some clean sheets, then I stripped the bed and re-made it.

I could smell her on the fucking sheets, so I dumped them straight into the basket.This wasn’t normal, but then again, neither was I.As I lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling with my hands behind my head, I wondered what life I might have had…

If it hadn’t happened.If I’d been a beta.If the pond of my life hadn’t been rippled by the arrival of a massive fucking brick.

There would’ve been fast cars, plentiful women, and a career waiting for me at my dad’s real estate business, buying land and properties and redeveloping them.My father was a ruthless bastard.I didn’t claim to have ever loved him, but he knew how to cut a deal.Power was a commodity to my father, and my mother was right there beside him.I wondered if they were still married.They were bound to be.Families like that didn’t have messy things like divorce.They picked themselves up from whatever life threw at them.

The family always stood together.I missed it at first when they tossed me here, rolling from one bad situation to another.I didn’t know how many times I got a beating and was left bleeding in the gutter.The survival instinct was strong in an alpha.Well, so I learned.

I always picked myself up.That was when Jace found me, lying in a bloody heap in the alleyway, half unconscious.I remembered him testing for a pulse and jerking back when I blinked.

“Fuck!I thought you were dead,” he said.“What the fuck happened to you?”

I tried to open my mouth.The words wouldn’t come out.

“Don’t try to talk,” he said.“I’d ask how long you have been on the streets, but I already know long enough.”

He pulled a cell out of his pocket and punched some buttons.

“Dane, I’m going to send you my location.Get your ass over here.”He looked back at me.“Yeah, some poor newbie bastard.Someone’s kicked the shit out of him.”

He turned off the phone.I started shivering.They racked all the way through my body.My eye socket was busted, my ribs broken, and I had layers of bruises after days on the streets.Days?It had been weeks, maybe as much as months.I didn’t know how much longer it was when a car pulled up, since the shivers had racked me and I was jerking uncontrollably on the ground.

I thought it was that moment of kindness.I’d never experienced that.My parents didn’t have empathy, not for their own fucking kids, and not for the people they ripped off.I didn’t think I’d had a genuine experience of empathy in my entire fucking life until that moment.

And then he’d swooped in, a rough around the edges alpha from the wrong side of town.He showed me more compassion in that weak, low moment of my life than my battered soul could deal with.I passed out.When I woke up, I was in a basic room, lying in a bed big enough to fit all of me.The rest of it was scruffy and worn, with grubby curtains pulled across the window.Another guy was there, not as big a bastard as Jace, but something about him seemed a little unhinged.Dane, I presumed.

“Well, he’s not gonna fucking die then,” Dane had said.

“Don’t be a prick,” Jace said.“Get him some water.”

“What the fuck am I?A babysitter?”Although he grumbled, he snagged a bottle from a nearby table.

I tried to sit up, but Jace put a hand on my shoulder.He was a few years older than me.He just held me there.

“Steady,” he said, taking the bottle from Dane and passing it to me.“You’re safe here.I know you’ve been on the streets, running, hiding, doing whatever you need to survive.But you don’t need to do that anymore.Not on my fucking watch.”

Jace was a man of his word, and that was how they became my friends.I didn’t understand these new feelings ripping through me.I wanted to go find her, as ridiculous as that was.We did go on the other side of the tracks every now and again, when it was necessary, but we did it carefully.It wasn’t like we could just walk up to a fucking apartment block, or a house or wherever the fuck somebody lived, and knock on the door.

She’d come from money.I saw the clothes she and her sister had—classy, expensive.I could get away with being an alpha in the rougher parts of town, where the police didn’t patrol as frequently, where there were fewer cameras and those cameras that were busted and broken down, but I couldn’t get away with it in the rest of the beta zone.Not in the fancy places—places I’d once belonged to.The place where Emma was now.

I wondered what she was thinking.Was she upset?Did she think I was a bastard for sending her on her way?Was she thinking about me in a good way, about how I’d made her come?Or was she already ticking me off as an item on her bucket list and getting ready for tomorrow, when a sensible beta man would claim her affections?I growled and rolled over, shoving my face into the pillow, willing myself to forget how she’d come for me, the feel of her ass under my palm.I couldn’t believe she’d asked me about fucking safe words.

“What if I want to say no but I don’t want you to stop?”

My cock began to thud against the bed.

“Baby, I’ve got so much I want to do to you.I’ve not scratched the surface.”

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