Page 22 of The Alpha's Gamble
I dragged myself off the bed and lurched down the hall to my own room, trying to ignore the sensation of his come slicking my thighs long enough to make it into the shower.
I stayed there for a long, long time.
And if some of those tears finally made their way out, the shower washed them away before I had to acknowledge them.
Chapter 7
Uncanny Valley Territory
Sleeping off the spanking and the fucking and the knotting and the hideously disconcerting personal revelations took me a full twelve hours.
Unfortunately for me, those twelve hours started after my shower, which meant they ended when I popped awake, panting and with my heart racing from a dream I couldn’t remember, and fumbled for the clock on the nightstand—which told me it was 3:27 AM. I flopped back on the pillows and blew out a long breath, flexing my fingers to get my incipient claws under control. Whatever dream I’d had, it’d almost pushed me to shift. I hadn’t shifted fully in a long time. That might have been part of the problem. Maybe I needed to run.
Like that was going to happen, in the middle of a city and stuck here at MacKenna’s beck and call.
But on the other hand…I eyed the clock again. Now it read 3:28 AM. Time sure did fly when you were having fun.
Fuck. It wasn’t like I was a prisoner, right? And Las Vegas was a 24/7 kind of place. A lot of the nightlife would just be getting into its full swing at this hour.
Not that I had the money to enjoy it. I didn’t even have the money for penny slots.
But that didn’t mean I had to stay in this suite forever, and right now I couldn’t stand being there. I’d been worried about leaving yesterday, but now MacKenna had to be confident that I wasn’t going to run. I mean, I’d already let him knot me. Why try to get away now, when I no longer had anything to lose? And I didn’t have to go far. I could get some fucking fresh air—or something that would pass for fresh compared to the endlessly processed air in this building. The Strip didn’t exactly smell great, especially to a shifter, but at least it’d be outdoors.
I forced myself to turn on the light, get washed up, take a piss, and get dressed without any particular caution. Not like I was slamming things around or anything, but dammit, I didn’t need MacKenna’s permission to go for a walk. Besides, he might never know I’d been gone. I’d come back before he woke up in the morning. Just a couple of hours of wandering to clear my head. Besides, I couldn’t even bring myself to care what he thought. The desire to get out had built to an unbearable itch under my skin.
The silent suite lay dim and shadowy as I emerged from my room. Not a sign of MacKenna anywhere—but of course, there wouldn’t be. He seemed to treat this place more like a hotel room than any of his guests did, and nothing like a home. Did he even have one? Or did he just hiss at people from under a bridge when he wasn’t here?
I hadn’t even had the time yet to think about what MacKenna had told me—or let slip out in the heat of his anger, more like—right before he’d put me on my knees. His grandparents had built this place. And then his parents had…what exactly? Screwed up. Gone bankrupt. And honestly, maybe the details of their failure didn’t even matter, because the results were the same: he’d somehow ended up working here as a lowly peon, getting fired, and then turning around and buying the place. Which meant he’d come up with hundreds of millions of dollars in the meantime. It made me wildly curious about those missing years of his, and also about his attitude toward the Morrigan in general. I’d have thought he’d feel more at home here, if it had been the family business.
On the other hand, I wasn’t really equipped to understand his feelings, period. How at home had I ever felt at Castelli Industries? If the business had gone belly-up or been bought out in a hostile takeover, would I have devoted my whole life to getting it back?
Not a chance.
My stomach growled threateningly at me, pushing my musings about MacKenna out of my mind. After twelve hours, my alpha metabolism was ready to eat my own internal organs. Without much hope, I stopped by the kitchen—only to find my abandoned chocolate cake and apple tart in the mini fridge. I stared down at them for a second.
MacKenna had put them away in the fridge, not thrown them out or eaten them himself. He hadn’t even done something petty, the way I might have, like taking one bite out of each.
Something clenched in my chest. No, not following whatever line of thinking might lead from there.
So I ignored it, devoured the desserts, and headed out.
The door opened with the annoying clunk of the lock that all hotel room doors seemed to do, and it shut behind me with a heavy snick.
That was the moment, of course, that I remembered I had no key card, no phone, and no wallet.
Well, fuck me sideways.
Screw it. I was out of the suite. The tastefully pale blue and gray hotel hallway stretched out before me, a corridor to freedom—at least temporarily.
I didn’t sprint down it to the elevator, but it was a close thing. My palms got all damp and clammy and my heart rate picked up. Like I was being chased. But the elevator came quickly after I’d punched the call button five or six times, and its ding had me grinning like a fool.
When the doors opened on the main lobby, the hubbub of voices and the more strident and insistent dinging of slot machines hit me like a wall. Lights. Noise. Air movement. People! People who weren’t MacKenna!
I made it through the hotel lobby, busy even at this time of night, by dodging drunken, staggering guests and hotel staff rolling luggage carts and carrying trays of drinks, or hustling off to whichever of their demanding patrons had summoned them.
Yesterday, one of those demanding patrons would’ve been me.
Today I was practically invisible. One of the employees shot me a perfunctory smile and nod as I stepped aside to let her pass, since she was carrying a box that looked too heavy for her. I could’ve lifted it with a couple of fingers, alpha strength and all. But she rushed by, and the weird impulse to offer to help didn’t seem like it would’ve been appreciated, anyway.
