Page 122 of Alpha Heat
The clock above the mantel gave an hour suitable for bed, but he was restless. He grabbed his coat and headed out to the ocean instead, finding the nighttime stroll along the beach less enjoyable without Xan there to sneak kisses and hold close as the cold water lapped at their feet.
The moon shone bright and uncaring. The winter in Virona was milder than the city, but chilly all the same. Urho wrapped his coat around tighter and stared up at the moon, the eye of wolf, and considered the wisdom of having let Xan go into the city with the contagion raging so strongly. He missed him viscerally, like a fist in his gut where ease should be.
He hadn’t heard from Xan since he’d given the instructions for the medication, and he didn’t know if that was good news or bad. He wasn’t even sure how to get in touch with him, or if he’d be staying with his parents or in his own home. Their conversation had been short and to the point.
Urho strode down the beach, feeling hemmed in by the ocean in front of him and the house at his back. He resented feeling so hamstringed by his commitments. He wanted to follow the man who was, inch by steady inch, making an impossibly deep claim on his heart.
By the time he’d walked back up to the house, he’d resolved to call Xan’s place if he hadn’t heard from him by midnight and his parents’ house if he hadn’t heard from him by morning.
Just to be sure he was safe.
Because something in Urho’s bones didn’t feel right.
He didn’t know how or why, but he was certain that Xan needed him. And that made him nervous. He’d come to know Xan better over the last few weeks, but there were still many things about the man that were a mystery.
Like what might prompt him to hurt himself with a visit to his monster.
And that thought alone made Urho sick to his stomach with worry and pain. Instead of heading up to bed, he went to Xan’s office in the back of the library and sat by the phone, listlessly turning the pages of a book in in his hand, waiting for a reason to believe his worry was unfounded.
Xan kept hiseye out for a taxi, but the roads of the Calitan District were virtually empty. His hands stuffed into the pockets of his coat, he shivered in the darkness. It was a long walk home, but he didn’t mind. It gave him time to think about all that had happened since he’d arrived from Virona.
Prostitutes lingered up and down the street outside the Lincoln Deli. He thought about branching off, but the other roads looked dim and seedy, and altogether vacant of human life. It seemed safer to stroll with the “’tutes”, as Vince had called them, than to walk entirely alone.
Ray’s lover hadn’t been like any omega Xan had ever met. Big and beefy with a thick beard, he’d looked far more like a beta. He’d wept with joy when Xan had told him Ray lived, and had shared a bottle of brandy with Xan, refusing to take any money from him.
Xan’s head swam now with too much alcohol as he walked. He had so many questions about his brother’s relationship with Vince, but he supposed it was Ray’s mess to figure out. Still, perhaps he’d let Xan help once he recovered from the flu. Because he would recover—there was no question.
Xan was near the shipping district now, and the prostitutes who’d been his companions thus far were thinning out. He glanced at the road that led toward more roads that eventually wound home. It was dark and eerily silent. He pulled up his coat collar and contemplated asking one of the streetwalkers where he could find a place to sleep for the night. Alone.
A new, top-of-the-line Sabel car pulled up alongside him, its engine purring in the quiet. He frowned, tightening his coat around him as the driver rolled the window down.
“Selling yourself now? That’s a new low.”
Xan stopped in his tracks, turning to stare at the handsome, sneering face framed by the darkness of the car’s interior. The man inside wore an expensive but wrinkled suit, and an air of desperate cruelty. “Buying prostitutes now, Monhundy? What would your omega think of that?”
“My omega can rot is what I think,” Monhundy barked, eyes catching fire with that old hate that Xan knew so well.
“Trouble in paradise?”
Monhundy laughed. “You’d know about that, wouldn’t you? Unmanned alpha with his frigid omega.”
Xan gritted his teeth.
“Get in,” Monhundy said. “You’re a long way from home.”
Xan swallowed hard and fisted his hands in his pockets. “Why should I?”
“Because I told you to, and you’re a good boy who does what I say, aren’t you?”
“Not anymore.”
“Get in the car, Xan,” Monhundy said, rolling his eyes and gunning the engine. “Hurry up. I don’t have all night.”
At that moment, it began to rain. Xan stared up at the clouds in the sky, the wet, cold water pelting his face, and he laughed. Maybe it was Vince’s brandy rushing in his blood, but the humor gripped him hard, rocking him with how incredibly terrible—howperfectit was—that in this dark place, on this fucked up night, after everything he’d said to his father, and what he’d learned about Ray’s sad love affair, that Wilbet Mon-fucking-hundy would pull up next to him on a dark, abandoned street and demand he get in his car.
“I won’t tell you again,” Monhundy spit out.
In the rain, Xan’s curls plastered against the side of his head. His chest ached. His feet hurt. He was still drunk enough that as he walked around the front of the car, opened the passenger side door, and climbed in that his tongue felt a little numb.
