Page 8 of Lone Wolf
His own emotions were a bit more difficult. Since Oscar had put the idea into his mind, he hadn’t been able to get the thought of Nevada Ashes out of it. And the more he considered it, the less the shame troubled him, and the stronger the absolute need grew to just touch another shifter, to smell their scent and listen to their voices. Even if he could never admit what he was. Would it be enough to soothe that empty space inside him or would it only make the longing worse?
At this point, did it even matter?
Damian took the bottle with him to the kitchen table and lifted the lid on the laptop. The browser was still open from last night’s drunken session with the Nevada Ashes website—at this point, he’d seen all the pictures, watched all the ‘interviews’. He could have practically quoted the stated specialties and hard limits of each of the advertised shifters. He knew that the ones wearing the white bracelets were the least expensive, and the ones wearing the blue would be the most.
He kept coming back to this one shifter. One of the few omega males on the site. He didn’t even look like Val, the omega Damian had left behind in Montana Border, but his image had stuck itself in Damian’s brain like a virus.
Maybe he should just go and get it out of his system. There was no way a night in Nevada Ashes was going to feel as good as being able to go home. And if it sucked as much as he hoped it would, it was entirely possible that this mood he’d been suffering with might just…evaporate. And he could get back to living his life and sleeping in the den he’d dug.
Quickly, before he could change his mind, he booked a Saturday night with the young omega with the beautiful blue eyes and shy grin. Three hours should be enough to purge him of all this need, but just in case, he added a fourth. After all, it was only money and he wasn’t short, even at the hourly rate the blue bracelet advertised. It wasn’t like he had a family to spend it on.
A return ticket and hotel room booking later, life was looking better than it had in a long time. He even almost didn’t dread tomorrow’s mountain of paperwork.
The last thing he did before he went to bed was to open the safe, where his false documents and a few other oddities of his job rested for safekeeping. The small black case he was looking for was almost invisible in the back of the safe, but his hand knew the feel of it. He tossed it on the vanity counter in the bathroom and undid his pants, letting them sag down about his hips.
Inside, two vials of a clear liquid sat inside their elastic pockets. New sterile syringes still in their packaging and tiny sharp needles long enough to go deep into muscle filled the rest of the space. With the ease of long practice, he screwed a needle onto a syringe then drew up a full cc of the clear liquid and jammed it carelessly into the muscle of his ass. The injection site immediately began to burn and tingle, but he knew that would wear off soon enough. The hours of puking that would follow the burning were only temporary too, but once that was past, his scent would have changed enough that he could walk among shifters and not even the sharpest nose would know what he was.
What he had been.
He cleaned up, threw the used needle in his sharps bucket, and put everything away before setting himself up comfortably in front of the toilet to wait for the storm to begin.
CHAPTER EIGHT
While my date used my shower to wash up after our amusements, I cleaned up the dishes we had eaten off of and put them back on the room service tray. This one had been exceptionally generous, buying dinner and drinks—not that I drank alcohol while working, that was a dangerous precedent to set—but the strawberries and chocolate we’d indulged ourselves with had been greatly appreciated. Even if I did now feel a little fat and bloated.
I glanced at the clock, but there was still time before my next booking. Although if this one took much longer getting out, I’d have to find some way to move him along. I still needed to shower, the room needed to be refreshed, the sheets changed, and the pheromone emitter in the air exchange needed to be refilled. I’d had to set it higher today to get myself to the appropriate level of desperate neediness that was the hallmark of sleeping with a shifter in heat.
Which I supposed meant that I had, at most, another day of this extra earning before I was back to my regular price structure and normal schedule.
Ah, well. It had been good while it lasted.
Finally, my client walked out of the bathroom, freshly washed. I waited for him by the door to the room with a smile on my face and my hands hidden behind my back, as if I had to keep myself from reaching for him.Yeah, definitely replacing the cartridge in the emitter before the next one.
“Come back again sometime soon,” I told him in a breathy voice.
“Next time I’m in town,” he promised, but I could tell he was itching to get going, now thathisitch had been scratched. That was okay by me, but it wasn’t professional to let the clients know that. I let him out the door and hit the appropriate buttons on the room’s maintenance panel to call floor staff before I’d even closed it again.
While I waited, I ran quickly into the shower and scrubbed as if my life depended on it. Through the sound of the water, I heard someone knock, then Barnaby’s distinctive low whistle as he poked his head in the door to make sure it was safe to come in.
By the time I’d made it out of the shower, he’d already stripped the sheets and gathered up the used towels to pile them next to the door, then dragged a chair over underneath the air intake and climbed up on it to pull the grate off so he could dig the canister of alpha pheromones out of the dispenser.
“Thanks, Barn. I’ve been working it pretty hard.”
“Sure. Figured you’d be getting close to empty. Last time that one was refilled was almost a week ago.” He reset the grate and climbed down from the chair. “You got many more tonight?”
I shook my head. “Next one’s the last one until tomorrow morning, but he’s booked for four hours, so you’re catching a break here.”
“You’re not,” he joked.
“All part of the job.” I handed him the towels I’d used and helped myself to a bottle of water from his cart. “It’s been a good week.” I made myself drink the entire bottle while I dressed again and chucked the empty in the bin on Barnaby’s cart just as he finished cleaning the bathroom.
“Okay, you’re ready to go,” he told me as he stuffed the used linens in the bottom of his cart and started shoving it and the one from room service out the door. “Good earnings to you,” were his last words to me, and then he was gone.
I checked my hair in the mirror, straightened my clothing and took a deep breath before opening the door myself to head down the hallway to the upstairs lounge, where my next booking should be waiting for me.
CHAPTER NINE
When Damian had arrived at Nevada Ashes, the gray walls felt almost like coming home. But going in through the gates was an entirely different story from going home to Montana Border. Here, the humans were friendly, though some of the jokes were crude. A few recommendations on who to try and who did what for the least amount of money. They barely took a look at his false ID, just copied the name into the computer for the visitor records and handed it back to him. He was almost annoyed—that ID was a work of art, the best the government could produce.
