Eleven
ELEVEN
Nat
I COULDN’T SEEM TO break free of the horrified paralysis pinning me in place. Instead, I continued to stare open-mouthed at the male alpha I’d let do unspeakable things to me in a hotel room.
“Just to be crystal clear,” the alpha said, “you are , in fact, Mia’s good-for-nothing husband? Not a random hookup who decided to turn stalker, and arbitrarily chose today to show up at my door and murder me with an ax or something?”
I snapped my jaw shut, swallowing a couple of times to get some moisture back in my mouth. “I’m Mia’s husband.” It emerged as a bare rasp.
Piercing gray eyes slid closed for a moment before opening again. “Of course you fucking are.”
That inescapable alpha gaze landed on me like a ton of bricks. If the weight had been physical, I’d have been crushed into a sad little puddle of blood and grease on the front porch.
I couldn’t come up with any more words. At least, none that weren’t some variation of ohfuck-ohfuck-ohfuck-whathaveIdone .
“Right,” said the alpha, his voice low enough not to carry to anyone else in the house. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You don’t know me. I don’t know you. You and I have never laid eyes on each other before today. I’m Byron. Pleased to fucking meet you, asshole . Now pull yourself together and stop looking like you’re about to fall over.”
It took several blank seconds for the meaning of what he’d just said to penetrate. When it did, I grasped at the words like a lifeline.
“Yes. Okay. Good plan.” I looked from side to side, as though I might find the sanity I’d just lost, perhaps hanging from one of the elegant carriage lamps flanking the open door. No such luck, sadly. “Pleased to, erm, meet you.”
I offered him my hand to shake on autopilot; my higher brain functions still nowhere to be seen.
Hookup Guy—Byron—stared down at it for a beat, before muttering something I couldn’t make out. He turned on his heel and disappeared into the house, so I let my hand drop and took that as an invitation to enter. After closing the door behind me, I found myself in a pleasant entryway. Byron was already halfway down the attached hallway. I hurried after him, feeling like I’d just walked into a fever dream... or possibly my own personal hell.
If I allowed myself to think about any of it too closely, I’d turn around and sprint out of the house, then get in the Jeep and keep driving until I hit an ocean.
Byron turned and disappeared into an open entryway.
“Mia, your ball and chain is here,” I heard him call.
I hesitantly entered an airy and well-appointed kitchen. For the first time in my life, I truly understood the alphomic concept of territory . I was an intruder here, for all that I’d been invited. The sense of trespassing on a space that belonged to someone else was visceral—an almost physical pressure pushing against my skin.
Five people waited for me inside. Mia rose from the barstool she’d been perching on, giving me a strained smile as she approached.
“Hi, Nat,” she said. “Grab a seat wherever you like. Can I get you a drink or something?”
“I’m good, thanks,” I said, taking in the pristine countertops and shiny appliances. “Wow. Guess I can see now why you left me for these guys.”
The words were out before I even realized they were forming on my tongue—my mouth still running on autopilot, without any oversight from my brain. The kitchen went absolutely silent.
It... wasn’t a good kind of silence.
“ Shit ,” I cursed. “Sorry, I meant... I didn’t mean...”
“Pretty sure she left you because you told her you wanted to fuck other people,” Byron said, casually examining the fingernails of his left hand. “But, hey, whatever story you need to tell yourself, bro.”
“ Byron ,” said a light-skinned Black man seated at the kitchen table. I recognized him from the night I’d found Mia in a singles bar, and later, from the restaurant.
“No,” I said quickly, the feeling of having plummeted into my own personal lake of fire increasing. “That’s... pretty accurate, actually. And the quip about the kitchen was a really stupid thing to say.”
Mia tilted her head, looking me up and down. “For what it’s worth, the kitchen was a definite selling point. Everyone, meet Nat. Nat, this is Zalen, that’s Luca, that’s Emiel, and the one with the mouth on him is Byron. Oh. And the cat is Princess.”
A gray cat seated unhygienically on the end of the kitchen counter paused briefly in licking her front paw to give me a baleful look, then went immediately back to grooming herself.
“Hello,” I said. “Thanks for agreeing to meet with me like this.”
In addition to Mia, Byron, Zalen, and the guy who’d brought Mia down to see me when she was in heat, there was also the same beautiful, slender male omega who’d been sitting with Zalen in the singles bar on that first, fateful night. I wasn’t completely oblivious—I knew he and Mia had struck up a friendship fairly early on in their acquaintance.
I didn’t understand the dynamic going on here, though. Had he really been okay with another omega coming into his pack like this? Was he okay with the fact that at least two of these alphas had fucked Mia through her heat?
The tiny voice of rationality and good sense that lived in the back of my head whispered, this is none of your goddamned business, you idiot . For once, I heard it loud and clear.
“Mia filled us in on what’s been happening,” Zalen was saying. “To say that what she told us is alarming would be an understatement.”
The other omega, Luca, looked sick to his stomach. As Zalen spoke, he hunched in on himself further, as though trying to disappear inside his barstool.
“Agreed,” I said, determined not to dig my own hole any deeper. “The problem is, I don’t see what we can do about it in the absence of solid proof.”
“Mia said you had surveillance video from the restaurant?” Zalen asked.
“Yes,” I said. “And I already fired the kid who planted the roaches in the dining room. But we’re talking grainy, low-quality footage, and it’s not like the container he dumped had a big label on it marked ‘ roaches .’”
“Nat already filed a police report about that part of it,” Mia added. “The detective that took the report told him it would probably have to be a civil suit rather than a criminal complaint. Disgruntled employee, no concrete proof of wrongdoing, blah, blah, blah .”
I nodded grimly. “I assume it’s going to be even worse if we go back to them with a crazy story about gangland conspiracies and money laundering.”
“And still with no proof,” Mia finished.
“I expect so, yes,” Byron said, his expression completely deadpan. “The police mostly don’t know their own asses from a hole in the ground.”
The dark-haired omega—Luca—spoke quietly, without looking up. “Maybe you should just cut your losses. Open up another restaurant someplace else.”
Mia inhaled sharply.
Bloodshot green eyes rose to meet hers, though Luca still avoided the gazes of everyone else in the room. “I’m serious, Mia. A restaurant isn’t worth your safety.”
“Why should they be able to trample all over anything they want?” Mia shot back. “Luca—that restaurant is my life . I’m not going to sit by and do nothing while someone tries to destroy everything we’ve worked for!”
Luca flinched visibly, but he didn’t back down. “You don’t know what they’re capable of,” he said—and just like that, it became obvious who it was that had personal experience with Joe’s gang.
Mia drew breath to argue. I recognized that stubborn look all too well. But the pair of them locked eyes for a long moment, and rather than speak, she let the air flow out of her lungs in a silent sigh. Her shoulders sagged.
“What about the other people they’ll go on to harass in the future?” she asked. “What about the next restaurant that opens in that building?”
“I don’t care about those hypothetical other people,” Luca said tightly. “I only care that you stay as far away from SSG as it’s possible to get.”
With that, he pushed off his stool and slunk out of the room, not meeting my eyes as he passed me. Mia watched him go with an expression of distress, but she didn’t try to follow him. To my surprise, she turned a pleading look toward the massive bruiser with the shaved head, who was leaning unobtrusively against a wall.
“Emiel?” she said.
Emiel grunted, straightening from his casual slouch. “Yeah, I’ll go after him.” He scooped up the cat who’d been sitting nearby, the animal immediately curling into his arms and starting to purr. Since arriving, I’d had the distinct impression that staring at him openly wouldn’t be good for my short-term health. But as he followed the distraught omega out of the kitchen, I thought I saw the faded remnants of bruising along the side of his face.
File this under ‘ things I was probably happier not knowing about .’
I cleared my throat. “I’m not sure tucking tail and running is a financially viable plan for us. Even if it was an emotionally palatable one.”
“No, I understand,” Zalen said. “For what it’s worth, I did a bit of digging, and RICO cases in St. Louis are handled by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Eastern District of Missouri. It’s possible that tackling the potential money-laundering case might have a better chance of success than trying to tie SSG to attempts to sabotage your restaurant...”
The rest of the meeting was more productive than I might have guessed it would be, even if we still had no good answers by the end. Neither Luca nor Emiel made a reappearance, and Byron limited himself to the occasional snide remark.
But it was clear that Zalen knew his shit when it came to dealing with gangs—and also to dealing with the legal system. I could easily picture him building a youth center from the ground up and running it day to day. I tried very, very hard not to picture him balls-deep in Mia. Were the two of them together, outside of her recent heat? Were she and Byron together?
I shoved those thoughts aside as best I could while Mia walked me back to the front door.
“I still don’t know what we should do,” she said morosely. “I’m worried they’ve already won.”
The restaurant’s profit and loss statements would tend to support that conclusion, but somehow, I just couldn’t bring myself to give up on what we’d built.
“I want to at least talk to the U.S. Attorney’s office,” I said. “There’s no harm in exploring that avenue first.”
She gave a tired nod as we reached the door. “I suppose not. In the meantime, let me know when we can get in the restaurant and start cleaning up the mess. Goodnight, Nat.”
I squelched the awkward sense that I should give her a hug, or a kiss on the forehead or something. The tiny distance between us ached, despite the fact that I’d been the one to put it there. “Good night, Mia.”
I trudged back to the Jeep and climbed inside. The drive home was punctuated with all the unwanted thoughts that I’d successfully managed to keep under wraps during the meeting. Even as Byron had spent the better part of an hour tossing cutting little comments my way, it had felt like he and Mia were magnets, and I was steel. I couldn’t stop picturing the two of them together, interspersed with searing memories of the two of them with me .
By the time I pulled up to my house, I was fully hard despite my best efforts, my dick aching against the crease of my jeans. My ears burned hot with humiliation, my adopted father’s hateful voice muttering in my head about sin and cucks and filthy faggot queers.
My breath was coming fast and ragged as I slammed the front door behind me and stumbled back to the cramped bathroom. I shed my clothes like they were burning me and stepped into the shower before the water even had a chance to warm up.
The cold spray should have helped. It didn’t.
In my mind’s eye, a hard-muscled, tattooed body pressed me down from behind, driving my dick into Mia’s soaking pussy even as something thick and hot pressed into my ass, nearly splitting me in two. The water grew lukewarm rather than chilly, and my hand circled my throbbing cock without conscious direction from my brain.
I leaned my forehead against the cool tile, a sob lodging in my throat as I jerked myself hard and fast, desperate for even a moment of that quiet, peaceful mindlessness that I’d found beneath the hands of a male alpha in a three-star hotel room. The Mia in my head writhed and bucked, clenching around me as she cried out her release. My balls drew up, come squirting out of my cock in spurts so strong it was almost painful.
The strength leached from my muscles, and I slithered down the shower wall, barely managing to twist my body so that I landed in a sitting position on my ass. The water pounded down on me, washing away the evidence of my pathetic weakness.
The only way I was ever going to have either of them again was inside my own fucked-up head. I’d made good and sure of that by being a clueless asshole.
The next time I saw Mia in private, I needed to bite the bullet and offer her a divorce before I fucked things up any worse.