***
My hotel room was on the main road, two blocks away. I reached it without looking behind me. Now to get to the fourth floor.
I didn’t remember the lift or the door closing behind me. I remembered throwing the chain lock with hands that were vibrating so hard I wouldn’t need to put the batteries in my dildo.
I kicked off the red heels as I pulled on the blonde wig and threw it to the floor. Then I dragged off my clothes because it might have been snowing outside but the room was too warm.
I turned the thermostat down as far as it went. Then I sat on the edge of the bed with my palms flat on my thighs and breathed through my nose and told myself that this was the same pain I had for three years. It wasn’t anything different. It was a phantom ache and that phantom aches, by definition, were not real, and therefore I was fine, this was manageable, and I was a woman in control of her own biology.
My body found this hilarious and proceeded to act like a burst pipe.
I groaned as the heat crested. I curled into a ball making a sound I would be taking to my grave.
This was the worst pain I'd ever endured. Worse than when my ex-alpha claimed me even though I was never his. Worse than when I had his claim dissolved. Worse than the pain I had endured since that day.
I had been told that the pain wasn’t real, by a medical doctor, no doubt an alpha himself. He told me that the pain I was enduring was a fake pain that I should resist. That sometimes the nervous system held onto things longer than the body did. That it would fade.
It was not fading. It was getting worse. Much worse. The pain was sliding between my legs.
I pressed my face into the hotel pillow and tried to think about something calming. But all I could think about was the three faces in an alleyway, and my knife clattering onto the cold floor.
My heat climbed another degree. I was about to combust.
I gave up on calming thoughts and leaned over the bed, dug my hand in my bag and pulled out a dildo.
I had to try other things.
I opened my legs and used it on myself, desperate for any friction to dull the fire, but it did absolutely nothing. The cold silicone felt like a cruel joke compared to the phantom heat pulsing through my veins.
"I need a knot," I cried out as I lay flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, damp with exertion, and still aching.
The room smelled wrong. Too neutral. Too clean. Too much like an absence of something I left in that alleyway.
“No. No. No! You do not—”
Someone knocked at the door.
I blinked at the ceiling then at the door.
I’d ordered room service before the bar, before the alley, before my entire plan went sideways and left me lying in my underwear, alone in a foreign city, in a body that had apparently decided tonight was the night to betray me completely.
Dinner. Right. Maybe that was all I needed.
I pulled on the silk robe. I smoothed my hair, which was a sweaty mess, but my whole body was just as bad.
I opened the door.
It wasn't room service. It was the three men from the alley who stood in the corridor.
No suits now. All their jackets were gone, ties gone, sleeves rolled back. They were larger without the shadow of the alley making them distant and theoretical. Up close, the scent of them hit the open doorway like a wave breaking over a seawall. And I stood in the way and was pushed backward by the force of it.
I planted my palm on the door frame as their champagne, caramel and something darker at the edges slipped into the room.
My other hand tightened on the door handle.
"Do you need some assistance, malen'kaya?" the bearded one asked. His voice was the same. Patient, low, unhurried, yet certain. His eyes dropped to my skin, to the flush across my collarbone, to the hand that was gripping the door frame.
"I can help myself," I said.
