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I needed time—time to make the most important decision of our lives, one that would affect four hearts for all eternity.
Chapter8
Holly
Fiddling with the soft, squishy cuff of my fluffy white robe, I watched as the beta bathroom attendant walked Tara—another club omega, one who could barely stand at this point, her naked body bruised and bloody—toward the showers. Then, when they were both out of sight, no minders around to tell me I had another twenty-one minutes exactly to go before my alpha returned, I ducked out of the dungeon’s private bathroom on tippy-toes, careful not to make a sound.
Twenty minutes and thirty seconds now.
Laszlo had promised to come back for me, and he said it so sweetly, cupping my face and stroking my cheeks, his tone an alpha purr and his presence so big and comforting and calm that I swooned for the first time in my life. Call me crazy, but I believed him. Still, I couldn’t just sit twiddling my thumbs for another nineteen minutes and forty-five seconds.
Something felt… weird.
And not because I’d been bitten repeatedly by three different vampire alphas tonight.
Not because they’d made me come harder than ever before.
Not because I’d taken a glorious pounding. Not because I’d had knots thrust in my face while one of them fucked my mouth, the musky masculinity burned into my olfactory system. Nope, nope, nope,nope.
I wasn’t like Tara.
They hadn’t destroyed me in a way that would leave scars—the invisible kind, the ones you carried forever.
It…
It…hurtto be apart from these alphas, which was nuts. They couldn’t be real, the sharp pang in my chest, the nauseating twist in my tummy. Those always hit the second I walked into Club Mistletoe for my shift, then again the moment the cage locked, with the first grope-y alpha hand prying between the bars. All that went away when I was behind closed doors again, alone, where no one could touch me or hurt me or leer at me—but now, suddenly, it went off like a flash flood the moment Laszlo turned his back and walked away.
He left me alone, and ithurt.
And I didn’t understand it. As I padded the stone corridors, I didn’t trust the feeling—or myself. In fact, I had to force myself to go slow, to not sprint back to the door marked withGravesand fling it open, then rush into one of their arms under the theory that that would make the pain stop. Maybe it was a side effect of their bites, like a hangover or a detox.
Maybe not. Maybe it was something else entirely, but I needed answers.
Now.
Arms crossed, head down, I slowed to a respectful shuffle when I passed two chatting alphas. The pair eyeballed me briefly, even throwing a few rumbles my way, but carried on without stopping. I let out a sharp breath, then peeked over my shoulder to confirm they were headed for one of many half-open doors in this particular corridor, the rooms mostly empty down here a level below the three vampires who made my heart trip over itself—
Painseared my scalp.
Again.
And suddenly, I was jerked back toward one of those half-open doors. Terrified, I instinctively screamed and flailed, my bathrobe tie loosening, but a meaty hand clamped over my mouth as I was hauled into an aggressively lit suite that smelled like industrial cleaner and wet stone.
And elderberries.
“I scented you first,” came a familiar gruff voice doused in liquor, his breath hot and horrible. The Yule Isle accent. The cruel way he tore at my hair and flung me around.Torvald.
Just as I was about to bite at his palm, the alpha hurled me to the floor so hard I shrieked, pain sprinting up my bones at all points of impact. Hands. Knees. Shins.Agonyscorched my insides, made sharp, bitter, andmeanby the heart-stopping fear of being alone with this alpha—of hearing the door boom shut behind him. Gasping, I crawled toward the bed, the only spot in the suite I could hide under with all the legs bolted to the floor. No big alpha body could squish under the metal frame to—
But he was on top of me in a flash, his full weight crashing down and pinning me to the marble.
“You disappeared to whore around with those fucking mobsters, didn’t you?” Torvald snarled in my ear, fisting my hair and wrenching my head to the side. “Did you like it?”
Omega instincts kicked in, demanding I make myself small and meek—begging me to soothe him, to calm his alpha ire before he tore me apart. So, I wailed without making a sound, his full weight on the small of my back.
“Did you like degrading yourself for thoseanimals?” He seethed in my ear, snarling, rumbling, sweaty and heavy and terrifying—then rocked his erection along my spine, driving me harder into the black stone. Then, without warning, Torvald eased off just enough to roll me over, dragging me by my hair, and then flopped back down on my torso. The force of him slamming onto my gut knocked the wind out of me, and I gaped like a fish on land, eyes wide, tears falling, lungs struggling to gulp down the air. His thighs pinned my arms to my sides, and pounding his back with my knees didn’t do a damn thing.
Omega instincts off, self-preservationon. I kicked harder, squirming, gasping, desperately searching for something to say that would get him off me—even for a few seconds—but my brain was static and I couldn’t move and he was just getting harder against me, a telltale knot swelling beneath his slacks, his disheveled dress shirt worse off now than it was before. A bruise bloomed over his left eye like he’d had a bar fight upstairs while I’d had the time of my life down here, and that seemed to have made an already sour mood even worse.
