Bad Boy Alphas

by Alexis Davie

  Cora’s arms were wrapped around Grayson’s neck as he helped her lift herself up and then lowered her down once more, both of them rapidly approaching their peaks with each one of their rhythmic thrusts as they kissed.

  She reached her climax with the next thrust of Grayson’s member, screaming her release into his mouth, and he swallowed her moans and gasps and continued to pleasure her, groaning while she murmured sweet words against his ear. He hit the bundle of nerves inside her one more time, and then his own orgasm overwhelmed him as he spilled his seed into her center. Cora held his head between her hands and kissed him so hard that she stole the very breath from him.

  They lay—side by side— afterward, their naked bodies covered by Grayson’s bedsheets. Her back was pressed against his chest, his arms around her as he kissed the nape of her neck, gently lavishing her skin with his tongue.

  “Stay,” he whispered, echoing the last word he had spoken to her the fateful night of their meeting. That night, he hadn’t known if Cora had heard him or if she had even said anything in response. Tonight, though, Cora pulled his arms tighter around herself and leaned back into his embrace.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she murmured. “I’m exactly where I’m meant to be.”

  Yeah, Grayson thought. Me too.

  With his arms wrapped securely around the woman he would never bear to be away from, Grayson fell into a deep, dreamless slumber.

  * * *

  THE END

  The Rescue

  1

  Sophia didn’t really know the girl and the two guys sitting at her table—after all, she had been dragged here by her best friend, Cynthia, who did know the other three people sitting with them—but she still howled with laughter at their jokes and at the funny stories they shared amongst themselves. It had been a long time since she’d gone out with any friends, and so far, she was having a wonderful time.

  At first, she hadn’t been convinced. Cynthia had all kinds of friends, and most of them weren’t the kind of people Sophia usually hung around.

  “C’mon, Sophia, please!” Cynthia had begged her, almost falling to her knees.

  “No, Cynthia!” Sophia had argued. “The last time you dragged me to a ‘friendly outing’—it was a setup for a blind date that I never agreed to!”

  “No, no, this is really just a reunion with my friends; we’re just going to a restaurant to hang out! They’re all from work; they’re all super nice—”

  “I’ve never even talked to them!” She had waved hello at them and had been generally polite to them when they had happened to visit Cynthia, since she and Sophia lived in the same building, but that was about it.

  “Just this once!” Cynthia had told her. “If you feel uncomfortable in the least, I swear I’ll drive you back home and never ask you to hang out with them again. Please?”

  There had been so few things Cynthia had ever asked of her that Sophia had found herself unable to say no to her. Now, she was glad she had agreed to come along to this little outing, which had, thankfully, turned out to be exactly that.

  “I don’t believe you in the least!” cried the girl named Annie, who was sitting next to Cynthia, in response to a guy, who was sitting across from her.

  Jensen? Jason? No, definitely Jensen, Sophia thought.

  He’d been in the middle of telling a ridiculous anecdote about some run in he’d had with a wild coyote or something along those lines. Sophia couldn’t blame her—all of this guy’s stories kept sounding more and more unbelievable, and she was sure that Annie had gotten used to calling him out on them.

  “You’re just jealous!” Jensen exclaimed.

  “Oh, yeah, absolutely,” said Annie, rolling her eyes at him. “I would love to stand face-to-face with a wild coyote about to devour me.”

  “I bet he had some great escape!” said the guy named Michael, who was sitting in front of Sophia. He drank from his beer can before nearly slamming it down on the table. “Like that one time you supposedly ran into a shifter?”

  “A shifter?” Sophia asked, speaking for the first time in the past half hour but unable to keep the disbelief out of her voice.

  “Oh no. Not this again,” moaned Annie, throwing her head back at the same time Cynthia burst into laughter.

  “I did see a shifter!” Jensen yelled. “And I also came up with a great escape plan for the coyote, mind you,” he added, turning his attention to Michael.

  Cynthia leaned close to Sophia to whisper, “He’s been saying that for like a year now.”

  “Because it’s true,” Jensen assured her.

  Sophia highly doubted it. She didn’t want to admit that she thought Jensen was a liar, but she had grown up listening to the stories. Everyone who had been born and raised in Evergreen Grove, Montana had heard of the shifters: people who could turn into wolves whenever they pleased, or at least at the full moon.

  There were supposed to be a few ways to recognize them while in their human forms, which Sophia had always thought had been taken out of some horror or fairytale book. They had particularly hairy arms and legs, they were dark-haired, they had a suspicious glint in their eyes, they tended to growl under their breath, their eyes would sometimes glow a yellowish color, and their teeth looked sharper than human teeth usually were…

  But they were just stories that had been passed down from generation to generation, urban legends that parents told their children so that they wouldn’t wander around the outskirts of the town or poke their noses where they shouldn’t.

  Of course, a lot of people swore that they had seen them all over Evergreen Grove, but Sophia didn’t believe they actually had. She had never believed in those ridiculous stories, despite her entire family assuring her that they were real, and that they were not something to be laughed at or disrespected. Sophia, however, loved the woods, and no urban legends or myths would keep her away from them. That was why she’d picked the closest building to the woods to live in.

  Besides, no close acquaintances of hers, friends or relatives, had ever seen one—at least, not as far as she knew.

  “I’m gonna say what I said the first time you wanted us to buy into your shifter-encounter bullshit,” Michael began after clearing his throat. “No shifter would leave you alive after spending more than ten seconds in your company.”

  Cynthia and Annie broke into laughter, and Sophia couldn’t help letting out a chuckle when she saw Jensen throwing his hands up in exasperation.

  “I give up!” he screamed. “You can all believe what you wanna believe, but when you come across a shifter yourselves, you’ll wish you had believed me and taken me seriously!”

  “Oh, c’mon, Jensen,” Cynthia told him, reaching out to take his hand across the table. “Are you sure it wasn’t another wild coyote?”

  “Oh, screw all of you,” Jensen said, and Michael patted his back while the girls laughed again. Sophia felt bad for doing so. Even if she didn’t believe in shifters, and even if she didn’t believe Jensen had seen one, he thought he had and that was no excuse for him to mock him.

  But then Jensen sighed out loud and broke into a smile. Maybe he was used to this exact conversation happening with every new person with whom they hung out, and Sophia allowed herself to breathe.

  They remained at the restaurant for another hour, all talk of shifters forgotten, before Sophia excused herself.

  “Hang on, I’ll drive you back,” said Cynthia, immediately reaching for her purse, but Sophia stopped her.

  “No, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll call an Uber or just walk there. It’s not that far away.”

  “Are you sure?” Cynthia asked. Sophia nodded. She could see that her friend wanted to stay a little longer, and there was no reason to pull her away from the rest of her friends just because Sophia was exhausted and wanted to go home.

  “Absolutely,” she answered.

  “Okay,” Cynthia said, though she still didn’t look convinced. “You’ll call me or text me when you get back home,
right?”

  Sophia smiled reassuringly at her.

  “You bet.” Then she turned to the other occupants of the table. “It was really nice to meet you guys!”

  Sophia received a chorus of cheers in response, and Sophia waved goodbye at them, still able to hear their raucous laughter on her way out of the restaurant. She thought about walking home, like she’d told Cynthia she would, but while it wasn’t that late yet, she didn’t want to take any chances. She ended up calling an Uber to drop her off at the entrance of her and Cynthia’s building, and she was taking out the keys to her apartment when she heard a soft whimper somewhere close to her.

  Sophia looked around the street. It sounded like there was some kind of wounded animal in the vicinity.

  A dog, maybe? thought Sophia.

  She couldn’t see where it was though. She tried to follow the sound as best as she could, walking toward the small alleyway between her building and the next one. The whimpering grew slightly louder, so Sophia dug her phone out of her purse and used it as a flashlight. She illuminated the various trash cans and cardboard boxes littering the alleyway, trying to find the source of the whimpering.

  A flash of movement caught her eyes, and Sophia turned to the dead end of the alleyway, where she saw a figure crawling away from her. As she carefully took a step closer, gripping her keys with her other hand in case she needed to defend herself, Sophia flashed the figure with the light of her phone, and she gasped at the sight in front of her.

  The figure wasn’t a wounded dog like she had imagined. It was a man.

  He had gray hair and a scraggly stubble that were starting to go white. The pants he wore seemed to have had their color washed out, and his long-sleeved shirt was tattered and ripped, as if the man had been fighting off a bear or similar animal.

  But what made Sophia gasp was the gaping wound in the man’s side, his hands pressed to it in an effort to stop the blood seeping from the gash. He breathed heavily, sitting on the floor and leaning back against the wall of the alleyway. How long had he been here, bleeding to death? Why hadn’t he called 911? Why hadn’t he called out for help?

  “Oh, my god,” Sophia mumbled to herself. Then she realized she was still just standing there, and she immediately rushed forward to the man. “Sir? Oh, my god! Sir, are you okay? Sir!” She knelt down in front of him, and the man winced back and away from her.

  “I’m fine,” he grunted, holding one of his arms in front of her to keep Sophia from reaching him. His voice was rough—older than Sophia had imagined him to be just by looking at him—and pained.

  “You’re clearly not!” she cried, gesturing helplessly to the wound on his side. “Are you okay? What happened to you? Did someone attack you? Did you get shot?” The man winced again, tightly shutting his eyes.

  “I’m fine,” he repeated. “I just need to…” He tried to stand up, but his knees wavered and dropped him back to the ground, and Sophia thought she saw more blood seeping from the gash.

  “You’re not fine!” she insisted. The next time he tried to stand, Sophia was next to him, letting him lean on her so he wouldn’t collapse again. “Hold on, I’ll—I’ll call for help, just—”

  “No!” the man snarled. He pushed her away, but he didn’t fall back down to the ground. He took a few steps toward the entrance of the alleyway, and the way he stumbled forward made Sophia want to reach out to help him, even though she knew he wouldn’t let her.

  “You need to go to the hospital!” she screamed at him. “You’re bleeding to death—”

  The man turned back to her, and the rest of her words died in Sophia’s throat. She hadn’t been able to look at his eyes before, given that she had been more focused on his wound, but she was pretty damn sure they weren’t yellow.

  Most of all, she was absolutely sure that they hadn’t been glowing like they were now, as though they were fluorescent.

  “If I were you,” the man growled, and his voice no longer sounded human but more like the animal Sophia had originally thought he was, “I would forget that this ever happened at all.”

  He fell on all fours to the ground, and at first, Sophia thought he had collapsed again, but then grey and white fur started to sprout from his body; his limbs shifted into paws, and a snout replaced his face, though the glowing yellow eyes remained through the transition before their glow faded, leaving Sophia to stare into the pitch-black eyes of a wolf.

  Where there once had been a man, now there was a wolf, a gaping wound on his side dripping blood at its feet.

  Sophia had always heard of the stories, but she had never actually thought they were true. She had never believed that people could turn into animals, that werewolves really existed, that people could be werewolves and shift into canine beasts whenever they pleased. She had never believed any of those ridiculous myths… until now, until she saw the wolf that had been a man only a few seconds before scampering out of the alleyway and off into the night, leaving a trail of bloody droplets after him.

  Sophia simply stood there, staring open-mouthed at the place where the wolf had stood. That had been a shifter. The wounded man I had found was a shifter. Her mind was racing, going over all the stories her family had wanted her to believe, the stories she had heard her entire life, the wild tales of people who would swear on their lives that they had narrowly escaped being mauled by a shifter…

  It was only until she had walked into her building, climbed up the stairs to the second floor, entered her apartment, and closed the door behind her that Sophia felt like she could breathe again. She leaned back against the closed door and slid down to the floor, suddenly feeling like her knees wouldn’t hold her weight.

  I guess Jensen wasn’t lying, after all, she thought to herself. Her phone vibrated with a text message, and Sophia realized that she was still holding it in her hand, her other hand curled tightly around her keys.

  Hey!!! read the text from Cynthia. Are you home yet?? LOL, Annie wants to know if you were mauled to death by a shifter.

  Sophia let out a laugh that had no mirth in it. Her nerves were all standing on edge, and her fingers were shaking, as well as her entire body, as she tried to type a response.

  Nah, I’m safe back home, she texted back to Cynthia. She thought about adding some kind of joke regarding Annie’s comment, but she didn’t really feel up to it. Besides, if anything, what she wanted to do was tell Cynthia the truth, but Sophia didn’t think she could ever tell anyone what had happened—what she had seen.

  Who would believe her, anyway?

  2

  Try as she might, Sophia couldn’t fall asleep.

  She had been tossing and turning in her bed for the past four hours, going over the impossible sights she had witnessed in the alleyway. She had seen a wounded man turn into a wounded wolf. She had heard him snarling at her to forget the entire thing, and now Sophia wished she could, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the blood seeping from the gash on his side, about the way he had refused her help even though he had probably been bleeding for a long time before she had found him.

  He had just run away into the night while he continued to bleed to death, and Sophia had just stared at his retreating form.

  I tried to help him, she told herself, turning once more on her bed. He didn’t want my help. There was nothing else I could’ve done.

  She could’ve followed him. She could have insisted on helping him. She could’ve insisted on calling 911, she could have… she could have… Sophia shook her head to herself. She could have been mauled to death, for one! The shifter had clearly wanted to be left alone, or he wouldn’t have run away from her. If she had pushed him, perhaps she wouldn’t even be here anymore.

  Then again, the shifter could’ve attacked her, and he hadn’t. Maybe he had refused her help for fear that she would find out what he was, or that he would shift while he was in the hospital, or that something would happen to him. After all, it had been easy to forget that the wolf that had stood in front of her had once
been a human man. Imagine the kind of chaos that would unleash if someone were to shift into a wild animal in the middle of a public place, especially one such as a hospital.

  Sophia remembered the trail of blood the man had left at his feet—or, his paws, in any case—and she couldn’t help wondering if he had managed to get some help in the end. What if he was still out there, slowly bleeding to death because he feared no one would help him? What if, by letting him walk away, she had also left him to die?

  Sophia groaned out loud before she pushed herself out of bed. She put on a robe over her pajamas, slipped her tennis shoes on, grabbed her keys and her phone, and she made her way out of her apartment and toward the alleyway where she had last seen the wounded shifter.

  It was past midnight, and the street was completely empty as Sophia searched the ground for the trail of bloody droplets the man had left behind. She could see the trail leading to the outskirts of town, where the woods began, and she followed it as closely as she possibly could: the street lamps went only as far as the street itself, and the further into the woods Sophia walked, the more darkness slowly overtook the path until she was surrounded by trees. Once more, she used her phone as her flashlight, illuminating the way in front of her.

  It took her only a minute to hear the shifter, and it took her less than another minute to find him.

  The man had turned back into his human form, and he was breathing heavily, leaning back against the trunk of a tree. Small branches and leaves crunched under Sophia’s feet, alerting him to her presence. His eyes, which had been closed, opened slowly, like it was taking him all his strength to do so—it probably was.