The Strip

by Heather Killough-Walden

“To the August. Someone is casting spells on Charlie and I’d wager it’s Phelan. No one else has reason to. I need to get to her before she loses the mark.”

  James stopped abruptly. “He can’t remove the mark from her without her permission.”

  Malcolm too came to a halt. He turned to face James, now several feet away. “Permission isn’t necessarily difficult to obtain,” he said with a meaningful glance in Lily’s direction.

  Lily blushed. Two years ago, Malcolm had managed to get Lily’s permission to remove Daniel’s mark. All it had taken was a bit of his indomitable power and a whole hell of a lot of seductive sway.

  “Maybe,” James cocked his head to one side. “Maybe not. She’s a female born, not a human. And it doesn’t matter anyway, Cole. You won’t be able to go anywhere near her.”

  “What the bloody hell are you saying?” Cole’s green eyes flashed his impatience.

  “I tried to get into The August this morning,” James told him. “The entire hotel is his territory now.” He paused long enough for the significance of what he was saying to sink in. “No alpha can cross its borders.”

  * * * *

  Charlie didn’t rush to get out of bed that morning. She lay on the soft mattress, her wide eyes gazing up at the ceiling, and thought about everything that had happened the night before.

  Every once in a while, she raised her right arm and stared at the shimmering emerald mark on the inside of her wrist. It was beautiful.

  Nothing made any sense.

  “I’m a werewolf,” she said softly. That was what Malcolm Cole had told her. She closed her eyes and searched her memories. Her father was there, with his bright white, wolfish grin and his stark, cobalt eyes. Her mother gazed back at her through eyes of amber. They looked like Jesse’s eyes. She wondered if it was one of the things that attracted her to Jesse. That likeness.

  “I’m a werewolf?” This time it was a question. Again, she looked at the mark on her arm. It seemed to beckon to her. It looked almost familiar; as if she’d always known deep down that she would be wearing it one day.

  She sighed now and rubbed her eyes. She wasn’t tired, but it seemed like the appropriate thing to do. Then she got up and got dressed, donning worn blue jeans, a Metallica t-shirt, and slip-on Converse sneakers. As she dressed, she noticed the way the material felt against her skin. Her lace bra kept rubbing against her nipples, which were painfully erect. The seam of the blue jeans brushed the insides of her thighs. She was too sensitive.

  She wanted to take the clothes off again and crawl back beneath the soft sheets on the bed and masturbate.

  “Jesus,” she muttered, running a hand through her hair. She needed to figure out what was going on. What was wrong with her? She knew it had something to do with Cole’s mark, and she had a feeling that it also had a lot to do with herself.

  She sighed again and looked around the room, trying to remember where she’d left her cell phone. Then she remembered and started toward the chair where her jacket hung, but half way across the room, she stopped in her tracks.

  The lock on the front door had turned green, issuing a small beep. The door knob was turning.

  For some reason, Charlie froze in place, unable to do anything but watch as the door swung slowly inward, and several large men strode into the room.

  All at once, Charlie’s eyes widened, her throat constricted, her heartbeat hammering painfully. Her ears began to buzz with the roar of blood rushing through her veins. Four men entered the room, each exceedingly tall and well-built. Two wore dress slacks and tight black t-shirts. The other two wore jeans. Their eyes, every pair a color that stood out in their handsome faces, shone eerily in the dawning light. The men in jeans bore tattoos on their arms, but all of them had short-cropped hair, making them appear even more mean than their physiques and ink jobs suggested.

  Charlie’s brain felt as if it were burning up, feverish in its fear. She experienced the brief, mad gratefulness that she’d managed to get dressed before her room was overrun with heavy-weight boxer look-alikes. But the fleeting appreciation was gone as quickly as it had come when the fifth man stepped through the doorway and the light from the window behind her illuminated his features.

  Her jaw dropped open and tiny stars danced in her vision. “Reese?”

  David Reese, her trainer, stood in the foyer of her private hotel apartment. He was dressed in an incredibly expensive, tailored suit and his hair was down instead of tied back as it always had been. But she would recognize him anywhere. From his long, blonde waves to his piercing brown eyes to the cruel smile on his lips.

  “Hello again, Charlie,” he said. As always, the low rumble of his voice both intrigued her and set her nerves on edge.

  The men on either side of him eyed her with something akin to hunger in the depths of their gazes. She felt completely and utterly overwhelmed. The mark on her arm began to prickle. She had no idea what to say and vaguely wondered whether she was actually dreaming all of this.

  “How are you enjoying your accommodations?” Reese asked. “I do hope you find my hotel satisfactory.”

  The men began to come further into the room, separating as they neared her so that she felt trapped. She took a few steps back and felt the familiar stirrings of panic burgeoning to life within her. Her skin was flushing hot and cold. Her chest hurt.

  “What are you talking about, David?” she asked, the alarm clearly audible in her voice. “What are you doing here?” She glanced at the tall men who were moving further and further toward her, boxing her in. “What are they doing here?” A few seconds more, and she would scream. Would anyone hear her? God, was she going to die in a hotel room today?

  “Please,” David’s gaze darkened. “I think it’s time we do away with the pretense, Charlie. I’ve grown so weary of it over the years. Call me Gabriel. I’ve always wanted to hear my name slip past your lips.”

  Charlie just stared at him. Gabriel? As in Gabriel Phelan? The man who owned The August and half of the real estate on the Strip?

  “What the hell are you talking about?” She took another hurried step back and felt her body begin to slip into fight mode.

  It didn’t escape Reese.

  “Take her now, men. I don’t want that kind of fight from her this morning,” David commanded.

  At once, the four large men rushed forward, moving faster than Charlie could fathom. She had little to no time to fight and they gave her no leverage to fight with. They were impossibly strong; her efforts at escape were futile. Within a few short seconds, her wrists were bound behind her back with leather-lined cuffs that she hadn’t even known they’d had, and she was being held immobile by sturdy grips on both of her arms. Their strong legs were positioned in such a way in front of hers that she could not move, much less use her legs to kick.

  She was out of breath and defenseless.

  Charlie felt as if she would faint. Her vision was tunneling inward. She concentrated on sending it back out. On breathing. But she was so confused. Why would Reese do this? Was he really Gabriel Phelan?

  She managed to lock gazes with the blonde man as he came further into the room and allowed the door to swing shut behind him. His expression was unreadable, but a horrid dread was uncoiling deep within Charlie’s gut. His eyes looked strange. As he drew closer, they seemed to lighten – to change. One moment, they were brown….

  And the next?

  Charlie’s ragged breath caught in her throat. The tiniest, shaky whimper escaped her lips as he came to stand a foot away and she found herself staring up into a pair of eyes of the deepest blue. She recognized those eyes. They glowed in the depths of her imagination, ripping through her subconscious and shredding her inner workings to smithereens as they exposed her for everything that she never knew she was.

  They were the searing, merciless blue eyes of the man from her dreams. The man who was not Malcolm Cole.

  “To answer the question that I know you are asking yourself, sweetheart – yes. I am Gabriel Ph
elan, Charlie.” His smile was unforgiving. “I am the man who hired your band to come to Las Vegas for six months. I am the man who signed your retainer check and put you in a room directly below his penthouse suite in his tallest hotel…. Like a princess locked in a castle’s tower.” He softly laughed then, the heartless sound causing the mark on her arm to tingle threateningly. His voice wrapped around her like the petals of a black rose. Dark and silky soft. But the thorns of the rose came flaying after. She shivered violently, her skin flushed, her stomach roiling with a mixture of queasiness and shocking sexual anticipation.

  Gabriel took that one final step toward her, closing the gap between them, and Charlie winced as the emerald mark on her right arm grew uncomfortably warm. “I told you that I would collect on our session, didn’t I, Charlie?” he whispered, slowly raising his hand to brush his fingers along her cheek bone.

  Sparks of pain shot up her arm and she hissed, trying to pull away from him. The men’s grips tightened on her arms. Gabriel’s hand shot out like lightning, roughly fisting in the hair at the nape of her neck to hold her still as the fingers of his other hand gently brushed along her lips. More pain assaulted her and she knew that David – that Gabriel – could see it in her eyes. He’d always been able to read her; to tell when she was in pain.

  He liked it. His smile said as much. “Does his mark hurt you, Charlie?”

  She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. It took all of her strength not to cry out as his fingers dropped from her lips to her collarbone, brushing it gently and then drifting lower on her chest. He ran his hand over the thin material of her t-shirt to the outline of her bra, his gaze locked on her eyes all the while. Watching. Measuring her reaction with malevolent curiosity.

  “I imagine you’re very confused, aren’t you?” he whispered.

  The pain shooting up her arm and across her chest was nearly unbearable now. And her mind was going into shock.

  It was all too much. She had no idea what the mark meant or why David Reese was really Gabriel Phelan or why he would bring her here or what Malcolm Cole wanted with her or what he had meant with his talk of werewolves. All she knew, at that moment, was that she was in agony. And that she wanted it to stop.

  “I can take the pain away from you, Charlie.” Gabriel squeezed her breast through the material of her shirt and lace bra and Charlie couldn’t help the harsh cry that finally ripped from her throat. His touch was a dichotomy of sensations. He brushed his thumb across the hard nipple through her garments, and it sent waves of electric pleasure through her body even as the contact had also elicited a new and terrible kind of suffering from the cursed mark that now burned like a brand on the inside of her right arm.

  Charlie felt her knees go weak beneath the double assault. But Phelan’s men easily held her up and Gabriel retained his grip in her thick, silken hair. He lowered his lips to whisper across hers.

  “Nothing else matters right now, Charlie. There’s just you and me.” He brought his hand back up to wrap his fingers around her throat. He squeezed gently, cutting off just the right amount of oxygen from her already bewildered brain. “Tell me that you want the mark removed, Charlie, and I’ll do it. The pain will stop,” he promised her softly. “Or we can do this all day.” He suddenly released her throat and ran his free hand over her taut stomach to the waist band of her jeans. Then he roughly shoved it underneath both her pants and her underwear, finding the soft curls between her legs.

  She bucked in the men’s grips, screaming once more at the further anguish the physical assault released over her. Gabriel’s hand threatened, stalling inches from her inner core, and Charlie was positive that she had never known such suffering. But it was nothing compared to what she felt when he violently thrust his fingers inside of her and silenced her resultant scream, covering her mouth in a brutal kiss. It was all force, all hunger, and it bruised her lips on contact.

  Charlie’s entire world was engulfed in a mixture of red-hot need and misery. Her legs gave out and her swallowed cry dropped off to a low moan as an orgasm racked through her body, the harsh pleasure immediately absorbed by the pain that had become her entire being.

  Consciousness began to slip from her grasp.

  And then something strange rode through her, piggy backing on the agony, a sort of insipid, slithering influence that coursed through her veins and re-awakened her senses.

  The blackness receded, and with the retreating shadows of blessed sleep came more pain. Inescapable. She was dragged ruthlessly back to the world of fully-conscious perception. Slumber had been denied her.

  She couldn’t even faint to get away from the pain.

  Gabriel Phelan slowly released her from his kiss and straightened, a pitiless and knowing smile on his handsome face. He drew back just enough to peer down into her glacial eyes and then shook his head. “No, Charlie. I’m afraid you don’t get off that easily. You’ll remain here, sweetheart. With me.” He drove his fingers deeper inside of her and she sobbed in throbbing, excruciating ecstasy as her inner muscles involuntarily squeezed him back. “Until you give me what I want.”

  The tears that had been building in Charlie’s ice blue eyes now spilled forth to run down her cheeks. She felt like throwing up. It was one thing to be violated in this manner by someone in the first place. It was far worse that it should bring such confounding, horrible agony like the pain brought on by Cole’s mark. But it was unimaginably wrong that she could feel pleasure at the same time. Phelan was doing something to her. He’d cast a spell or something. He wasn’t human.

  She wanted to die. To disappear.

  If she had possessed any ability to move whatsoever, she would have thrown herself through the floor-to-ceiling windows across the room. Anything to end this intolerable anguish.

  “What do you want?” she gasped. It was surprisingly easy for her to find and form words in her suffocating world of hurt. The question just came out.

  “I want you, Charlie. All of you,” he hissed, giving her hair a swift tug to accentuate his words. “Tell me to remove Cole’s mark from your arm. That’s what I want.”

  Charlie stilled under his grip. A quiet stole over her. In a brief and surprising moment of mental clarity, Charlie realized that if Phelan was asking her for something – it was something that she should not give him.

  He was a good fighter. He was a good teacher. But Jessie was right. He was a sadist in every sense, and in the truest form of the word. And it was no secret that he particularly liked dolling out pain to her. It brought him pleasure. She could see it in his eyes and in the way he smiled. She could feel it when he touched her and hear it in the low, mesmerizing pitch of his voice.

  She didn’t understand how Malcolm Cole, the green-eyed man from her dreams, had managed to put that mark on her arm. She didn’t comprehend what purpose it served – other than, apparently, to cause her immense amounts of pain. But she knew, suddenly and with stark certainty, that if Gabriel Phelan wanted it gone, then she was better off keeping it.

  “No,” she hissed, her own gaze narrowing in defiance. She winced as more pain rode through her like a shockwave but she gritted her teeth and continued through it. “I think I’ll keep it.”

  She expected his wrath. She expected him to hit her. Maybe punch her. Anything but what he actually did. He gently pulled his hand out of her jeans and his lips spread into a victorious smile. She stared up into his blue eyes as they started to glow, just as they had in her nightmares. And then her gaze flicked to his mouth and she almost moaned in horror as his canines began to elongate until they were razor-sharp fangs, glinting malevolently in the waxing sunlight.

  Charlie stopped breathing entirely. She went utterly still beneath him.

  “Ah Charlie,” he said, his low voice now laced with a barely perceptible, animalistic growl. “I was so hoping you would say that.”

  Chapter Nine, The Rake

  “Boss, you need to calm down.” Jake watched his alpha warily, wondering if his life was going to come to
an end that day. If Cole slipped into wolf form, everything would go to hell. His pack would follow suit – loyal to the end. And humans would see them. And then there would be a giant battle between timber wolves and gray wolves and black wolves – right in the middle of the street in Las Vegas.

  And then, no matter who won, the Council would get involved and someone would have to pay for the mess. And someone would have to clean it.

  It would be bad.

  It had only been seconds since James Valentine had given his leader the news about the territory spell on The August. Seconds was all it had taken for Cole’s entire visage to darken – to change. His power had lashed out wildly, infused with fury and Jake had temporarily been robbed of breath. He could feel the humans around them giving them a wider berth, suddenly crossing the street to avoid them.

  Cole’s eyes had begun to glow like emerald search lights. Lucas Caige had been quick to take off his own mirrored shades and hand them to his boss. Cole had donned them without hesitation.

  But no one was fooled by the temporary cover. Jake knew that there were fangs behind his boss’s lips. And the hands that the alpha had curled into fists at his sides most assuredly bore claws. Jake could smell Cole’s blood. It was pooling in his palms, drawn by his own digging nails.

  “The spell will fall by midnight,” Lily piped in, trying to help. “I’ve been reading about these kinds of things. Most spells like this can’t last more than twelve hours, no matter how good the witch or warlock is.”

  “Caige,” Malcolm turned to the leather-clad wolf. His voice had become a growl behind his barely hidden teeth.

  Jake noticed that Lily Kane backed up when Cole spoke. She sensed the mounting danger, and his low, rumbling growl most likely reminded her of the time that he’d kidnapped her and absconded with her to his cabin in New Mexico two years ago. James Valentine quickly stepped in front of her. It was his job as her guardian, but it was probably also natural.

  Lucas Caige came toward his leader, waiting.