by DD Prince
“Alpha females,” I repeat.
“Most of our females are beta or omega by nature. There are a few alpha females,” Bailey says.
And I think I’ve smelled this one before. I think I might even have encountered her scent as wolf. In my years living only as a wolf, I encountered other wolves, mostly ordinary, non-shifting, who all ran at the sight of me, but once, I caught the scent of a female shifter. I didn’t let her get close. I’m pretty sure it was this woman.
“Take care of Ivy around her,” I order. “I don’t like the feeling in my gut right now.”
She slices her hand up in the air and stops at her right brow, nods at me and then catches up with Ivy, Audrey, Leona, and Sherry.
“Drink?” Riley asks and leads me toward the bar.
I don’t typically drink alcohol. I hated the way it smelled on my uncle. I hated, even more, the way it made him behave.
“I’ll have a beer.” I don’t mind beer too much.
Riley grabs a mug and opens the tap on a barrel that’s on its side, pouring me some.
“More about Mason Quinn, Riley. What the fuck was that?”
“I know it tweaked you, but Mase is solid, man. He’s rock-solid in his loyalty. He got back Monday morning, right after you two went home from the clinic. He was disappointed he didn’t get a chance to meet you. But then, man, he said he didn’t feel right. And he went around in circles all day around the village. He shifted and went in more circles.”
“Who’s his mate?”
“He doesn’t have one. He said he caught a scent of the woman who might be his mate and couldn’t find her to make sure. He knew a trail led to your place and wouldn’t take it.”
“He doesn’t think my Ivy is his.”
Riley winces.
Does he?
I feel my blood heat up, my fists clench. What the fuck?
I repeat myself.
“He doesn’t think she’s his, Riley.”
“Not exactly, he says. He’s confused, though. He’s having trouble figuring it out. I told him, there’s nothing confusing about it. When he smells her, he’ll know it. He knows she’s not his or he would’ve followed that trail straight to Ivy.”
He’s right. He will know it. I had not a doubt. No confusion that Ivy was the woman for me.
I see my woman dancing in a group with Bailey, Sherry, Audrey, Leona, and three other women the range in age from Ivy’s to likely the age of my mother. They all look to be having fun.
My woman moves gracefully, her hair moving, her hips swaying, as she drinks from a clear bottle containing a red liquid.
She catches my eyes and smiles at me, then one of the women, Carrie Blackwood, Bailey’s mother, touches her arm and speaks to her while they continue to all move together to the music.
I like watching my woman dance.
She’s gorgeous. She’s graceful. She’s having fun and looking at me like she loves me.
Does she realize she looks at me that way? She’s done it a lot today. The past few days, really. I catch her watching me. When I’m chopping wood, cutting grass. I’ve seen her watching me when I wake up and get the impression she’s been doing it a while. It feels good to open my eyes to her gazing at me with love written all over her face, her hair all messy, and my fluids leaking from her sore cunt.
I love her more than any man has loved any woman; I’m sure of this.
I won’t let anyone take her from me.
Another song starts and Ivy looks excited as she begins dancing with more confidence, with more of a sway to her hips, with a look on her face like no one is here, just her and the song that she sings the words to.
Something makes the hairs rise on the back of my neck.
I follow the sensation with my eyes and catch sight of Mason Quinn on the opposite end of the barn and he has a glass to his lips and his eyes are on Ivy. My Ivy. He’s drinking whisky by a doorway. I smell it from here. Whisky. Fucking fuck. My back straightens.
He’s watching her and she’s dancing with allure. Her ass is moving to the beat. Her dress shows so much leg. Even her ankles look appealing with all those straps crisscrossing over her feet.
“Wait.” Riley touches my arm, obviously picking up on my mood shift.
I bare my teeth and a growl moves up from my gut, getting caught in my throat.
Riley’s eyes flash with worry. “Let’s talk to him. I’m sure he wouldn’t be here if –”
I swallow it down but I’m already on the move, so Riley doesn’t get a chance to finish.
I see Jason move in on one side of Mason and Joel on the other. As they get there, all eyes are pointed at mine except for Mason’s. He’s still watching Ivy. He’s not even aware I’m coming for him until I get in front of him and stare.
I feel Lincoln and Grey move in step with Riley, flanking me.
“Why are your eyes on what’s mine?”
His eyes meet mine and I see what I can only construe as a flash of challenge in them. His mouth twitches as if he’s about to say something sarcastic.
And something strange occurs to me. It’s almost as if he’s got a right here. That something strange washes straight through me. I can’t label it. I don’t know what the fuck it is.
This guy feels like she’s his. And his feelings are… what… real? Legitimate? I can’t label it. It’s hurting my head. My head is swimming with confusion because in his head, he has a right to look at her and right now he doesn’t fear me. When he met me earlier, he was filled with other emotions. Remorse. Confusion. Conflict. Right now, he doesn’t feel conflict or remorse. Confusion? Yes. But something in addition to that. Entitlement.
The music changes to a new song with a slower tempo and Ivy’s scent is suddenly upon me as she’s right here, reaching for me.
“Hey, handsome. Wanna dance with me?”
He can reach her if he reaches out. She’s between him and I. All he has to do is reach and he could touch her hair, her arm, he could reach out and snatch her.
I watch, as if in slow motion, as he inhales and his eyes change. His pupils grow as he takes in her scent. He’s breathing Ivy into his lungs, into himself. He’s confused about why he’s doing it, but that doesn’t change the fact that he is doing it.
My Ivy.
Blood rushes through my ears and heat shunts through my body as I launch myself at him. He flies backwards with the force of my palms.
I hear gasps as he crashes into a table filled with drinks.
I see red. Only red. Lightning thrusts sharply up my spine, and I haul him off a table he’s landed on and he’s up off the floor in my grasp. I roar in his face with a deafening force that I’ve never had. It’s even more powerful than the day at Cornelius’s corpse.
I want to rip his heart out. His throat. But, first, his eyes. His eyes that touched her. His lungs that are full of her scent. I want to crush it all.
Something is stopping me. Something halts me from crushing his bones to dust.
He submits, curling into himself, showing me his throat.
I roar again, and I half-shift while the noise is still blaring from my mouth.
The floor shakes beneath us with the force of my anger and my teeth have extended. My jaw is inches from his throat.
Something inside prevents me from closing my teeth around it and ending his life. Something. What?
And there she is. At my feet, cowering, eyes wild with fear.
She’s mine.
Only mine.
I drop him and rip the shirt from my body before I go for my fly.
I need her.
I need to fill myself with her. I need the warmth of her skin against my heart. She’ll smell like me and he’ll see. He’ll watch me take her, knot her, he’ll know that she’s mine. Mine only.
Mine. Fucking. Only.
I stare into his eyes, which are filled with pain as he watches me, immobile. I push her to her belly on the floor and line up, rip her panties sideways, and haul her back by them because
she tries to move away. I then spear into her from behind. My cock has never been harder. Her cunt has never felt better.
She’s trying to claw the floor, trying to get away. I sink my teeth into the back of her neck and hold her there until she stops squirming. And then I release my hold at her throat as I stare at him while I fuck her. I throw my head back and roar as I thrust my cock inside my mate, over and over, grunting as I feel her body around me. She’s mine. This beautiful little sprite is only mine. I feel her tightness around my cock as I ram up inside her with a slow and rhythmic pace. I show Mason Quinn that she belongs to me. Only me.
His eyes are bleeding. He stares at me with blood trickling down his face, regret washed across his features.
I roar, blowing his hair back with the force of it.
He needs to see that she comes beautifully for me. That she loves what I do to her. That I will be the only one to do these things to her.
I flip her to her back and thrust back inside.
“Mine!” I shout at him in a guttural tone that comes from the pit of my being. The very center of me. It’s not just me as man, it’s also my wolf telling him she belongs only to me.
I would kill him now, while I continue to fuck her, if I could. Slam my cock in her while my teeth tears his flesh apart, devouring him so that he’s part of me every time I fuck her from now on. Why can’t I reach out and rip him apart? It doesn’t make sense. Is it because he’s in a submissive pose? Something is physically preventing me from ending him.
He needs to know.
So, I knot.
I knot because I know he has never knotted. He’s not expanding inside her; I am. He has no idea how good this feels.
I do.
I knot so he can watch how beautifully my mate comes for me.
She won’t ever come for him. He won’t ever know what this feels like.
She’s crying out and I laugh. I laugh and then I halfway shift again to show him who I am. I’m man. I’m wolf. I’m both. I’m his alpha. His superior. And she’s mine. Fucking mine.
When I finish knotting her, I’ll kill him.
I roar out as I come inside her.
She’s on the floor under me, coming for me. Her beautiful pussy spasms around my knot and her entire body is wracked with tremors from the force of it.
I grunt as I continue to spill into her. It feels incredible to know he sees. He sees how she comes for me; he sees that she’s mine only.
I reach for her hair to make sure he can also see my mark on her. So all of them can see. For the past moments, it’s been no one in this room for me but me, my mate, and Mason Quinn. But they’re all still here. I feel their presence. I’ll show them her mark so that if any of them get any inkling of fantasy about my Ivy, about being me, they’ll know that she’s mine. Even that alpha woman will know. Ivy Adeline Savage is mine and I am hers.
My eyes catch sight of my hand and I realize I’m still half-shifted. I pull it back and everything recedes.
My knot releases and my fluids spill from her.
I exhale and it feels like the first exhale since I saw his eyes on her. My eyes move to the floor.
To my Ivy.
My Ivy who is beneath me, leaking my fluid from between her beautiful legs in her pretty dress. She’s bleeding. Blood on her knees. Blood on her hands. Blood between her beautiful legs.
Her face. It’s wrong. It’s so very wrong.
Horror washes over me.
38
Ivy
He’s Tyson again. He’s looking at me like I’m actually here, like he actually sees me and it’s dawning on him, what he’s just done.
I need out. I need away. There are so many eyes on me. So many saw him fuck me, saw him turn into that monster and fuck me while he was a monster. He wasn’t a wolf. He was wolf-like, but not.
I know he’s torn me. Torn me between my legs and my blood is mixed with his semen coating my inner thighs.
There are so many sets of eyes on me. And they’re all sad.
Sad, sad eyes. Except his. His irises were red, and his eyes are filled with rage. Or they were. Now, I don’t know.
I can’t look.
I see sadness now but saw horror in the other eyes all around me. Vertigo makes them all sway, makes them look like they come closer, grow larger, and then move farther away and shrink.
Bailey is crying. Cat has her arms around her, and Cat’s eyes are haunted. His mother. His mother saw all of that.
I cover my face with my hands, which are bleeding, from when I was trying to crawl away. He threw me aside when he went after that guy and I have splinters in my hands from the rough wood floor. And my knees, too, from when he dragged me back by my thong. I can’t even feel that pain yet because I’m just… I can’t look at their eyes anymore.
A sliver from my palm pokes my cheek. I pull my bleeding hands away and blink at them.
I’m up and moving. He has me; he’s carrying me out of there. Voices fill my ears, but I don’t know what they’re saying.
It’s bedlam all around me.
There’s shouting. Tyson is shouting over his shoulder at the guy that’s on the floor, the guy with the bloody streaks on his face. The guy Tyson threw. The guy I thought Tyson was going to kill.
There are other men crowding us, trying to calm Tyson down.
I curl into myself and squeeze my eyes tight, trying to block it all out. I can’t comprehend this. I can’t.
***
I smell citrus furniture polish and I hear low voices talking.
I’m under blankets, in a soft cloud.
My eyes open. I guess I fainted.
And then I woke while Cat tended to the bleeding and splinters. She also rewrapped my ankle, telling me in a soft and motherly voice that I can ditch the ankle bandage the next day, ditch all the bandages the next day. And then I fainted again, I think. I don’t even know…
And everything slams into me with the force of a brick wall that I’ve driven straight into.
One second I’m asking him to dance, the next, he’s throwing me behind him, and I fall as he attacks someone he threw about ten feet away, then he roared so loud that it deafened me, it felt like an earthquake shook the room. Before the noise and shaking stopped, he was undressing and turning me to my belly.
I thought for a second before I got spun around that he was taking his clothes off to shift, to fight as a wolf against that guy he’d roared at, but then he’s on me, spearing into me from behind. In front of dozens upon dozens of people in a crowded barn dance.
Bailey told me that after those awards ceremonies the younger ones were leaving and thank God for that because that meant no small kids or younger teens would’ve seen that.
Seen me.
Me.
Getting screwed in public.
Seen me fighting to crawl away, only to get dragged back by my red lace thong, in front of everybody. Pain sliced through me as I was dragged. I had splinters from the wood floor in my palms, in my knees.
And the thing he became when he flipped me, and that knot filled me and began vibrating inside me?
He was Tyson, but also the black wolf. At the same time. Like the definition of a two-legged wolf man instead of a wolf down on all fours. Hair everywhere, though not as thick. His nose halfway between man and animal.
And his hands were like his normal hands, but larger.
And his body heat? Like I was inside of an oven with him while he did that to me.
And it was like I wasn’t there. He was losing it. He was growling and snapping his teeth at the other guy while he thrust into me over and over.
And it was horrible. Every second of it.
Especially when my body turned on me and without a choice because of that vibrating and pulsing thing inside me I was climaxing.
Climaxing!
Climaxing in front of everyone while on the floor. I climaxed so hard beneath that monster who fucked me hard while holding me down with his giant hands. In front of ev
eryone. I cried out an orgasm with my eyes tight shut because I didn’t want to look at them. Didn’t want to look at Bailey, his mother, his fucking grandparents who were probably still there, too.
My neck hurts, too; I think he broke skin when he held me down with his teeth to it.
I whimpered and writhed under him, crying out as his hot cum filled me, spilled from me. And while he was still coming, he began licking at that spot on my neck, laughing while I was writhing like a come-drunk slut under him.
I’m mortified. Horrified.
And my heart is absolutely shattered.
A sob tears out of me.
“Ivy?” Tyson’s leaning over me, trying to talk to me.
Tyson. Tyson who did that to me.
My eyes open and I scream. I scream at the sight of him and then I’m running.
I’m running and others are moving sideways to let me go.
He chases me and catches me in the hallway, hooking an arm around my waist from behind, lifting me high and scooping under my knees with his other arm so he can pull me high and tight against his chest. He’s carrying me back, making ‘shh’ sounds.
“Purr for her, Tyson,” an older man’s voice orders.
Tyson starts doing that as he approaches the bed and I go from struggling to lax. I’m bawling into the hard chest that I’m plastered against and can’t break free from as he gets into the big sleigh bed in his parents’ bedroom in that beautiful castle-house, keeping me tight in his arms. Rocking me. Rocking me and his chest vibrating that soothing sound straight through me.
I’m trembling so hard. And I can’t stop. My body aches from how much. It’s like convulsions.
“Harder, Ty,” the male voice urges, and the sound gets louder. The sensation in my chest gets heavier along with my limbs.
My eyes drift shut as I feel like a warm blanket wraps tight around me. That blanket is Tyson.
39
