Page 112 of My Unhinged Alphas
The room is small and dim, one lamp on near the bed, the curtains pulled shut. Cheap carpet. Cheap bedding. Cheap motel art bolted to the wall. Lena is sitting on the bed when we walk in, back straightening the second she sees us. Her eyes move to me first, then Havoc, then Knox again.
She didn’t know we were coming. That much is obvious.
I stop just inside the room and the smell hits me.
Sex.
Not faint. Not imagined. It’s in the air, mixed with stale detergent and old cigarette smoke and the motel’s damp, shut-in smell. Sweat, skin, something warmer underneath it. Fresh enough that it hasn’t had time to disappear.
I don’t react. But I know Havoc catches it too. I don’t even have to look right away. I know because the whole energy beside me changes. Then I do glance over, and there it is. That manic look settling over his face, quick and bright and a little wild, like he’s just been handed something he absolutely shouldn’t enjoy this much.
He doesn’t say a word. That’s what makes it worse.
Lena sees him see it. A flush rises high on her face, not quite shame, not quite anger, but something tight and immediate. Her chin lifts, like she refuses to be the one uncomfortable here. Knox, for his part, doesn’t look at either of them. He shuts thedoor behind us and moves a little further into the room like the smell doesn’t exist, like the bed isn’t rumpled, like none of us can read what happened in the space between him standing outside and Lena sitting there now.
But the room knows. And now so do we.
Havoc drags a hand over his mouth, still silent, still wearing that expression. His eyes flick once from Knox to Lena and back again, amused in a way that promises trouble later.
I decide immediately I hate all of this.
Lena folds her arms. “What?”
“Nothing,” Havoc says, too smoothly.
Which means absolutely something.
Knox shoots him a warning look. “Don’t.”
That only makes the corner of Havoc’s mouth twitch.
I look at Lena again. She’s trying hard to look unaffected, but I can see the tension in her shoulders, the way her fingers tuck into her elbows, the way her gaze won’t stay in one place for long. Then I look at Knox, who still has that locked-down expression he wears when he wants to pretend he’s made of stone.
It would work better if the whole room didn’t smell like him and her.
Havoc exhales through his nose and finally says, “Well. This is interesting.”
For a second, nobody says anything. The silence sits in the room with all the other things nobody wants to name.
I stay by the door because it feels like the right place for me. Not too close. Not too far.
The room is too small for this many people and too full of things nobody is saying. Lena on the bed, arms folded, chin up. Knox standing a few feet from her like he’s trying to look calm enough for both of them. Havoc leaning against the wall with that unreadable half smile of his, watching everything, missing nothing.
And me, standing there feeling something ugly turn over in my chest.
Possessive.
The word hits hard because I hate it the second I think it. Hate what it says about me. Hate how natural it feels anyway.
Everything about me is fucked up. Everything about this life is. Part of me wants to blame Havoc for it. For all of it. Wants to tell myself he pushed me into Lena in the first place, that he got in my head, wound me up, aimed me at her because that’s the kind of shit he does when he’s bored or curious. But standing here now, with the smell of her still in the room and the memory of her body still too easy to pull up, I know that’s bullshit.
He didn’t make me fuck her. I wanted to.
I liked it.
More than liked it.
And what bothers me most is that it didn’t feel dirty when it happened. Didn’t feel wrong. Didn’t feel like I was taking part in one more rotten thing in a life full of them. It felt good. Real. Simple in a way almost nothing ever is. For those minutes, with her under me, everything made a brutal kind of sense.
