Page 14 of Pin My Alpha
I shove the image away. This isn’t about him. It’s a business analysis. A local establishment with a weak Q4 strategy and an obvious path to revenue diversification. That’s all. I’m not building a PowerPoint. I’m just… ideating.
I flip open the screen. The coffee sits next to me, untouched, going cold. I open a new document and start to type.
Declan
The landlord’s letter is still on the bar, right where I left it. I’ve been staring at the damn thing for an hour, as if my attention alone can make the number next to the words rent increase shrink.
It hasn’t.
The paper is crisp and official, a piece of someone else’s world dropped onto my scarred oak bar top. Clipped to the back is the buyout offer from some hospitality group with a name like a tax firm and a logo that promises ten-dollar light beers. They want to gut this place and turn it into another soulless box for kids with their parents’ money.
They want to erase it. Erase me.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. The bar is always too quiet in the mornings. No jukebox, no arguments over sports, no sound but the hum of the coolers. It smells like lemon disinfectant and the faint, sour ghost of last night’s spilled drinks.
And underneath it all, it smells like him. The scent is everywhere—clinging to the upholstery of the stool beside me,on me. I dragged myself out of a bed that was still warm on his side, the sheets tangled and smelling of sex and a panic so sharp it felt like it was in the back of my own throat.
He’s gone. The Henley I’d left on the chair upstairs is gone with him.
My gaze drops to my own forearm. Just below the cuff of my sleeve, there’s a dark crescent of teeth marks, the skin around it bruised and swollen. He must have done it last night, right at the end, when he was coming apart under me. I barely registered it then.
Now, it throbs. A low, steady pulse that echoes a deep, possessive satisfaction in my gut. It’s a stupid, animal part of my brain that sees the mark and thinks, Good. Mine.
I trace the indentation with my thumb, and the feeling only gets stronger. It’s the worst possible thought to have about a kid I just terrified into running out of my apartment before the sun was even up.
“No,” I mutter, the word swallowed by the silence. It doesn’t change a thing.
I put my teeth in his throat.
He’d said one night, no strings attached. He’d looked me right in the eye, cool and cutting, daring me to misunderstand. I did worse. I understood him perfectly, and when it came down to it, I let some feral part of me take over anyway.
That bite is permanent.
So is the memory of how he looked right after—dazed and soft for one single, brutal second, before the fear slammed back into his eyes. I should have been better. Instead, I made him run.
The front door groans open. I don’t turn around, but the soft clack of boots on the floorboards is familiar.
“Planning on setting that paper on fire with your mind,” Tessa says, “or is this just a new hobby?”
“Morning.”
“That bad, huh?”
I finally look up. Tessa’s got her dark hair shoved into a messy knot, wearing her usual black jeans and a Byrne’s shirt. Her expression is flat enough to scare someone into tipping well. She takes one look at my face, then her eyes drop to my arm.
She stops walking.
I brace for the question, the lecture. Maybe a right hook. She’s known me long enough to know I don’t make messes like this.
But she just walks behind the bar, grabs the coffee pot, and pours a mug for herself without a word. She leans against the counter, takes a long sip, and then looks at my forearm again.
“So that’s a claiming bite,” she says. It’s not a question.
“No shit.”
“Right.” She gives me a look over the rim of her mug. “You want to tell me why you smell like you got mated and then slept for about ten minutes?”
“Didn’t sleep.”
