Page 59 of Pin My Alpha
The screen goes dark. I stand there, my heart still hammering, listening to the apartment hum around me. The fridge, the old pipes, the faint thumps from the bar downstairs. I can smell Declan everywhere. It’s in my hair, under my nails, baked into the blanket I was just wrapped in.
It’s on my neck.
The claiming mark throbs with a low, steady heat. My fingers find it without me telling them to.
Permanent.
So this is how it happens. All my life, I’ve watched my mother fall for the same man in a different body, the one who promises forever and leaves before rent is due. And here I am, with an alpha’s mark on my neck, in his apartment, wrapped in his blanket.
An amazing strategy.
“Shay.”
Declan’s voice comes from the doorway to the living room. I don’t turn around, just stare at my own faint reflection in the dark window over the sink.
He doesn’t say anything else. He just stands there, his presence filling the space behind me. The silence is worse than a question. It’s patient.
“What happened?” he finally asks, and the quiet concern in his voice is like sandpaper on my nerves.
I turn, because staying silent feels like a different kind of surrender.
He’s pulled on a pair of grey sweatpants, his chest bare and his hair a wreck from my hands and his own. The bite I gave him that first night is a dark mark on his forearm. He looks rumpled and solid and like he belongs here, leaning against the doorframe of his own home.
He looks exactly like the kind of alpha who could convince you he’s different, and a cold dread coils in my gut.
He swallows, and the simple movement of his throat is suddenly the only thing in the room. I’m hyper-aware of the three feet of linoleum between us, of how easy it would be for him to cross it. How much some stupid, broken part of me wants him to. How much I can’t let him.
“It was my mom,” I say. My voice is flat.
“Is she okay?”
“She needs money.” I say it like a challenge.
His expression doesn’t change. It’s not pity. It’s something calmer, steadier. “Okay. Does she need help?”
The question hits me so hard I physically recoil, taking a step back.
His face tightens. “Shay, I just meant—”
“I know what you meant.”
A bitter laugh tears out of my throat. “No, you don’t. You have no fucking idea.”
“I know she upset you.”
“You know she upset me because you can smell it,” I snap. “My scent is probably souring the whole apartment.”
His jaw works for a second. He takes one slow step into the kitchen.
I take one back.
The look on his face isn’t anger. It’s not frustration. It’s a quiet, deep hurt that’s a hundred times worse. He just stops.
“Tell me what you need,” he says, his voice low.
There it is. The offer. The beginning of the end. First it’s help, then it’s a debt. The groceries that get mentioned in a fight, the rent money that means you can’t leave. The care that becomes a cage.
I pull the blanket from my shoulders and let it fall onto a kitchen chair. The scent of him—cedar and whiskey and safety—is suffocating.
