by Hettie Ivers
Oh. My—
“Fuck—this was a mistake.”
That disturbingly ironic sentiment burst forth from Kai—my suddenly terrifying Stranger-Danger hook-up—just before another sustained growl rolled up his chest and reverberated through the alley.
You think? Way to steal the words from my choked throat.
“Christ—can’t hold it … so good … so right. Fuck. Promised myself I wouldn’t kill you …”
I was sure I was about to die as a continuous stream of bizarre, gravelly expletives erupted from my sexy doctor-slash-stalker-slash-beast-of-the-night as he kept impaling—and choking—me. His hips ground and jerked erratically against my ass, pressing me flush against the cold, hard brick building.
My hands yanked frantically at the giant hand—paw—squeezing my throat as deep, loud, animalistic grunts and growls sounded behind me.
He was coming. That much was obvious. Even with the terror of my own mortality staring me in the face, I’d have to have been a true corpse already to have missed the signs—much less the physical sensations—as his huge cock swelled and hot cum flooded my insides.
And as frightening as my present predicament was, my own dumb cunt didn’t recognize the danger. Nope, it was too busy convulsing all over again—rejoicing in the best fucking of its soon-to-be-over young life—milking the fattest, longest cock it had ever taken for as much time as it had left. (Way to go, girl.)
With my face smushed up against the brick wall and my body growing weak from lack of oxygen, I gave up trying to break his immovable hold on my throat in favor of raking my fingernails as hard as I could across the wrist and forearm attached to said hand obstructing my airway.
I felt his lips move against the back of my head, heard him groaning, “Stop,” over and over into my hair as consciousness began to ebb away.
At first, I thought he was talking to me, telling me to stop scratching him, but then his grip relaxed around my throat and I heard him murmuring in a soft, penitent voice, “Please don’t hurt her … please don’t hurt her. You can do this … you don’t have to hurt her …”
His whispered words were laced with disgust, weighted by doubt and self-loathing. He was talking to himself.
Boy, could I pick ’em.
Slowly, he loosened his grip around my neck, allowing my chin to dip. I shifted from my cheek onto my forehead against the brick wall. My mouth fell open and my lungs filled with blessed air.
“I’m sorry.” He pressed a kiss to the top of my bent head as I wheezed and gulped in oxygen. “Ah, God, I’m sorry. I couldn’t stop … I never meant to … it’s okay … you’re okay … I didn’t kill you …”
31
Lauren
Gentle fingers stroked my abused throat. It was easy to tell myself I’d only imagined it in my panicked state that those same fingers had been clawed moments ago.
What the fuck had just happened?
I’d just experienced the best orgasms of my life was what had happened. But that was one scary-kinky rollercoaster ride I wouldn’t be lining up for twice.
I needed to get out of here. Now. First thing tomorrow, I’d hit the nearest clinic for a morning-after pill. Holy shit, he’d come inside of me. How had I let that happen? I’d always been so careful about safe sex before.
Kai’s arms tightened around me—as if he’d sensed my need to flee. “I’ll make it all better. I swear.” His breath came in hot bursts against the back of my neck as his mouth moved lower, kissing the top of my spine. “You’ll be fine. I’ll fix anywhere that hurts. Just tell me where you hurt.”
Was I worse off than I realized? He sounded panicked that he’d caused me damage. Or perhaps he was embarrassed that he’d lost control and gotten rough.
And had grown claws.
Don’t go there.
“We’re cool.” My words came out raspy, more than a little breathy as he started kissing the tender spot on my earlobe where he’d bitten me. “But you definitely owe me a new blouse,” I said in an attempt to inject some levity—and distract myself from the truth of what I had just seen and experienced. Had he actually muttered something about not killing me a moment ago?
He sucked my whole earlobe into his mouth, and my inner muscles fluttered in response—drawing my attention to the unmistakable fact that I still had a huge, steel-hard dick inside me. Wow. I really was going to feel that stretch for days. Or a lifetime.
How was he still completely hard? “Have to get back to Abbie,” I managed to murmur. “It’s been um … fun.”
It had almost sounded before as if he’d been surprised that he hadn’t killed me. Or … proud. Had I heard that right?
Oh, Christ … it was all coming back to me now. As he’d been choking me, he’d said that he’d promised himself he wouldn’t kill me.
His hand skated down my stomach to my sex, and his fingers glided through the slickness of our combined fluids before sliding back up to gently circle my clit.
My eyes fluttered shut as I felt my body responding, releasing more fluid as my insides eagerly pulsed and clenched around him, all but begging for another rough fucking.
But despite the fact that my body was crazy, I wasn’t entirely. “Have to go now,” I repeated. This wasn’t safe.
His other hand cupped my breast, his thumb stroking my hard nipple. “No.”
For a split second, I was sure I had to have misheard him say no to me with such unabashed authority. Then he doubled down. “I can’t let you go, Lauren.”
Okay. Okay. Don’t panic.
But I couldn’t think straight with his hands on me—with his massive organ still intermittently pulsing and jerking inside me. “Um … you’re really not supposed to say that to a woman when she—”
“I need more. We need more. Please. I promise I can do it without hurting you. Please, let me try …”
My head was spinning—dizzy from so much … sudden oxygen? Huge cock? Stalker-doctor freakfest? Take your pick. Yet I was lucid enough to know only an idiot would sign on for more with a guy who’d just strangled her. And had grown claws.
And had to make promises to himself about not killing her.
“I—it’s been … a long while … for me.” His quiet admission sounded sincere as he struggled for words. “I can do better. I’ll make it better for you … this next time. Please?” That one word managed to sound both hopeful and sad, coming from a place that seemed beyond lost and wanting.
His plea was oddly humbling. I was the world’s greatest fool.
“It’s just … you feel so … fucking divine.” He kissed the top of my head as his dick flexed within me. “You’re like nothing I’ve experienced before. It’s as if I’m locked in a chokehold I never want to escape from … a perfect velvet embrace that I can never get enough of. I want to live out the rest of my days inside you …”
Aw, hell. What was one night of dangerous sex in an alley with a potentially psychotic killer wolverine creature who hadn’t been laid in a while? I mean, it sounded like he’d really convinced himself he didn’t want to kill me.
I nodded subtly, rationalizing to myself that I couldn’t have gotten away from him even if I’d wanted to. Not with his monster erection still impaling me.
His heavy exhale stirred my hair, and a small place in my heart, as he whispered, “Thank you.”
I’d been right: he did need me to save him. I just hadn’t imagined it’d be my vajayjay that would provide the actual lifeline. It was strangely sweet. And all sorts of crazy.
Because I knew I’d seen him grow claws. And as I thought about it now, it occurred to me that his brown eyes glowed blue whenever it looked like he might go meshuggeneh.
Please don’t be a werelock. Please don’t be a werelock. My desperate mind clung to the fact that his friend and colleague Milena was so unbelievably nice. Milena didn’t seem like the type to get mixed up with werelocks. Then again … her husband Alex was the personification of suspiciously good-looking.
Can�
��t think about it now.
“You need to stop touching me, Lauren. Place your palms against the building.”
Kai’s sudden, albeit gently worded directive jolted me from my thoughts, and it took a moment to realize that I was, in fact, touching him—my fingers absently stroking his forearm that was banded around my ribs. I froze.
He kissed my shoulder. It felt like an apology. “It’s … safer.” His lips brushed my cheek. “While I do this.”
God help me, but I did as he asked and flattened my palms against the brick wall. I felt him twitch and expand inside me in response. He liked it when I followed his orders. There might’ve been something in me that liked it too.
With a muffled groan, he gripped my hips and slowly pulled out of me. Oh, wow. That was gonna leave an ache. I felt the loss of him immediately.
Suddenly, I was cold. Shivering. Or maybe I’d been shivering this whole time and I just hadn’t noticed. Either way, the abrupt chill and emptiness I felt shifted my perspective on things. Behind me, I heard him breathing heavily, making strange little rumbling noises in his throat like he was in pain—or struggling with something—as he removed his hands from my hips.
What the hell was I doing? I was standing mostly naked in an alley in Seattle at nighttime in the dead of winter. My mom had gone off the rails and was speeding toward a total breakdown. This was no time to be having unsafe sex in an alley with a guy who might very well be an SGLP!
If I didn’t get myself killed tonight, I was sure to catch pneumonia. Now more than ever, I needed to stay focused and be the responsible, parentified child that I was. I had to storm Mel Novak’s office tomorrow and lay down the law with my absentee father to get Babs the help that she needed.
It was time to find Abbie. And get out of here.
I glanced down at my shredded blouse hanging from my shoulders. Shit. Where was my bra? A few inches from my left foot, I spotted my little pink wristlet lying on the filthy asphalt next to my wrecked underwear. Omigosh.
I made a quick move to dart down and snatch my wristlet and undies from the ground, but the moment my hands came off the brick wall, I found myself flattened against the side of the building—a growling beast of a man’s naked body pressing against me from behind.
“My wristlet!”
I hadn’t meant to scream it, but he’d startled me. Unfortunately, my scream seemed to set him off even more, because he growled and clamped one palm over my mouth while the other slammed straight into the brick next to me, sending huge chunks of it crumbling to the ground.
My first instinct was to freeze—to not move a muscle and just wait for him to calm down. But that sense was accompanied by the intuition that he was somehow more animal predator than man at present, and he was reacting to what he viewed as my attempt to flee from him. Which basically meant he saw me as his prey. And it was that notion which caused my fight-or-flight response to kick in big time.
I really should’ve stuck with my first instinct, though, because as I began to struggle, I quickly realized that not only was it futile, but it was calling out his beast. And not figuratively, either.
One moment I was being forcibly subdued against a brick wall by a naked, growling man in a dimly lit alley in Seattle, and in the next, I found myself on the frozen ground of a dark ice cave with a ginormous white wolf snarling down at me.
Being instantaneously transported somewhere via a magical means that violated the laws of matter and energy was terrifying on its own. Being growled at from the frozen ground of a frigid dark cave by the colossal wolf form of the werelock who had transported me here was the stuff of absolute nightmares.
And, not gonna lie, the realization I’d broken my three-semester dry spell in an alley with the self-same beast who was now snapping his jaws at me like I was dinner, was for sure going to irrevocably scar me for the remaining seven and a half minutes or so of my life.
But not one of those things was as devastating to my psyche as the knowledge that it wasn’t just any werelock who I’d been fooled into thinking was simply some uptight stranger-danger-widower-stalker-doctor human with a super-kinky-alley-sex-choking fetish. It was my werelock: the very same white wolf pup from my visions.
Although I had never received visions of him as an adult wolf, I’d recognize him anywhere. And I’d immediately sensed that it was the white wolf pup’s cave into which Kai had so unceremoniously dropped me before bursting from his human form.
But just as I was emerging from my initial state of paralyzed shock to embrace the mother of all panic attacks, the white wolf vanished.
32
Lauren
It may have only been ten minutes that I’d sat shivering on the floor of the cave with my arms wrapped tightly around my bare knees that were tucked to my naked chest. But it felt like an eternity. Once the echoes of the white wolf’s horrific growls and snarls had died down, the eerie silence that descended after his departure was deafening.
I remembered reading in middle school science class about how caves were known for being some of the quietest places on earth. I recalled my teacher saying that a normal speaking voice could carry for a quarter of a mile through a cave because of the echo. Or something like that. I hadn’t really been into that class. Had I known that I might die all by my lonesome in a cave one day, I might’ve paid better attention back then and read rather than skimmed those cave chapters in my science textbook.
What did ghosts have against haunting caves? I sensed not one single spirit. After having so many ghosts hassling me constantly over the past week, it was unnerving not to hear any of them now. I doubted DDTTB would find me in here. Which was for the best, I decided, since I’d take the silence over listening to the Weird Sisters jabber on about Maribel as I froze to death.
Absent the arctic wolf’s glowing eyes and bright white coat to light the space around him, I couldn’t see for shit inside the cave. I supposed living here had worked fine for a magical wolf creature who could see in the dark, but the darkness of the cave was absolute misery for me. Even once my eyes had adjusted, I could barely make out more than my own hand in front of my face.
I felt rock and earth beneath my frozen bum as I shivered in place. And ice. I was locked inside an icy mountainside somewhere—the same frozen terrain from my visions in which I’d witnessed Kai die as a werelock pup over and over again. If he didn’t return for me soon, I was going to die here too. Only I wouldn’t be regenerating.
Any immediate relief I’d felt at the threatening white wolf’s magical exit had been short-lived. In my head, I began to contemplate which would be the worse way to die: hypothermia or mutilation by a werelock in his giant, angry wolf form. I loathed being cold, and I couldn’t recall how long it took to die of hypothermia or what the stages were, but I knew that in the final stages before a person fell into a comatose state, they went from freezing to feeling like their bodies were on fire. Not so appealing. On the flip side, I remembered some nature show saying that wolves ate their prey while they were still alive, so …
The silence in the cave was so stark that after a while, I started to hear the faint sound of wind moving, and the occasional, intermittent drop of water echoing from someplace that sounded far away. So when I heard the soft ping sound of a calendar reminder popping up on my phone, my racing heart jumped so hard in my chest I just about fell over. The sound was accompanied by my wristlet lighting up on the ground a few feet away as the screen on my phone inside of it came on.
Unlocking my frozen limbs, I quickly grabbed it before the light went off again. Finding the wristlet in the cave renewed my sense of hope. Not because I harbored some idiot notion of securing a rescue. The chances of the phone having a signal were nil, and the odds of anyone being able to locate and get to me in time, the same. It was the fact that Kai had grabbed it for me while in his angered, predator state that gave me hope he would come back soon to save me rather than to eat me alive in his wolf form. Maybe he’d only left to go calm his beast nature down
?
My numb fingers were so sluggish it was hard to work the zipper. Once I got my phone out, it took several tries for my uncoordinated digits to input my screen code. As predicted, the phone had no signal inside the cave, but it would give me blessed light. I went straight to the flashlight button and turned it on.
There wasn’t anything to see but rock and ice in the space directly in front of me, so I began to scoot in a circle on my bum in order to get a 360 view of the space.
The first pile of old bones I spotted against the cave wall was unsettling—to say the least. By the second stack, I felt my stomach turn with renewed fear and my eyes burn with unshed tears. But I reassured myself that they didn’t appear to be human bones at all, and in my visions, I had seen the white wolf drag all those animals here to try and save them. Perhaps these were their remains? Or maybe he just buried his bones in a cave rather than a backyard like a domesticated canine.
It wasn’t until I got to the third macabre pile of bones that my psyche really suffered a massive setback. Because to the immediate right of the third pile of bones, “Lauren” had been clawed into the cave wall in giant letters.
Kai chose that very moment to magically reappear—in his naked human form and cursing a blue streak. I dropped the phone to the ground in my panic, but the flashlight still shone brightly enough to spotlight the evidence that I might actually be in a werelock serial killer’s lair.
He strode straight over—dropping F-bombs all the way—and crouched down in front of me, blocking my view of my name etched on the wall. His palm was so hot it burned my cheek as he cupped my face in his hand. The fingers of his other hand found the pulse in my neck. I noted that his irises were brown.