Love Like Cyanide-chapter 5
Alpha idol paranormal romance
«Chapter 4
Chapter 5: Natalie
My eyelids struggle to open as my alarm blares from my phone. I slap the screen a few times to stop the noise, laying back down.
“Just five more minutes…” I murmur, knowing there’s a backup alarm set and trying to get comfortable again.
The feeling of bare flesh that isn't mine startles me awake as quickly as a bucket of ice water would. My cum-drenched evening with the frustrating fuckboi alpha hadn't just been some heat-induced fever dream.
Oh, shit.
Dante is peacefully passed out beside me, looking more beautiful in his slumber than I'm willing to entertain. The alarm didn't disturb him in the slightest. The man sleeps like the dead. If I couldn’t see his chest rising and falling and feel his warmth, I’d think he was a corpse. I’m about to make him into one… I grab his shoulder and give him a firm shake.
“You giant-ass bastard, wake up!” I hiss, barely resisting the urge to yell at him.
He mumbles something under his breath and sits up with a yawn, dragging long fingers through his messy hair. Dark lashes rest against snowy cheeks, and I halfway want to slap him just to make him a little less pretty. But the group has another show this evening, so they have practice and all the things before then. Can’t have him going on stage with a shiner.
“The noises you were making when your mouth was stuffed with my cock were so much better than hearing you bitch first thing.” He covers another yawn with the back of a hand.
I smack him with a pillow, and he flinches from the sneak attack, but doesn’t let it show on his face. “I get up earlier than the rest of you, so you need to bail before anybody knows you were here.” My words come out softer than I intend them to.
He lets out a dry chuckle. “I don’t think I’ve ever had someone kick me out of bed before. First time for everything, I suppose.” He gives me a soft kiss on the forehead and gets up, surprisingly without arguing about it.
He puts his clothes on, the heavy silence between us oppressive and constricting. There’s a knock at the door and I almost jump out of my skin from the sound that overwhelms the electronic hum of the appliances in the room.
Dante walks to the door, slipping on his shoes one at a time as he peers through the peep hole. “Don’t answer that!” I whisper-scream.
He glances over his shoulder at me with a smirk, opening the door and bending down for a second before coming back in. My heart has relocated to my throat, and I want to scream as it pounds painfully, making it hard to breathe. Dante has a box in his hands, wrapped in plastic. He tosses it to me, and I fumble to catch it, almost dropping it.
“What is this?” My eyebrows furrow in confusion, and I try to shake off the last vestiges of sleep.
He quirks a brow at me, clearly more functional before coffee than I am. “A box, obviously. Open the thing and you’ll know, Doc.”
I lean over to the bedside stand, pulling my pocket knife from the drawer without needing to glance at it. Dante gives me a look that I’m not sure is approval, or disdain. “I don’t have fucking fingernails. Don’t judge me,” I mutter under my breath, snapping the blade open.
He crosses his arms and watches as I slice carefully into the packaging and rip it open. Two objects sit inside. The first is a box of hormone suppressant patches, which loudly declare ‘Extra Strength, 24 Hour Delayed Release’ on the front. And the other is a plain black t-shirt, that’s somehow in my size.
“You ordered these. For me?” I look up, way up, at the alpha.
He shrugs, completely unbothered like giving gifts is a normal thing between us. “You’re going to need those patches. Put one on the worst bite on the back of your shoulder, and on your neck where you usually have them.” I nod, not arguing with his authoritative tone. “And the shirt is because I’ve never seen you wear sleeves, the whole time you’ve been with us. You wear a normal tank top like you always do, and everybody’s going to see those bites and know exactly what we’ve been up to.”
I must be zoning out, because he snaps his fingers to bring me back into my body. I make eye contact, buried under the tangled nest of covers with the extremely practical items in my hands. “When did you order these?”
“You were out cold more than once, last night.” No smugness in his tone, merely facts rolling from his tongue.
I nod, looking back down at the patches and shirt. After a moment of quiet, fighting the tears that threaten to spill from my eyes, I swallow and say softly: “Thank you, Dante.”
“An alpha always takes care of his ma—" He trails off with a cough, and I focus on him more fully. “Med team! An alpha always takes care of his med team.” He clears his throat, and I tilt my head curiously. Again, there’s a dusting of pink on his cheeks behind those captivating freckles.
“You’re right, though.” He glances at the clock, trying to cover the blush that I don’t fully understand. “I should go before the others are up and about. See you later, Nat.”
Before I even have the chance to say goodbye, he’s out the door and it shuts behind him. The silence and emptiness of the hotel room are overwhelming. I feel tears run down my cheeks and I touch my fingertips to the moisture, not sure why I’m crying. But it feels right. Must be a side effect of the hormonal insanity of my heat cycle being staunched.
I head into the bathroom, aching in places I didn’t know I had muscles, and stand under the stream of steaming hot water until it starts turning cool. As I run the soap over my shoulders and upper back, I wince as my fingers graze what can only be the bite marks Dante was warning me about concealing.
Drying off a few minutes later, I go to wrap the towel around myself, and glance in the large bathroom mirror to assess the damage. “Holy mother of fuck!”
I wipe condensation from the glass with my palm, not wanting to believe my eyes. Paled bruises shaped like fingers and thumbs skate across my back and ribs, from my shoulder blades and down. But the back of the nape of my neck, where throat and shoulder come together…
He wasn’t kidding. They could almost take dental impressions from the marks on my right shoulder. At least if he killed me in the future, they’d have evidence. And yet… what I felt when he sank his teeth into my flesh didn’t line up with what I could see. It hadn’t hurt when he did it, but he’d clearly chomped down hard enough that he almost broke skin.
But Dante was right… I don’t know much about what being an omega really means. I just know that I need to hide those pheromones. Nothing else had registered to my parents, and they largely ignored my heat cycle symptoms when I was a teenager. They were normal humans, but I wish they would have tried a bit harder to help me understand this genetic quirk of mine.
Seriously, with how much I worked and with how old I already was, and with the other issue that I discovered in my early twenties… Who had time to do research? If all it took to not be off my feet for a week was getting manhandled and banged seven ways ‘til Sunday by an alpha… A girl could cope with that.
I make sure my skin is dry and slap one of the new patches over the marks on my shoulder, sticking another on the opposite side of my neck. Getting dressed, I pull the shirt on and can’t help toying with the bottom hem for a few seconds. It’s just a regular black t-shirt. No name brands or anything blazoned across it. Dante either pays more attention to me than I realized, or he got lucky and guessed. The second patch on my shoulder is totally concealed, and I vow to thank him again, later.
I throw my moist hair into twin French braids and call it good. I grab my gear and hurry to the elevator, wanting to inhale some breakfast before heading off to the venue. My job is primarily to work on the members of Inferno, but if I can make some extra money massaging and stretching the crew? I’d be a fool to pass that up.
~*~
The morning passes in a blur of breakfast, bodies, and more twisted ankles from the stage crew than I’ve ever seen in one sitting. After a chat with management, they agree to do a safety check and make sure all the cables that run backstage are extra secure.
After Haven’s mishap yesterday, the last thing I need is for the guys to be tripping and getting injured because someone didn’t use enough gaffer tape behind the scenes. Is that my job? No. But security and I have an understanding. Primarily that we’re both looking out for the physical wellbeing of the members of the group, so we might as well be allies.
And I can be one hell of a pest, when I have good reason to be. Though she be but little, she has big obnoxious energy.
After having a well-deserved lunch, I’m heading back to my makeshift treatment area. It’s nothing more than a series of accordion walls with a curtain draped across the doorway. Enough privacy for anyone who needs to strip down, but still light and easy to pack up and relocate when we’re constantly on the go.
I’m happily slurping away on an iced coffee, walking up a series of risers. Being an exhausted, distracted dumbass, I plant the arch of my foot on the edge of one of the steps. Everything feels like slow motion as I lose my balance and go over backwards.
This is it. All that work to keep everyone else safe, and my death will come thanks to coffee and temporary stairs. I had a good run…
I brace for the impact, hunching over and hoping my demise will be swift. Rather than slamming into the hard ground, I’m winded by colliding with the unexpected embrace of Valentine.
Dear Universe: you’re a cunt, and I’m so over your bullshit.
His light laughter brings me back from my millisecond of brooding, when I’d been ready to die only a moment before. “First day on your new feet, Doc?”
Christ’s sake… His voice is too powerful from this close, the rumble of it radiating through his chest and into my back. I look up into his coffee brown eyes, glad the heat urges have been diminished. I might have jumped his bones on the spot, otherwise.
“I feel like I’m having a lot of days like that, lately.” I confirm with a little smirk. I glance at the plastic cup still clenched tightly in my hand, the smirk becoming a full-blown grin. “But at least I didn’t spill my coffee!” I take a triumphant sip and Valentine’s responding chuckle warms me down to my toes in a manner most dangerous.
I wonder for a second if maybe the heat isn’t as under control as I thought but then I remember, no… that’s just Valentine. He’s had that effect on me since the first time I saw him in person. I can almost feel a physical pull from his presence, like I’m drawn to him. Similar to the way I feel around Dante, but less prickly.
He helps me right my balance and gives me a disapproving, almost fatherly look as he pats off my shoulders. “You really do work yourself too hard, Doc. We appreciate it, but seriously. You need a vacation as badly as we do, once this tour wraps up.”
I do my damnedest not to wince as his hand claps right down on the now aching bite marks on the back of my shoulder. His eyes narrow and my pulse races, panic rising in the back of my throat. “You know…”
Oh, fuck. Oh, shit. Goddamn. Sonuva— “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you wear a shirt that has sleeves.” Valentine says simply.
I cover my heavy sigh of relief with a laugh and take a long draw of the iced coffee, hoping the slurp hides the color that tries to blossom in my cheeks. “Yeah, that air con back here’s been kinda brutal. It’s fine when I’m working on you guys, but when I’m just waiting around in between sessions, the cooler temp hits me harder.”
It’s not totally a lie, but he doesn’t look like he’s buying the story I’m trying to sell him. He gives me a slow, appraising look that rolls down the length of my body before coming back to meet my eyes with such volcanic heat in his own eyes that I nearly break out in a sweat. “You are a tiny little thing. Makes sense that you’d get cold easy.”
I nod, drinking the coffee way faster than I should be. The caffeine’s going to shred my stomach if I keep using the straw as a prop to hide my embarrassment. I take a step back and give him a half-bow. “Thanks for not letting my crack my head open, Val! See you in a while!”
He gives me an easy smile of dismissal that could melt butter, and I practically jog off to my improvised cubicle. Haven’s up first, so I can spend a bit more time making sure he’s in fighting form. Then I get to cycle through the other six members of Inferno, with Dante and Valentine being last. Dante is going to be a challenge, for sure.