Alpha's Last Fight: A Paranormal Shapeshifter BBW Romance (3 page)

While a wolf would rip a man to shreds more often than not, it was no match for a man with the strength and speed of a wolf. For Quinn to shift so early in the fight was as shocking to the crowd of onlookers as it was to me.

I glanced sideways and caught a glimpse of Sabine’s eyes. She knew as well as I did that this was all over. I allowed myself the luxury of wondering for a moment if she was aware of her part in it.

Quinn stood with his front paws on my chest. Specks of hot drool splashed against my face as he snarled and snapped in an attempt to exert some sort of dominance. I bared my teeth and snarled back, before throwing myself forwards and wrapping an arm around his neck, pulling him to the ground and pinning him there. His jaws rendered useless, he kicked against me, claws gouging the skin of my thighs and shredding my shorts.

I didn’t give in. I held him there as the crowd chanted to five. And I held him still as he shifted back, from wolf to man.

It was hard to take it all in. I hadn’t expected it to be easy. It was like he’d given up when he’d smelled Sabine on me. It was kind of tragic. I guess. For him anyway. I felt… I wasn’t sure how I felt.

The crowd had gone strangely quiet. That was odd. They were never quiet after
he
won. Or Gina. Or any of the fighters. Even me, the times I’d won against lesser opponents. They’d shout my name as I strutted around the ring, milking the moment for all it was worth.

Someone pulled me off him and Sabine ran to his side. She had tears in her eyes, but to be honest, he looked kind of happy. Like a weight had been lifted. He’d have to leave. They always did. I guess she’d be going with him. I’d miss her, but there were others.

“Holy shit Hutch. You did it.”

Gina was crouched beside me. She looked a little pale. Suddenly everything seemed like a big deal to everyone and it felt like I wasn’t in on it.

“Yeah sure. I won.”

“You know what this means?”

I shrugged. I did. But it hadn’t really sunk in.

“Are you kidding me Hutch? You won. You’re pack leader now.”

She was right. I knew, of course I knew. But I had just been focused on winning the fight. For the sake of winning. For the sake of being the best and showing everyone I was the best. The pack leader stuff, I’m sure it would come as naturally as everything else.

“Gina… you know what this means?”

“What?”

“You get to fuck the pack leader tonight.”

I expected a grin. At least a little smile. But I was met with a stony glare. She put her hands on her hips.

“Christ, Hutch, you’re such an asshole. This isn’t all about your cock, you know. This is serious. These are responsibilities you can’t fuck your way out of.”

“I can try. Ow!… ouch…
shit…
cut it out!”

Gina rained down a hail of blows on me. As much as Gina likes to think she can do playful… she can’t do playful. She just isn’t built for it. Her punches
hurt
.

“I’m serious, asshole. This is our life. This is a huge change. For those of us who choose to stay, at least. And not everyone will stay, you know? Believe it or not, there are people who don’t buy into your warrior poet ‘we fight we fuck’ bullshit.”

Gina was sounding a lot like Sabine now, and it was starting to annoy me. I loved them both. I loved them all. But none of them knew what it was like to be an alpha. To be born to lead. They needed to trust me. They all needed to trust me.

“So…”

“Look,” she said. She was calmer now, her voice almost tender. “I’m not saying I don’t want to fuck the pack leader tonight. Although, if you must know, it won’t be the first time I’ve fucked the pack leader, so it may not be as big a deal as you think it is.”

OK
. That came as a bit of a surprise to me.

“I’m just reminding you that this,” she gestured wildly around us with her hands, “
is
a big deal.”

I nodded and grinned and told her exactly how we were going to celebrate how big a deal this was. Her eyes went wide, but she didn’t say no. They never did.

Turns out they were both right. Sabine and Gina.

I was too young. I wasn’t ready. But Sabine didn’t stick around long enough to say
I told you so.

Gina was right, too. I was an asshole. For better or worse, I still am.

Chapter Three

Natalie

It was like I was driving through a photograph or a movie set. The whole neighborhood looked unreal, as though it had been taken down years ago, packed away, and then hastily resurrected for my homecoming.

The streets seemed narrower. A bush had been planted, a tree cut down. At the house on the corner, a gate swung rusty and crooked on one hinge. The lawns here stretched out brown and dusty, crabgrass clawing its way around the edges of the dirt.

Coming home made me ache in ways I hadn’t expected. My fingers squeezed tighter on the steering wheel as I pulled up to the single-story house and parked on the street. The house was smaller than I remembered, the paint yellowed and peeling off of the windowsills. As I got out, I heard the screen door slam and looked up to see my dad coming down the front steps.

“Nat! The prodigal daughter returns!”

“Hey, Pops!”

His arms wrapped around me, and I hugged him back carefully. He had always seemed like a mountain of a man, but every visit shocked me more as his age started to show. His hair had thinned out so that I could see patches of his scalp. The skin on his hands was wrinkled like tissue paper. And his arms, strong enough to pick me up and toss me in the air when I was a child, had dwindled to… respectably flabby, I think was how he called it.

I only hoped that he’d be strong enough to get through the surgery.

“How was the trip?” he asked.

“Great, great.”

“You want to pull up into the driveway?”

“Nah,” I said, shaking my head. “The darn thing’s leaking oil.”

“We’ll have to put it up and take a look this weekend,” he said.

I could see the spark of curiosity in my dad’s eyes as he glanced over at my old Passat. If anyone was a fixer-upper, it was my Pops. Never mind that it took him more time and money to fix the things himself.

“Where’s your truck?” I asked.

“Oh, that. Had to sell it.”

“Sell it? I thought you just refinanced.”

“Damn hospitals keep pushing me around with the bills. You know they charge you for having a five minute talk with a doctor now? At least she was pretty enough, heh!” My dad reached for my suitcase but I picked it up, waving him off. For once, he didn’t argue.

“Let me talk to them about the money,” I said. Anger crept into the edges of my words. If he’d kept his old insurance, he would have been fine. Two missed payments, though, and he’d lost his coverage.

“It’s nothing, it’s nothing. I’m doing fine by myself. Just this damn surgery coming up is all. At least it’s a good excuse for you to come visit, huh?”

“Everything looks different around here,” I said.

“You haven’t been back in a while! Why don’t you come visit more often? You don’t miss your old man?”

“You know I love you, Pops,” I say, dodging the question. He didn’t push it. I looked down the street one last time as I stepped up onto the porch. A newspaper blew into the gutter. Somewhere in the alley a dog was barking.

This was home again, at least until my dad recovered from the operation. I took a deep breath and walked through the door.

“Watch your step,” my dad said. I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the dark interior of the house. “I haven’t—I haven’t had a chance to do much cleaning around here.”

I didn’t say anything, but my eyes must have said something for me.

Empty cans and fast food containers littered every available countertop and flat surface. Boxes piled up into every corner. I stepped forward and knocked into a stack of magazines. There was a half-eaten pizza sitting on what should have been the coffee table but instead consisted of two large cardboard boxes with a piece of plywood on top.

“Sorry—sorry about the mess. The Andersons down the street got foreclosed on,” my dad said, looking across the room with my eyes. He rubbed his temple with one hand. “I told them I’d keep their stuff for a while, until they found a bigger place. They’re all in a one bedroom now and... well, they just don’t have room.”

You don’t have room either
, I thought to myself. Instead, I forced myself to smile.

“I’ll help clean up,” I said. I looked around. There was so much stuff piled on top of stuff that I couldn’t tell what was garbage and what wasn’t.

“Oh, Nat, you don’t need to do that. I cleared out a bit of space for you in your old bedroom. Here, I’ll let you get settled. Grilled cheese okay for lunch?”

“Sounds great,” I said, in a tone more cheery than I actually felt. This place was a garbage pit, and everything seemed to be closing in on me from all corners.

I tiptoed through the mess to the back of the house and pushed open my bedroom door. Behind me, my dad clanked pans in the kitchen and I heard the sizzle of butter on the stove.

In front of me was my childhood.

There were boxes in here, of course—where weren’t there boxes?—but my dad had shoved them to one side of the room and left me a path.

My desk stood on the side of my bed, the corkboard still covered with notes and scraps of watercolor paintings I had done in school. I tossed my suitcase at the bottom of the bed and came back to the desk. The wood veneer was coated in a thick layer of dust that came off in a streak of darkness when I ran my finger across the top.

Rubbing the dust off of my fingertips, I moved my gaze to the medals and awards pinned to the wall above my bed. Most of the prizes were academic—a poetry contest, an art gallery exhibition prize for a self-portrait I’d done in pastels. There was only one sports award among them – a third grade ribbon for scoring first place in a croquet tournament. I smirked: I’d kept it up as my sole athletic accomplishment.

Remembering something, I opened the top drawer of my desk. My fingers slid to the back of the drawer, searching for the one picture I had thought to save from high school. At first I thought it was gone, but then my fingertips found the edge of the photo and I pulled it out.

Me and Tommy, standing in our graduation robes the day we’d gotten them at school. His arm was around me, his smile crooked, his dark hair flopping over one eye. That was the week before prom, the week before—

I tossed the photograph back and slammed the drawer shut. If the room had seemed small before, it was utterly stifling now. My heart beat faster and I could sense the monster in me creeping up from below the surface.

Not now. Not now.

I scrounged through my suitcase and pulled out my watercolors. Tucking them under my arm, I left my bedroom.

“The best grilled cheese in the world!” my dad announced. He pulled two plates from the countertop and brushed old crumbs off of them before setting them down on the kitchen table. I could still see the smears of an old meal on the rim of the plate.

“Dad, I’m not...I’m not feeling well,” I said. “Mind if I take mine to go?”

“Not even two minutes she’s here and already she’s trying to get away from me?” My dad smiled, but I could see he was hurt. The monster poked me in the back, and I winced.

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t think I can...” I waved my hand in the air, trying to explain what I could never explain to him.

“Oh. Sure,” he said. “Is it, you know, your little problem?”

My little problem.
That was what he called it. Not the disease that turned me into a brutal animal. Not the genetic condition that my mom had given me, the worst kind of gift I could imagine. Not the thing that drove me away from town and shattered the only relationship I’d ever had. No.

My little problem.

“I just need to be alone a while. Paint a bit, you know.”

“In your bedroom?”

“No, I—”

My voice cut off as my breath caught in my throat. Just thinking about my old bedroom, where Tommy and I had hung out, made me nauseated. My body began to react, my muscles twitching, and my dad must have caught the scared look on my face, because he tried extra hard to be nice.

“Sure. There’s space in the garage, maybe, if you move the tool bench over.”

“Thanks,” I winked and nabbed the grilled cheese sandwich off of the pan with a paper towel before he could put it down on the dirty plate. “Best grilled cheese in the universe, dad.”

“Nat,” he said, and then stopped. He reached out and squeezed my arm. “It’s good to have you home.”

“Good to be home,” I lied.

***

There was actually plenty of space in the garage, if you counted the empty spot under the table saw as space. With a few strategic moves of the boxes and the tool bench, I had a little square of free space under the table that itself was piled high with heavy Rubbermaid tubs I didn’t dare move. There was a couch just next to it, again, covered in boxes.

Looking for a better source of light, I pulled over a work lamp and tilted it so it would shine underneath the table. The warm yellow light would work much better than the ugly fluorescent tubes installed in the ceiling. I turned off the garage lights and the lamp shone happily under the table, illuminating a nice small spot. It was dark everywhere else, and you couldn’t even see the mess piled up on all of the other sides. Perfect.

Munching the grilled cheese as I went, I set up my painting spot carefully. The floor was dusty, but I laid down a half-ripped picnic blanket and put down newspapers under my painting pad. The brushes I laid out on a small terry cloth rag, in order from smallest to largest.

As I worked, I breathed easier. It was even more cramped in the garage than in the house, but it didn’t seem like it when I was focusing on my brushes.

I filled the plastic tub with water and brought it to my chosen spot. Ducking under the table, I settled myself in cross-legged, the paper pad in front of me. I took a deep breath and exhaled. The tension creeping up through my skin was slowly releasing. The monster retreated.