Bearly alive

5

Roman

“You can’t deliver her right now, Roman. I’m very pleased with your work, but I have a summit I’m attending for the next ten days and I can’t have this situation distract me. You need to keep her in a secure location until I can come to collect her.” The King tells me.

It’s literally the last thing I wanted to hear right now. Yet I mumbled an affirmative answer and ended the call, biting my tongue and stopping myself from saying that I really didn’t want to deal with the situation either. Just being around the situation makes me feel like I’m suffocating, like my throat is closing and I can’t breathe. Unless I keep her close to me.

I took Stella the Omega nearly two days ago and have been trying to contact the King ever since. No reply until just now when he called and gave me this great new promotion. I am to be a babysitter now too. Not even the promise to have my fee already wired to my account as soon as the call is over made me feel more excited. And not even his offer to double my fee, the bonus to be paid after he collects Stella.

Truth be told, I’m in an exceptionally foul mood. I kind of fear the girl won’t even make it ten days. She looks half dead already.

She slept for almost 24 hours straight after I took her and hasn’t eaten anything. I didn’t even need to knock her out, she just… slept, her soft snores filling the car. On second thought, maybe I should have given her something to eat. My bear scoffs inside my head, a rare appearance. It’s the second time that he’s interacted with me in the last couple of days and I can’t say I missed him.

I’ve checked us into a seedy human motel, but I’ll be damned if I spend ten days in a roach infested hellhole like this. I may be a brute and seen my fair share of bloody messes, most of them started by me, but I could barely sit down on the dubious looking armchair in the room, and I would kill for a shower without even batting an eye. Best I could do was to clean up the blood on my arms and change my shirt.

But even with the millions I have in my bank account, I can't exactly check into a high end hotel either, not when I have a kidnapped woman with me. She’s been quiet and compliant so far, but it may be because she was in shock. And she slept for half of that time, so the kicking and screaming might start soon enough.

I almost laughed at my previous thought. I called her a woman. This is a little girl, and I’m being generous as is.

The walls in buildings like this motel haven’t been built with supernatural hearing in mind, and let's just say that aside from kidnappers, a certain category of people tends to rent these rooms by the night. Or by the hour.

Stella woke up about midday when the couple next door was f*****g. I could tell from the woman’s fake moans that she was paid to be there and seemed to get about as much pleasure as she would while doing her taxes. Actually, I’m certain something along the lines of that was happening in her mind while the guy who paid her was f*****g her, according to him hard. Because that seemed to be the guy’s catchphrase, I’ll f**k you real hard, baby.

I think I did the world a favour when I killed him just before I took the King’s call. I planned on lecturing him a bit about pleasuring a woman and the reason his life was ending today, mostly because I was bored, but also because I was tired, dirty and pissed off. Unfortunately my phone rang so a shot to the back of his head and in the laundry bin at the end of the hall he went, because after calling him a dozen times, I could not afford not taking the King’s call.

But if I’m being really honest here, the whole thing that sparked my impromptu murder was the way Stella’s face turned bright pink when she woke up and realised exactly what she was hearing. She seemed more stressed about being put in that uncomfortable situation than the fact that she’d been kidnapped. Again, how f****d up is that? And why does it still make me so angry?

I left her in that room with instructions not to even think about trying to escape, and then left. Somehow, a part of me was so sure she wouldn’t try to leave that it made me angrier than I was. It’s probably why I made it a point of telling Stella I’ll go show our neighbour what real f*****g is like since she sounded disappointed in her current partner. Stella’s innocent face and her big eyes remain ingrained in my mind. She seemed hurt or disappointed again. And I’m getting angrier and angrier because I don’t understand why that even sparks a reaction in me.

“You… you shot him, didn't you? You killed that man.” Stella’s words and her face staring at me again is what greets me when I unlock the door to the motel room.

Shit. Despite my initial reasons for killing that fucker, I didn’t want to be the reason why the kicking and screaming I mentioned earlier started. I curse myself inwardly, feeling like I shot myself in the foot. Bad pun very much intended. I forgot that while a human wouldn’t hear the gun with the silencer I had on, a wolf would. At least here’s my confirmation that Stella the Omega is not just human. But how can I be so careless, I didn't even think that she might hear the gunshot and piece things together. And again, why the f**k do I even care that she heard me kill a man? That’s what I wanted, didn’t I? That should work in my favour and scare her into not making any stupid moves that might involve me chasing her around for the next ten f*****g days.

No, this is no joke. I need to get her somewhere secure, somewhere I can control the environment and make sure I can control my actions. f**k it, I need to get her to my house, there’s no safer place for her. For me. I mean for me and my own f*****g sanity which seems to have gone on an unplanned vacation right now.