“Y-yah.” Dray was far less drunk than he realized.
“That dude was an alpha? I seriously couldn’t tell.” Rick glanced around, eyes scouring the sea of heads in the club. “Fucker took advantage of you.”
“S’shoulda known. He was drunk like wooo, too.” Dray huffed as anxiety, nausea, and fear owned him. Rick’s comforting grip guided him out.
“Okay. Okay, let’s get you a morning-after pill and get you home. I have some at my place.” Rick patted Dray comfortingly as they stumbled out, calling a rideshare. For shifters, morning-after pills were a bit of a taboo as births were to be celebrated.Rick traveled for work and, fortunately, the medicine was legal in some of the circles he traveled in. Dray thought he was the luckiest shifter on earth.
Chapter One
Tripp
When someone walks into their apartment early on a Thursday afternoon and finds their fiancée of two years with her scales wrapped around the ugliest iguana shifter he’s ever seen in his entire life, they tend to lose it. Tripp had wanted to, but he couldn’t. He’d walked in, watched his future wife’s ass gyrating over bunched sheets, and left with a lame protest of, “No, Tripp… Wait…”
No explanations, just a hurried apology that she’d be out by the end of the day. So when he came back to a half-empty apartment later that evening, he threw his keys into a missing dish on a side table that wasn’t there anymore. They clattered to the floor, the sound echoing off bare walls. The half-drunk, paper-wrapped bottle in his left hand felt solid under his fingers as he lifted it for a sip.
The couch was his, at least. So, when he sauntered to the living room to flop onto it, he stared at an empty spot. Half the pillows for the couch lay scattered about. Personal belongings had been put in piles in corners. Technically, he’d bought the couch, and she bought the matching chairs and end table. “Well, that sucks.”
He dragged his feet to his bedroom and, that too, had been mostly stripped. Only the mattress and sheets they’d been fucking on hours before lay lonely on his bedroom floor. Pillowcases taken, pillows left. No sense to the items taken and left, only what would most likely hurt him.
His cellphone rang, and he answered it with a lame, “Hello.”
Shelby had been his father’s best friend’s daughter, and they’d been pushed together their whole lives. It’d been so effortless when they moved in together, that they engaged aftera year, waiting for… He wasn’t sure. The wedding had been planned, deposits put down, but it was still months away.
“Tripp! What the fuck, Son? How am I only just now figuring out you broke off the wedding? Cheating on her?” His father’s rage-fueled voice cracked the speaker in his ear. Shelby had a way of spinning things.
“Would it do any good to tell you the truth, or do you want to hear whatever she’s said confirmed so you can keep yelling at me?” Tripp rarely spoke back to him. “Because I came home to her riding some other dude’s dick, and she barely blinked. Kept fucking him after I walked out and sent me a text that she’d be out.”
“Are you drunk?” Of all Tripp said, that was the only thing his father commented on.
“Yes, sir. I am!” Tripp took another swig. “Gonna stay that way awhile, too. Fucking iguana.”
“You need to learn some accountability. Shelby wouldn’t have been with another alpha for no reason.” Tripp’s father seethed on the other end, breath near shaking as if his rattle lived in his throat.
“Well, if she had a reason, she didn’t tell me. I’ve been supporting her and her vlog forever. I didn’t ask her to help with the bills; I never pressed myself on her.” Tripp sighed. She’d grown cold as of late, commenting on his reluctance to be in her videos, his desire to save money rather than spend it for clout.
Tripp made a good living, not the best in the world but good. He had a tech startup that brought in decent capital—nothing special but nothing to sneeze at. He didn’t think Shelby had any idea how much money he actually had. She only saw the money he paid himself, which was tidy but conservative.
“You sure you didn’t do anything?”
“Pretty damn certain.” Tripp stared about his nearly empty apartment. “Want me to pull up my home video feed?”
Tripp searched out his cameras and found them missing. She knew they had security feeds on the door and hallway… He opened his phone and put the speakerphone on as his father grumbled, not wanting to look at Shelby getting it on.
“Nah, I got some security footage or audio here somewhere of them at least coming into the apartment.” Tripp thumbed through his app and found the security camera that he’d patched into his gaming setup that caught the living room. She’d disconnected the cameras before he came over. Big shock. But his game system had caught the man coming in, some touching and kissing, and he downloaded the clip before forwarding it to his father’s email. “There. Nothing indecent, but still scandalous.”
Tripp waited a moment, and his father grunted. “That could be anyone. What kind of security footage is this? Boy… I’m so ashamed of you right now. I have to explain to Marshal… And what am I going to tell the boys at the country club?”
The fucking country club. “Tell them that Shelby and I didn’t work out. She met someone new, and I’m moving on.”
He swore and grumbled on the other end. “That story ain’t gonna fly. She’s run her mouth, and it’s not looking good for you or me.”
“I didn’t like her much, anyway.” Saying it out loud made Tripp relax. “I like omegas.”
His father grimaced audibly. “At least make sure they’re snake.”
Shelby was a quite pretty leopard gecko, full of her own vanity, but any reptile would have done. All Tripp needed to do was have a snake child. Have enough children, and one was bound to be a snake.
“Whatever.” Half drunk already, Tripp put on his best clothes and stretched out. If he were starting anew, he needed to scratch an itch. Perhaps he’d find a human at the club, slake hislust. Omegas always got snatched up quick, so that plan flew out the window.
