Chapter Text
There are times when I wonder if the money's worth it, and measuring out the dimensions for a panic room for one of the most horrible people I've ever had the acquaintance of damn sure ranks somewhere up there. Admittedly, I've met worse people, but at least some of them had manners and didn't spend time lobbying to make prescription drugs nearly too expensive to afford. I can excuse a little money laundering and gambling here and there, but a guy's gotta have standards at some point.
In any case, I couldn't wait to get out of that weaselly little man's house. Crawling around in insulation and holding measuring tape up to support beams to figure out how much clearance the crew would have to work with wasn't my idea of a fun evening, not that it kept me from having to do it so often. The foreman who had my contract held strange hours with even stranger people and she gave me a short leash for dealing with the annoyance, likely because she was just as involved on the premises as I was.
"Clark!" The voice cut through the musty haze, near-startling me enough to where I almost thumped my skull into some wood. "You makin' any progress? Holden's gettin' twitchy about it all and I can't take another fuckin' attempt'a his t'talk t'me about those huntin' trophies he's got."
And there she was. I looked up to see Lonnie, my boss, leaned up against the roughly-hewn, light-wreathed hole in the wall that I'd entered through. As abrupt and demanding as always. About par for the course for an alpha, really, but something about her had always frustrated me on a level beyond just that. I could tolerate most alphas on a good day, being a beta helped a fair bit with that, yet there were always a few that knew how to worm their way into the corners of your brain and tug at places you never knew could annoy you. Unfortunately, Lonnie Morowia was one of them.
"If he starts talking about cutting into any of the supports here you're gonna need to gently remind him that a panic room is supposed to be secure and not fall on his goddamn head, but you guys should have plenty of space to work with up until...uh. Fifteen feet in?" I took a moment to clear my throat from all of the dust. "You'll need to build around the back of the fireplace. Don't touch that or there'll be hell to pay later. It's ancient."
Lonnie grinned and slapped the side of the hole before pushing a mop of blonde hair out of her face.
"Good boy, Clark. I like havin' you around for a reason. Crawl on out n'take a break while I wrangle 'im."
I winced at those first few words. God, she really needed to stop that shit. I rolled my tape back in and wiped the sweat off of my brow before exiting that hellish pocket into a study filled with books that had probably never been read.
"I'm grabbing a smoke."
Her eyes lingered a touch too long on me for my liking as I tried to ignore the rest of her. That grating accent followed me out the door and into the hallway.
"Don't wander far, hon. Wouldn't want you gettin' stolen by any unsavory types."
I'm sure she would have just laughed if she'd heard the derisive snort I made in response to that. Standing out on the patio of some rich asshole's manor and smoking a cigarette was a time-honored tradition, with the only differences being whether or not I'd need to wear a coat or have to stand near a porchlight. The guy who owned the place, Holden, seemed to be a bachelor who was too paranoid to keep any real family around, so even the pool out back looked pretty untouched. Not even the paycheck from this job was enough to keep me from privately viewing him with contempt. For all the inspections I'd done for Lonnie, he seemed to be one of the more pathetic clients I'd encountered. We'd come recommended by the rare few people he'd allowed near him and I hoped for our sake that they stopped mentioning our services to other worms of the sort.
Not that I could pretend to be all that clean, myself, due to having helped out with so many commissions. The manager at the architectural firm that rented me out was one of the only people clued into what Lonnie's construction crew did and was regularly cut a healthy sum for my services, apparently. The sheer amount of crooked, rich families that lived in the state of New York was part of what brought her up from the south to start her business. I think some of them even got a kick out of her sounding so alien compared to most everyone else. It was hard to deny that she had a presence to her, even if it rubbed me the wrong way most of the time. She actively delighted in how much she was able to bother me. It was something I'd had to grow used to over time, to the point where most of it skated past me with little comment. Weirdly, she always seemed a little disappointed when I didn't take the bait. I think that was what annoyed me the most in some perverse, roundabout way.
I was beginning to lament not bringing a coat as the sun set over a rim of shadowed trees in the distance. Autumn had really started kicking in lately and I was already thinking about slipping back inside despite only being on my first cigarette still. My thoughts on the matter were interrupted by the screen door creaking open to let an intimately familiar silhouette out onto the patio.
"Care t'bum me one?"
The corner of my lip twitched up briefly as I flitted my eyes towards her.
"Oh fuck off, Lonnie. I know you can afford your own."
She pressed closer, her gaze narrowing at the same time her usual lazy grin appeared once more. I could already predict how this would go.
"Come onnnnnn, Clark. You know I'll make it back up later."
The barest smear of some of her husky subtonals were already working into her words. I was grateful that I didn't have to deal with the full effect of them, because I'm sure they'd be as aggravating as the rest of her. My grumbling wasn't going to deter her, either, so I eventually relented after a few moments of thought and slipped one out of the pack, holding it out to the outline of her against the glow of the porchlight.
"Besides, they always taste better when I take 'em from you. Why d'ya think that is?"
My nose scrunched up involuntarily as she busied herself with lighting it.
"I'd rather not know."
The spark flared up as she took a long drag, a practiced tongue balancing it in the corner of her mouth while she spoke next.
"I think it's cuz you always give 'em t'me."
"Whatever."
She chuckled to herself and torched another segment of it, eyes still locked on me all the while. It was a habit she had, one I'd never figured out. There was no telling why I fascinated her.
"Anyways, we can head out. Holden's not that happy about it bein' smaller than he'd wanted, but I assured him he'd be happier alive than broken under part'a his house."
I finished off what was left of my initial cigarette and snubbed it out in the soil of a wilted potted plant next to me. Rubbing at my arms afterwards and shivering slightly only seemed to draw her attention more, so I stopped once I realized it. Warming up would just have to wait.
"Am I done on this job, then? Can I go home?"
I'd only be free once she gave the clear on it. It was an essential part of the contract, apparently, when you worked on shadier projects. She usually didn't hassle me too much on it, though.
"Nope. 'Fraid not."
Hearing that froze my thoughts on what I'd do after heading out, which had been probably hitting up a drive-thru and eating a dogshit burger while watching an even worse horror movie.
"Huh? Why?"
"First, I'm gonna need'ta smoke a second cig, and then I got some forms for you t'sign off on at my office."
Usually that sort of thing would happen after the fact, maybe once a day or two had gone by and I could swing around to her place and quickly get it done. That she wanted it done tonight, specifically, was a bit odd. I could tell she was aware of that fact when I asked about it.
"Is there...a reason why? I'd kinda been hoping to have some time to myself at some point."
She waved me off as she burned through what was left of the one I'd lent her, even scorching a bit into the filter before she flicked it off out into the darkness, sputtering embers quickly winking out on the brickwork.
"Oh, y'know. Legal stuff. Gotta get it done before a deadline and all'a that. Now, cough another up and I'll meet you at the office once I'm done here. Maybe pour you a drink once it's settled."
My pack had already been dwindling, and Lonnie's greed was quickly making that worse. It looked like I wasn't going to be having a second one tonight as I begrudgingly handed another over. As much as she could afford her own, much more than I was capable of, it was still by her hand that I earned enough to not care about her raiding damn near half of my stock when I was on-site. Being annoyed at the circumstances wasn't enough to make me forget that fact as I simply shrugged and gave her a brief wave. Her eyes glittered in the encroaching shadows when I turned to look at her while unlatching the side gate.
The drive was uneventful. Most of the winding roads leading through the rich asshole neighborhoods tended to not have much traffic to worry about. Especially not at night. Lonnie's office was a frequent trip for me given how often I had to make sure that things were filed properly, so everything was muscle memory once I hit the familiar main drag. Pulling up my cracked phone at a red light revealed that she'd texted me at some point since I'd left. My eyes narrowed at the words.
[lonnie (ugh)] heyyyyyy just let yourself in at the back and get comfy while you work honey
[Me] Stop calling me that
[lonnie (ugh)] hahahahaha not a chance honnnnnn
I casually threw it over into the passenger seat so it could slide around as I pulled into the gravel drive leading up to the material yard connected to the portable unit that Lonnie used as the hub of her business. It looked unassuming on the surface, and technically more or less wasn't harboring anything shady. It was mostly the clients involved and what they wanted that tended to be the questionable part. The back door being unlocked was nothing new, so I made the usual climb up the rickety stairs and slipped into the pleasantly warm little structure. Her office was the only real fixture beyond a musty waiting area, a bare excuse for a kitchen and a bathroom that had experienced the horrors of most of her construction crew visiting it. The forms in question were waiting on her desk with a sticky note attached to the front that said 'Hi, Clark!' in her familiar scrawl. I had to wonder why she hadn't just brought them with her if they were so time-sensitive instead of having me come all of the way here.
My annoyance aside, I settled into the cushioned seat across from the desk and lost track of time as I scribbled in the spaces where I was supposed to and casually read over something I'd filled out nearly a few hundred times over with names and addresses swapped. Hearing the door open and close wasn't even a distraction, as the very cadence of it told me that it was Lonnie finally dragging her ass back after doing god knows what. She bumped around in the kitchen nook and finally called out to me over the hiss of the faucet running.
"Everythin' lookin' good, honey?"
I rolled my eyes at the pointed jab and flipped another page over on the clipboard.
"About the usual, boss. I'll be done soon."
"Good. You're hittin' a shot with me t'celebrate."
I usually wasn't one to drink that often and had found that the harder stuff didn't sit too well with me. Unsurprisingly, Lonnie was the source of most of the liquor I'd had to toss back over the last year or so once she'd started 'warming up' to me and made more of a point to capture my attention whenever she got the chance. Like a lot of things, our professional relationship tended to hinge entirely on me satisfying her whims whenever I wasn't crawling around in dusty openings behind drywall and mortar.
"Whatever. As long as it's not that Everclear shit again."
Her grating laugh carried into the office, a subtle hint of those rough notes supporting the more respectable part of it and sounding like a cacophony.
"Only top shelf for you from now on, Clark. I guarantee it."
I would have laughed at that if not for knowing that giving in to her bad jokes would only inspire her to throw more at me, so I merely flipped the pages back over onto the clipboard and set it back onto the desk proper. Likely I'd need to wait for her to give me the all-clear, so I just sunk into the chair and pushed some of my loose hair out of my face. It was yet another reminder that I should really look into getting it trimmed. There had already been too many times of people assuming I wasn't old enough to be drinking whenever I'd been dragged out to bars or other places of the sort. A lot of Lonnie's clients tended to not care, but a few of them would give me strange looks every now and then when I was brought on-site as if they figured some kid fresh out of high school was going to be surveying their place. For reasons I couldn't fathom, Lonnie kept telling me I should keep it longer.
Her heavy footsteps preceded her entrance after I'd spent a few minutes tracing the lines in the cheap tiles of the ceiling with my eyes. I'd accidentally left my phone in the car, so I'd only had so many options to occupy myself with. She carefully set two overflowing shots onto the desk, one in front of me and one by her chair, before thumping the thick bottle next to them. All I knew about 'Wild Turkey' was that it was some kind of bourbon, and that bourbon was apparently different than whiskey. She'd seemed damn near ready knock some sense into me when I'd first made the mistake of mixing up the two. I stared at the little glasses there as she dropped into her seat and brought a boot up onto the cheap wood next to the bottle.
"Everythin' settled?"
"It looks the same as usual. Am I good?"
She lifted a calloused hand and motioned to the desk between us.
"Not until you indulge me a lil', hon."
I'd known it was inevitable, but I still let out a sigh and leaned forward to carefully pluck the booze between a couple of fingers without spilling any. I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, so I quickly tilted back and downed the shot, fully expecting yet still regretting the burn. The coughing hit me almost immediately. It shook me for at least half a minute or so as I fought to keep the stuff down and I was eventually able to look up to see Lonnie grinning right at me with a strange look to her as she leaned in for her own shot. It went down smoothly and she began pouring herself another as I tried to gather myself.
"See? You ain't dead, are ya?"
My neck felt warm and I started tugging at the collar of my button-up as if it would relieve some of the weirdly uncomfortable feeling that was seeping into near every part of me. Lonnie was busy with pounding down another in the meanwhile. I knew I wasn't a big fan of liquor, but maybe I'd been more exhausted than I'd thought and it was rapidly catching up to me. She leaned back and simply watched me fidget in place for a few moments. Things started getting stranger when I went to push into the arms of the chair to lift myself out of it and found my fingers sliding off to the side due to a sudden rush of dizziness. My boss chuckled as I tried to speak, tongue disconnecting with my brain as the wet slap of saliva smeared inside my cheek.
"Wbuh?"
"What was that, sweetheart? Speak up."
The warmth of dulled anger started flooding across the bridge of my nose as I struggled to respond. My vision grew hazy as the back of my head skated across the back of the faux-leather chair behind it. Lonnie's subtonals dragged themselves across the back of my consciousness as her laugh accompanied my
slumping
over
into
oblivion
Awareness brought the dull pressure of pain slowly grinding into parts of me as I tried to roll about the moment I recognized my own limbs once more. Fingers took a few seconds more to distinguish themselves from the arms as a whole, elbows still entirely forgotten as I focused on trying to push myself up. At some point I'd been moved from the chair I vaguely remembered reclining in to the shitty little sofa that was in the reception area, yet it was somehow the least of my worries as messy splotches of my memory began forming themselves back together into a recognizable palette. Nothing between the drink and now had stuck with me once I'd dropped off, unsurprisingly, but there were a few details that made it at least kind of clear as to what the fuck had just happened.
The eerie quiet one could pick out when they knew they were truly alone somewhere filled the portable unit and told me that Lonnie was nowhere to be found as I hoarsely groaned through clenched teeth while feeling along the fresh bite marks that overlapped on the sides of my neck. She hadn't remained only there, of course, and had ruined my button-up in the process of letting her canines wander down towards my chest somewhat. My eyes merely stared up at the ceiling for a while as all kinds of thoughts skidded through my head and threatened to smash together if I didn't focus on at least a couple of them. I didn't have any experience with being roofied, but my boss had very clearly drugged the shot of bourbon she'd poured for me and then...seemingly had her way with my body without actually undoing my pants, from what I could tell. The smears of drool that were still drying on my skin had a weird smell to them, something that gingerly scraped at my frontal lobe and told me that it was supposed to have a heady, sweet scent. That I was even picking up on that much alarmed me, as I'd done my best to ignore Lonnie's...alpha presence when around her over the last year or two.
My sluggish reactions tapered off more and more, an attempt having to be halted so I wouldn't tumble onto the floor without being able to catch myself, but I eventually managed to push myself up into a sitting position and glared at the door leading into the ramshackle little office my boss called her home away from home. All I knew was that I needed to get the hell out of there and reach out to the architectural firm. The money wasn't worth being fucking violated. Her stench clung to me while I had to force myself to wake up more. It was a miserable stretch of time before I was capable of walking, much less standing, and getting my first breath of fresh air after leaning against the door frame was a welcome relief. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the darkness interspersed with the harsh glow of streetlights beyond the fence. It was an eerie feeling, slumping my body in the doorway and half-expecting a distressingly familiar face to just come swaggering up the gravel drive at any moment, yet I was spared that horror after taking a couple of minutes to gather myself. The quiet rush of wind in dried leaves accompanied by the occasional trill of insects lent a strange quality to everything as I desperately looked over my shoulders a few times on the trip back to my car.
Part of me was holding back the urge to vomit somewhat by the time I tumbled into the driver's seat while even more of me knew that I'd feel like shit if I allowed myself to do it. The overhead light dimmed after a few seconds and I blindly began groping around in the passenger seat for my phone after buckling my seatbelt, only to grow frustrated when I didn't immediately close my fingers around it.
"Motherfucker-"
Vague panic had started settling in at some point and all I knew was that I wanted to get out of there, so I kicked the car into reverse and figured I could lean over to reach below the seat at a red light or two if that's what it took to find the stupid thing. Little else mattered other than getting home and taking some meds to make sure that nothing flared up from her...what she'd done. Getting your hands on heat suppressants without other people finding out was damn annoying in the first place, so I was going to take them if it meant feeling safe about my chances. I'd never talked to anyone about it or sought anything further about the matter, but I'd had a strange experience with something that had felt like a fever for a few days after having to crash at a place with a couple of college buddies of mine who were both alphas. They'd given me some weird looks and I'd sworn up and down that I'd just picked up a bug from a party, yet there'd always been this deep fear rooted in the back of my head since then that it could have been one of those freak scenarios of someone reacting in a way they shouldn't have after too much exposure.
Needless to say, my usual aversion to alphas seemed more than warranted, especially after tonight. I was going to give Phil a fucking earful about this whole business arrangement and demand to be hired out to someone else, no matter how much cash Lonnie waved under his nose to keep me attached to her hip.
My heart sank in my chest the moment I recognized the flashing lights in the rearview. I'd been going the speed limit, even, and had practically bolted both hands to the steering wheels whenever I'd been actively moving. My phone hadn't turned up from my awkward shoving of my fingers underneath the seat next to me, so I'd simply resigned myself to having to kneel in the passenger door in the parking lot outside of my apartment building. Having pulled out my registration and license ahead of time, I rolled the window down before the approaching officer could reach it. His flashlight shone just below my sight line as a shit-eating grin spread across his lips. Another officer was slowly ambling up behind him, according to the mirror.
"Been doing a bit'a partying tonight, son?"
I wasn't sure how to answer him, really, as the fear of trying to explain my situation blinded anything reasonable. Why would either of them care about some guy stammering over his words about being violated by a woman? An alpha woman, even? They'd probably laugh their asses off.
"...No, uh. Just. Long shift, you know?"
My attempt at a forced laugh didn't seem to be amusing them. The white of their eyes peered at me, bracketed by stripes of the cold night behind them tinged by the muted reflection of blue lights against skin.
"License?"
I wordlessly handed it and my registration over while desperately wishing I could be most anywhere but there at that moment. The accompanying officer plucked them between his fingers and quickly looked the little plastic card over before nodding to the man in front of the window.
"Care to step out of the car?"
The annoyance at everything in particular flushed right to the bridge of my nose, heat flickering at the edges of my vision.
"What the hell did I even do? Aren't you going to tell me anything?"
Neither of them seemed likely to respond in any way I wanted them to. I could feel the immediate shift in their mood the moment the words left my mouth, though, and from the tense lines forming at the corners of the main officer's eyes as they narrowed I could tell that he was about ready to 'escalate' matters.
"Step out of the car, Clark."
The fact that he was just throwing around my name as if he was familiar with me seemed less notable than my terror at pissing him off more, so I gingerly clicked the door open and near-fell out onto the road after having to readjust to walking once more. A strange, acidic smell hit my nose amid the chill air as the accompanying officer closed in, and with dawning horror I realized that he was an alpha a moment before he spun me around and roughly shoved me against the side of my car. My sore grunt forced a frosty cloud out into the night sky, the main officer's flashlight immediately flickering up to focus on the patch of metal and plastic next to my face.
"Search him for weapons, Samson."
"On it."
Rough hands immediately began patting me down as I dug my nails into already-scratched paint underneath. It had already gotten humiliating, but feeling an extra hand pull at the collar of my shirt immediately made me wince and try to jerk away. The alpha thrust against me and pinned my body further, which only made things worse with how it disoriented my already-confused senses.
"What the fuck did I do to deserve this?"
A nasally, breathy whine had leaked into my tone at some point between being stopped by the cops and ending up getting treated like an escaped felon.
"Shut up."
A deep, subtonal growl from behind threw my brain for a loop and made me choke up for a moment as the other officer, presumably a beta, prodded further at my neck with a couple of fingers. The stinging of multiple teeth marks screaming in concert made tears well up in the corners of my eyes.
"Looks like we got a pervert on our hands, y'think? Blown-out pupils and covered in hickeys." He turned back to speak close to my ear. "D'ya let just any alpha go at it, or only the one? I bet you're really popular."
I was mortified to hear him willfully misinterpreting what was going on with me, so my attempts to correct the matter didn't go over too well with the way syllables crashed into one another and came out as a belabored groan instead.
"Looks like we'll be taking you in, Clark. Care to sleep things off?"
"Kiss my ass-"
Pain blossomed in the back of my skull, and for the second time that night I lost consciousness.