Teach Me How To Please, Alpha

Two Weeks Ago 

Isla

I was ashamed.

I hated the hope that flickered in my chest when I found the front doors of the townhouse my mother and I had lived in for nineteen years slightly ajar.

For a second I wondered if my mom was back home. Maybe something had happened with her new lover. Maybe he had cheated. Maybe she had realized she didn't love him nearly as much as she'd thought she did.

The guilt should choke me.

But I had spent the last month getting used to the guilt of waiting breathlessly for my mother's new lover to disappoint her.

Ever since I picked up her tearful phone call from the werewolf academy I attended.

I think I'm in love, Opal. I'm getting married.

But I was working on it. I was going to do better, be a better daughter. 

I had even perfected my happy for you smile a day ago. A slight tug of one corner of my mouth. Eyes narrowed just enough to look misty. If I blinked twice quickly, they watered convincingly.

But the moment I entered the living room, the hope I secretly still harbored disappeared.

At first glance, the room looked the same.

Our framed picture still sat on the mantelpiece. The throw pillows I had picked out before leaving for school remained scattered across the settee-fuchsia pink against yellow cushions, green walls, and red rugs. A chaotic burst of colors that should never have worked together, yet somehow always had. It was home.

Then I noticed the empty jade vase and couldn't keep lying to myself.

All my life, I had woken up every morning to fresh flowers arranged in it.

Fiona Adam had loved her flowers a little too much.

It wasn't that I was not in fact happy for my mother, I was.

She deserved this. She had lived all her life catering for me, of course she deserved the kind of love she had gushed about over the phone.

But for nineteen years, I had grown used to being her whole world.

Dancing to old vinyl records after dinner, resting on her laps while she told me about my father and how she had fallen for him at first glance, making flower crowns and braiding each other's hair, cooking together amidst chattering about our day and the laughter that had spilled from our lips?

I could barely recognize the quiet living room...

The townhouse was never silent.

It always echoed with howling laughter, with gushing tears, with music... We felt a lot right here... Truly lived.

But now Fiona was gone, in love with the Alpha of Creek Harbour, the small town I had spent almost my entire life in.

While I had to return to where it'd all started; a desolate house that now looked as abandoned as I felt.

I swiped angrily at the tear slipping down my cheek and dropped the unused keys into the ceramic jar by the entrance.

Then I went still.

A sound.

A dull thud.

I paused, my heart beating.

It was rhythmic.

My ears perked up. The noise was coming from upstairs.

The master's bedroom.

My mother's bedroom. 

Without a second thought, I sprinted toward the stairs, taking them two at a time.

Perhaps if I had been less excited at the prospects of my mother being home, I could have heard the broken gasps, the muffled tearful cry of a name, the periodic fuck exhaled accompanied by a deep masculine groan.

Maybe I would have noticed the absence of my mother's scent too: the familiar mixture of crushed flowers and honey that had followed Fiona her entire life.

A scent that was as familiar as my very name, imprinted in my very first memory of my mother, yet, senses eluded me.

All I felt was hope. I hoped and hoped.

I reached the doorway in a single bound and stopped frozen, completely blindsided by what I was seeing.

There was the lewd sound of flesh slapping together.

A woman cried out breathlessly into a lilac pillow.

Her red hair was splayed on white covers and her pale ass, which was high on the air, was covered with handprints.

While one large tattooed hand encircled her hips, keeping her still despite how hard she squirmed against the hold, the other was a manacle around her wrists, pressing them into the mattress just above her head while he just... rutted in her.

There was no softer word for it.

It was almost punishing, hard and fast. The headboard slammed repeatedly against the wall from the force of his thrusts even as he held her down making her meet each stroke.

Red bloomed in my cheeks.

I'd been guilty of reading my fair share of pornographic books, with pictures that had made my eyes widen at the plausibility of having sex in such a position.

I had eavesdropped on whispered conversations in dorm rooms late at night.

But they were nothing like this...

At the academy, they taught us that intimacy with your mate was sacred. Gentle. Blessed by the Moon Goddess herself. It was love making.

But there was nothing loving about the way the woman beneath him was nearly sobbing into the pillow, broken cries spilling from her lips as she spurred the man on my mother's bed with muffled yeses and just like that, while gasping his name like it was prayer.

"-Ryder please,"

Neither was his answering laughter, cruel and dark.

The room reeked of sweat, lust, and something overwhelmingly feral.

I could smell both of them everywhere.

On the sheets.

In the air.

Then the man looked up.

Our eyes locked.

My breath left my lungs.

I knew him.

Or at least knew of him.

It was hard not to know in a small town like Creek Harbour where fodder for gossip was sparse as everybody knew everybody and new things barely happened.

He was an Alpha with a hard fate.

Ryder, nicknamed the cursed prince.

The son of our Alpha.

One day, he would either kill his father and take the pack for himself... or spend the rest of his life subjugated under his father, resisting his alpha urges, a fate almost as painful as death.

Blond tousled hair.

Baby blue eyes.

A body built by violence.

Every shifter parent in the territory warned their daughters about him.

Now, his eyes were glowing, showing the tattered restraint of his control on the feral urges of his wolf and his teeth, now elongated, although not his wolf's, didn't look human.

Predatory.

Dangerous.

And fixed entirely on me.

A slow smirk curved his lips as he tilted his head slightly then thrust into the woman again.

And again.

I couldn't move.

Couldn't breathe.

When he pulled out completely before slamming back in with a savage snarl, she cried out loudly, making my lips part.

Ryder paused.

Amusement flickered across his face.

The redhead tried lifting her head from the pillow, but Ryder shoved her back down with one hand without ever breaking eye contact with me.

Then he started moving again.

If I thought his pace before had been punishing, his pacing now was heartless.

The woman's cries were screams now.

But Ryder didn't seem to be able to register her voice.

He was like an animal unleashed as his hand remained on her head, his eyes glowing with excitement, while his hips moved, brisk and unrestrained.

I spun around and ran.

And Ryder's dark laughter followed me all the way down the stairs.