The Alpha's Lover

A Taste of Red Wine

Whispers followed me like bees searching for pollen the following week. His women hid behind walls, tittered behind books and created a clique against me. They all hated each other, but they hated me even more.

“Bitch, what can she do that we can’t?” Mariah whispered loudly as I waited at the kitchen island for the house chef to prepare me a sandwich. I’d told her repeatedly that I could do it myself but her only reply was a pat on a shoulder followed by a tender smile and a, “Sweetheart relax.”

I knew Mariah, she was the youngest before I showed up nearly three years older than me with long pin straight black hair and fox like eyes that she kept rimmed with black. It seemed that he had a thing for women with raccoon rimmed eyes. From what I’d heard she had been the most obliging of the five conquests, she had come willingly. She had come more than willingly, she had rubbed herself against him whenever she saw the chance.

Whore.

Alana rolled her eyes, flipped her brunette waves and cast me a quick look before laughing loudly, “I heard her screaming the night she came. Do you think she was a virgin? I bet she’s a horrible lay.”

I held my peace as the chef, otherwise known as the middle aged Susan carefully laid tomato slices on top of the thinly sliced ham. Susan rolled her eyes to indicate that she’d heard everything and pointed to her mouth as she made a gagging face, “Don’t let em bother ya.”

Alana wasn’t too far away from Mariah she was three years older, but at twenty three she acted as if she hadn’t discovered the definition for maturity. I didn’t know much about her in terms of reputation, all I knew was that she had birthed twins for Ivaylo, much to his displeasure they had both been girls. Needless to say he’d steered clear of her for a moment, he couldn’t have a house full of bitch pups.

The other three were nowhere to be seen, maybe they had gotten their fill of ogling at me and had found something better to do. I didn’t particularly feel like I should have been a threat to begin with, for one I had been forced into his harem of women.

But ‘force’ didn’t matter to them, what mattered was the fact that Ivaylo had found a new toy to play with and in the meantime they would be left alone until he felt the need to see them again. Didn’t they see that we were all toys? None of us were special. None. Only one had the ring. Only one had the power.

Ivana.

The delicate syllables of her name swirled inside my head, like tendrils of smoke escaping from the lips of an avid smoker. I’d yet to see her, his wife, since I arrived into her home but I knew that when I did I would have hell to pay. As had the women  before me.

Rumors swirled that Ivana had found a way to sneak into Alana’s home and that she was the reason for her very short pixie hair cut two years before. Saundra my old friend had vanished the very night she gave birth to a still born son, her nightgown was found billowing in the wind throughout the woods, tinged with her blood from the waist down. Mariah’s apartment had caught fire just six months before and as for the others there was more to the tale.

I could only imagine what she had planned for me.

“You ok child? Here eat,” Kind sweet Susan lulled me away from my fears with a soft tap to my shoulder. With her other hand she pushed the plate over the smooth black marble of the island. A gourmet sandwich, prettier than any my mother had made greeted me in two halves, each abundantly filled with fresh ham, thinly sliced tomatoes, watercress lettuce, provolone cheese and a delicate spread of mayo.

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine,” I mustered up a smile, it was the least she deserved and she returned it back twentyfold with a wide grin that exposed a friendly gap between her two front teeth. As I averted my eyes away from the chattering women again (because they had found something else about me ogle over; the way my voice reminded them of a small child) and gathered a sandwich half between my two hands I wondered if Susan had a story too.