Taming the Broken Playboy Alpha

Episode4

Chapter 4

Camila Duarte’s POV

The clang kept resounding, the bell’s chiming yanking me rudely back to the present with a sharp jolt. Desks slid across the floor as the students barrelled for the door. I stayed planted where I was until the very last stragglers slid into the corridor, and only then did I haul my notes into my bag. Ultimately, I heaped my notes on top of one another and squeezed them into my bag.

Thiago Acosta and his cadre of cronies vanished long before that. His shadow continued to linger in the room, clinging fast and pressing in as though a suffocating, smothering veil. I exhaled a long sigh of relief, glad to be rid of it.

I moved into the corridor. In the time it took to beat one heart, their eyes once more fixed on me. A gaggle of students stripped my flesh layer by layer, segmenting me into an ornate jigsaw they’d never hope to reassemble. Whispers shadowed me, unspooling in shimmering threads of shadow that looped about me.

I wonder when they’ll at last give up looking. Might this be the wrong thing to wear? My face? Maybe all that audacity I displayed in answering him yesterday has provoked this?

I cast my gaze at the floor tiles at my feet and picked up the pace of my steady strides. Every morning all I yearned for was to slide into the wooden panelling, vanish into nothing, and vanish from sight for an eternity. Even so, the gossip roared through the corridors—blazing like a hungry forest fire—consuming me in its furnace-hot blaze long before the murmur ever abated.

I set my History of the Wolfblood textbook on the shelf of my locker. Faint whispers hissed up from behind. That derisive laughter lingering at my heels ripped into a pain sharper than the s***h of any knife.

I yanked my bag with such force its contents spilt out into two distinct heaps. Pens skittered across the floor, papers skimmed and fluttered, and my lunch rolled away. Their laughter climbed to a crescendo.

Great. Perfect. All that they’d come for.

A rush of heat rose to my neck. I knelt on one knee, floundering through the jumble of belongings trembling in my grasp, and slammed the locker shut with a deafening clang. The echoes rumbled the length of the corridor. I dipped my head and propelled my pace into a frenzy of flight.

Some breathing room was imperative. Could I pass by for even one minute and go unmolested, unseen?

The instant I hurled the restroom door open, the room was empty. I eased myself into the stall and slam-shut the lock with a heavy echoing clang.

Silence.

Finally.

I pressed my spine to the icy wall and drew my knees in tight against my chest. My pulse quieted to a muffled whisper. I inhaled, let it go, steady.

If I keep my gaze sufficiently remote, the gossip is bound to disintegrate. Everyone tires of the gossip sooner than you’d think. It will pass.

At least, I repeated to myself over and over.

The portal to the restroom flew open. Heavy footsteps. Fast breathing.

I stiffened.

A guttural grunt echoed, and the even measure of footsteps soon took up residence. A further door swung open. More footsteps.

I heard her unmistakably clear voice.

Sofía. In the course of a single second, my curiosity burst into a blaze.

I froze. Shut up, and don’t tell me to calm down,” Valeria hissed.

I sucked my breath down tight and pressed into the stall. Who the f**k does she think she is?

Now it’s far too late to slip away. Has he surrendered?

I allowed his exchange with Mateo and Bruno to waft into my ears. Sofía asked.

“He did! Flattening my scalp to the brick, I extended my chin toward the stars—their very tip nearly touching—and murmured beneath my breath to the enveloping stillness. What a nerve that boy has.

Even as a gnawing mass of guilt slit my pulse, a steel-hard curiosity—fuelled by unflinching strength—burst forward.

Valeria’s voice climbed, sharpening into a razor-thin s***h of fury. So audacious—she swaggers into my school as if it were hers.

She’s scarcely anything special. Just by any miracle, did you by chance observe her dreadful Batman pyjamas last night?

Sofía snorted. She sports a nest of birds on her head. A taut, piercing laugh resounded. Repulsive. Jesus, she even got me to brush it out last night.

Those remarks rammed into me with full force. They whirred away about me.

The corners of his mouth broadened into a broader smile.

As the climax of this episode edges toward its closing coda, will you still hold the bread of friendship out toward me?

Soft whispers surged into my ears, rolling in on the suffocating weight of a leaden cannonball. To be perfectly frank, did they really mean anyone else? Still—I recognized I should.

No. They wouldn’t. Not them. A stream of bile slipped from Valeria’s tongue.

Maybe another girl is wearing Batman pyjamas. Yesterday was nothing but a thirst for attention.

Surely every one of us realises that Thiago will, someday, ascend to the Alpha throne?

She was fully aware of exactly what she was doing. Little by little, she will bend to me as my mate. Sofia’s venomous laughter clung to her, slinking away and fading into the farthest echo. My heart descended even more into that pit. Probably a spoilt Alpha child who’s been homeschooled.

Far from it—Camila is by no means stupid,” Valeria hissed, distorting my name into an unfamiliar form. Special ed for the brainless.” Jabbing my blisters with the paring knife wrenched crimson strokes across my vision.

Even as the searing heat behind my eyes pressed for release, I herded each tear straight into my own breast.

She pretends to be innocent, yet the act is nothing but a bid for male attention. “ She’s worse. Manipulative. How, for goodness sake, did I ever believe that they were my friends? A pathetic pick-me girl.

Within the depths of my heart, my wolf growled, the knot of anguish and unremitting unease winding ever tighter. Her hand crept forward, but the blistering lava of betrayal flared out of reach.

Stupid. An insistent energy seared through my veins—I had to rise and roar, brand Valeria the snake she was and pin Sofía to the reality she’d refused to see.

Yet the dread of yet another round of drama kept me firmly in my place. A second surge of drama settled in my throat like a lodestone, for it would invite even closer scrutiny—scrutiny that I could simply not withstand.

Sofía’s voice shredded my ears. All right, then—what is at stake this time? A further presence slipped into the room.

Secrets they strove to keep from the ears of anyone else. The restroom door opened a second time.

“It’s about—”

In little more than a breath, the sharp staccato clack of their heels fading over the floor tiles heralded their departure. I lingered until the room once again stood empty and then slinked away. Silence followed.

Secrets. I stole a furtive look in the mirror, and confronting me was a girl I scarcely recognized.

The words hung there.

My waves of brown hair stood in a tangled frizz, freckles dotting my pale cheeks, my honey eyes sunken.

I let my gaze slide to the floor. Nothing worthy of notice. Too thin. Too plain. I could not have been more unlike them.

Every filament of my skin leapt. Ugly. Repulsive.

He hovered over me, his gargantuan shadow pinning my body with exacting force to the floor. That was far more than what I looked like. I stretched my hand toward my books at the locker.

I let my eyes rest on the floor tiles, pressed my chin to my sternum, and in a hushed breath begged him to uncoil the fierce knot tightening inside him.

And suddenly he was there.

Thiago.

Even now his eyes were fixed on me. It ran through me. Hot, heavy, a weight pressing in upon me.

He pinned me with a look that forged an unshakeable mask of unyielding stillness across his face. My wolf purred, malicious, moulding itself to the scalding warmth. His hush pressed in, creeping relentlessly nearer, and at last it shattered. Under what name do you introduce yourself?

Why now? Why here? Why me?

I lifted my eyes. A storm of gravel-like words rolled from him, its command impossible to miss. Again I lowered my voice. “My name is Camila.”

I clamped my lips shut. Every instinctive pulse in me begged me to fire a sharp riposte at him.

He loosened his lips into a smirk. A streak of searing heat rose up my neck and streaked across my cheeks. Not again.

I lifted my eyes to the floor and watched that unpredictable stream of my vulnerability creep stealthily through me.

I’m relieved he said it. “Feisty. At that instant, a fissure slipped between the walls of his guard, and a lazy grin eased onto his mouth.

It altered the contours of his face into something else. The blush had betrayed me. I hushed a cough into my throat.

What concern is it to you? For only the span of a moment, he stayed his reply. Dangerous in a different way.

Rather, he drew from his pocket a fragile, slender dandelion—dim and delicate. A skip beat pulsed in my chest.

Was he cognisant? He stretched it toward me.

Since the once-familiar name has been silent—quietly sewn together by only the drops of my first-heard silence—could he ever recognise the love I have nurtured in the garden?

I blinked. His voice slid out in unflappable serenity. A discreet apology for the incident of last time. For one singular heartbeat I held my breath, then raised my hand to the blossom and glided my fingertips along his arm.

A blossom from the comingly ruthless Alpha? A tightening knot of tension tightened across my chest.

I stared. An apology? From him?

It strained the bounds of reason. He spread his smile ever wider.

Now sensing that the ordeal has passed, would you sit down to lunch with me? Awkward. Soft whispers surged into my ears, rolling in on the suffocating weight of a leaden cannonball.

“Uh…thanks?”

Far from it—far deeper still, a courteously veiled summons. “ Good. Every instinct screamed its emphatic refusal.

I gave the most subtle inclination of my head. An invitation. I set the blossom back within the curve of his palm.

Thank you; however, no.

He lifted his left brow in mild surprise. “Nope. Thanks for that apology, and in return, let that sincere graciousness find a home in you.

Even so, I felt entirely at peace all by myself. Increasing my speed, I strove to wipe any lingering hint of wounded pride from my wake and to keep the moment from growing any more awkward.

“No one’s ever—”

That capsule of a heartbeat later, I whirled from Thiago Acosta, permitting him to cradle the shrivelled, tightly wound dandelion. For one brief nanosecond—when my pulse hadn’t yet ebbed—I slipped into oblivion, turning my back on Thiago Acosta as he held an uncanny, tightly coiled dandelion in his hand.

Wheeling about from Thiago Acosta, my breath and pulse drained away like river mist, evaporating when he so softly cupped the tightly crisped dandelion.

When the last curve of my solitary orbit neared its end, my pulse vibrated on in unerring rhythm—I turned away from Thiago Acosta, letting him gather the dandelion’s withered head into his palm.