Heal Read online

  Heal

  Piper Scott

  Heal © Piper Scott 2017.

  Amazon Kindle Edition.

  Edited by Courtney Bassett.

  Cover design by Terram Horne.

  All rights reserved. No part of this story may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the copyright holder, except in the case of brief quotations embodied within critical reviews and articles.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  The author has asserted his/her rights under the Copyright Designs and Patents Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book.

  This book contains sexually explicit content which is suitable only for mature readers.

  First LoveLight Press electronic publication: December 2017

  http://lovelightpress.com

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  Heal is set in the USA, and as such uses American English throughout.

  Contents

  Prologue

  1. Cedric

  2. Gabriel

  3. Gabriel

  4. Cedric

  5. Cedric

  6. Gabriel

  7. Cedric

  8. Gabriel

  9. Cedric

  10. Gabriel

  11. Cedric

  12. Gabriel

  13. Cedric

  14. Gabriel

  15. Cedric

  16. Gabriel

  17. Cedric

  18. Gabriel

  19. Cedric

  20. Gabriel

  21. Cedric

  22. Gabriel

  23. Cedric

  24. Gabriel

  25. Cedric

  26. Gabriel

  27. Gabriel

  28. Cedric

  29. Gabriel

  30. Cedric

  31. Cedric

  32. Gabriel

  33. Gabriel

  34. Cedric

  35. Cedric

  36. Gabriel

  37. Cedric

  38. Gabriel

  39. Cedric

  40. Gabriel

  41. Cedric

  42. Gabriel

  43. Cedric

  44. Gabriel

  45. Cedric

  46. Gabriel

  47. Gabriel

  Epilogue

  Bonus Scene

  About the Author

  Also by Piper Scott

  More from LoveLight Press

  Prologue

  Gabriel

  The dreams always started the same.

  The bed shifted. Gabriel opened his eyes to a darkened room, but he didn’t need to see to know that someone was rising out of bed beside him. Drowsy confusion led him to lift his head, and he blinked a few times in rapid succession to clear the sleep from his eyes. In the shadows, a grainy gray shape emerged.

  Humanoid. Masculine. Familiar.

  Gabriel settled back into the sheets and rolled over to take up the space where the figure had slumbered. The residual body heat left in their blankets warmed his skin, and the smell of the figure’s cologne—marine mineral notes with earthy, mossy overtones—partnered with the scent of alpha and soothed Gabriel’s soul.

  Home.

  “Garrison?” Gabriel’s voice cracked from disuse. He pulled the sheets closer to his body and looked through the darkness at the form freshly risen from the bed. “Come back to sleep. It’s not time to get up yet.”

  There was no reply.

  The figure standing at the bedside stepped away, putting distance between himself and Gabriel.

  “Garrison?” Gabriel asked again. He sat up, body protesting. It was too early to be awake. He’d worked long into the night, his hair still damp from his last shower of the evening. If he pretended, he couldn’t smell the lingering traces of his last john. “Don’t go.”

  Gabriel’s eyes were blurred from sleep, and he blinked several times to distinguish the figure in greater detail. He stood facing away from the bed—proud shoulders, a sensible haircut, body not overly athletic, but still toned enough that Gabriel enjoyed every solid muscle and each hard line. He was nude. Gabriel allowed himself to trace the outline of his body and drink it in.

  Safety. Adoration. Comfort.

  He was in love, and he knew he’d feel that way forever. Garrison Baylor was his soulmate, and Gabriel wanted more than anything to prove it to him.

  “Come back to bed. Please?” Gabriel scooted over to close the distance Garrison had put between them. “Please, Garrison? We can make love, or, um, you know, whatever you want…”

  There was no response.

  Frowning, Gabriel swung his legs over the side of the bed. The soles of his bare feet met the cold wooden floor, and a tremble ran up his spine that he couldn’t shake. A hazy part of Gabriel’s brain told him it was summer, but the floor was freezing. This disconnect worried him, and for a moment, he remained seated on the edge of the bed while he tried to get over the strange rift between what he knew and what he felt. His gaze parted from Garrison, and he didn’t notice him move across the room until the squeak of the doorknob brought him to lift his head and refocus.

  Garrison was leaving.

  He was leaving again.

  But this time, he was leaving when Gabriel was awake and willing to offer his body.

  He was leaving to bed another boy.

  Impulse brought Gabriel to his feet, but his sleep-weakened knees weren’t ready to support his weight. He stumbled as he stood, barely catching himself on the bed. A shrill gasp broke from his lips on the way down, and once he was steady, he took a second to regain his breath before trying to stand again. No matter what he did, his legs were uncooperative, unresponsive, and sluggish, like Gabriel’s brain was only intermittently in control of his body.

  “Don’t go!” Gabriel cried through the darkness, but his voice came as nothing more than a whimper. “Don’t leave me! Don’t go. Don’t go to him…”

  Garrison pulled the door open. The darkness of the room gave way to the light of the hallway beyond it, and the sudden brightness blinded Gabriel. He squeezed his eyes shut and ducked his head, but the spots in his vision didn’t go away. In desperation, he covered his face with his hand and counted down from five, trying his best to remain calm in the face of crisis.

  A floorboard creaked in the hallway. The sound of heavy footsteps approached. Carefully Gabriel parted his fingers, allowing a modest amount of light to reach his eyes. This time, the light didn’t blind him—it allowed him to see.

  What he saw made his heart stop.

  Standing in the doorway was another man—a man whose presence alone made Gabriel tumble onto the bed and crawl backward, seeking salvation. He wanted to run, to hide, to do something, but his feet couldn’t find purchase on the bed, and his arms moved like he’d submerged them in a tub of syrup, if they obeyed him at all.

  “Do you want him?” Garrison asked the man. “He’s one of the finest omegas you’ll ever get your hands on. Pliant. Subservient. Broken.”

  I’m not broken, Gabriel wanted to whisper, but his jaw wouldn’t move. I love you, Garrison. I love you. There’s nothing broken about that.

  “I want him,” the man replied. Those ugly words were curled with disgusting self-indulgence. They made Gabriel want to scream. “Can I take him? Right here? Tangle him up in those sheets and make him mine?”

  No. Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut. His body had abandoned him, leaving him trapped in hi
s mind. This is my bed with Garrison. We’re supposed to be together. I don’t want you here.

  Nothing he thought did any good. Gabriel was caught on the bed like a mouse in a glue trap—stuck, helpless, and afraid.

  Why was Garrison doing this to him? He’d been good and done everything Garrison had told him to do. He’d bedded every man Garrison had asked without complaint, because Garrison had told him that if he did, eventually they’d have enough money to get married. Why couldn’t they just be together?

  It wasn’t fair.

  The man beyond the doorway moved past Garrison, entering the darkness. Gabriel’s heart raced as he approached the bed, and it nearly burst when the man’s knees sank into the mattress. Gabriel smelled him on the air—like wood and leather, and beneath that, the putrid scent of an alpha whose soul was rotting.

  As the man moved across the bed, straddling Gabriel inch by inch, Garrison left through the open door. Gabriel lifted his head and tried to cry out for him, but words refused to come. He knew that if Garrison closed that door, he’d never see him again. He knew it.

  So why was Garrison going? Why was he leaving Gabriel with someone he didn’t want? Why was he letting this happen?

  If Gabriel could just get up from the bed, if he could move his legs, if he could do something, then maybe they could still be together. Maybe he could follow Garrison wherever he wanted to go.

  But he couldn’t move. He couldn’t talk. He could barely breathe.

  Garrison closed the door behind him. The room was plunged in darkness once more, and Gabriel felt the weight of the man without a name pushing him down into the mattress.

  The dreams always started the same, and they always ended the same, too—as nightmares.

  Gabriel woke up screaming. Mouth dry, throat sore, and heart pounding, he struggled against the thin blankets on his bed only to find that he was trapped in them. The scream of terror turned into one of anguish, and he struggled to roll to the side, but his body refused to let him.

  “Gabriel?” a familiar but distant voice asked. “Gabriel, you’ve got to come back to us. Come back down from wherever you are and come back to us. It was a dream. It was all a dream. You’re safe.”

  Only Gabriel didn’t feel safe at all. He hadn’t felt safe since the bust on The White Lotus brothel had robbed him of his home—and of Garrison.

  “Gabriel!” the voice said again, firmer this time. “Gabriel, come back down. Come back to us.”

  But Gabriel couldn’t. He didn’t want to. All he wanted to do was go back to when he had been safe, and loved, and cared for. Before he’d come to Stonecrest Omega Rehabilitation Center, before he’d been taken from the brothel during the bust and kept unjustly by the man with no name, he’d been with Garrison, and that time had been the happiest of his life.

  He wanted to go back.

  “Gabriel?”

  Gabriel focused and found himself in his closet-sized private room at Stonecrest, light streaming through the singular window as Counselor Kendrick held him by the shoulders. The concern on the counselor’s face should have made Gabriel feel cared for, but instead, it made him feel worse.

  Broken.

  He wasn’t broken. Not really. Not in any way that counted.

  Love broke men. It made them weak. Gabriel didn’t get why none of the counselors here understood that. He hadn’t been shaped into something he wasn’t—he’d been formed into the man he was, and Garrison had been the one who’d molded him from useless putty into a creature of exquisite beauty. He’d taken Gabriel when he was still bumbling and confused, unsure of his sexuality, unsure of his body, unsure of everything, and he’d shown Gabriel the world. But now that world was small and gray, and Gabriel longed to see color again.

  Gabriel blinked away tears. He was alone.

  Blinking didn’t do anything to keep the tears at bay. They rolled down his cheeks in silence until Gabriel’s nose blocked and he had to breathe through his mouth. It was a mistake. The air hitched in his throat and turned into an ugly, shuddering sob.

  All he wanted was to get to Garrison, and he’d failed. He’d let his brother, Adrian, put him in this place, thinking that he might be able to figure out a way to get back to the man he loved, but instead, he’d languished. The things the counselors tried to teach him weren’t meant for people like him—he wasn’t broken by circumstance, he was broken by love, and that was different. So different.

  “Gabriel?” Counselor Kendrick tried again. His hands tightened on Gabriel’s shoulders, the pressure reassuring instead of overbearing. “Where are you, Gabriel?”

  “Lost,” Gabriel said through a rattling sob. “I’m lost, and I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  “Gabriel?” Counselor Kendrick’s tone became worried. “What are you saying?”

  Gabriel let loose with one last ugly wail that shook his chest and hurt his lungs, but he couldn’t hold back the truth any longer. “I want to call my brother. I want to go home.”

  1

  Cedric

  “So, Mr. Langston…” Sterling didn’t glance at the papers in front of him, some of which Cedric knew were his resume and cover letter. “I’m not going to waste your time with questions meant to psychoanalyze you. What I want to know more than anything else is why, after five years away from The Shepherd, you’ve decided to come back to vie for a managerial position?”

  To sit across from Aurora’s one and only Sterling Holt, owner and manager of kink club The Shepherd, was an honor. Cedric smoothed his hands down his thighs, cognizant of his posture, and looked Sterling in the eye. He hadn’t come so far to waste this opportunity. If Sterling remembered him from his short-lived membership at The Shepherd, Cedric took it as a good sign. There was silent trust already established between them—a relationship that other candidates might not have, if only he could explain his way around his long absence.

  That wouldn’t be difficult. There was a reason why he hadn’t come back to the club, and if Sterling didn’t understand it, it was his loss.

  “Vie isn’t the right word for it.” Cedric held himself with his back aligned but his shoulders loose. His posture conveyed confidence, but hinted at familiarity he hoped would help ingratiate himself with Sterling. Age didn’t mean anything—all that mattered was that he appeared to be in control when speaking with men in positions of power. And Cedric was in control. His genes had already taken care of half the work—now all he needed was to make sure he sold himself as the total package. “Vie would suggest that I’m on a level playing field with your other skilled candidates. The truth is, I’m not—I’m ahead of the competition.”

  A playful glint sparked in Sterling’s eyes, accompanied by a charmed, upward curl of his lips. “Oh?”

  “Not only was I a regular member of The Shepherd who maintained excellent standing for a year-long period, but since my departure, I’ve aligned my life in ways that have strengthened my appreciation of the community. As is listed on my resume, I—”

  Sterling folded his arms on the desk and leaned forward an almost imperceptible amount. The light in his eyes changed from playful to paternal. Cedric wasn’t sure whether he should be humbled or humiliated. Sterling was almost twice his age, after all. A look like that could easily be patronizing. But Cedric’s gut told him that Sterling’s intentions were nothing but pure.

  “Forget about the resume, and forget about all the canned interview responses you’ve been practicing in front of the mirror in preparation for today. I want to hear about your life from you. Tell me about what you do, and tell me why you’re passionate about it.”

  The request swelled like a balloon in Cedric’s chest, its presence not stemming from fear or anxiety, but from pride. Of all people, Sterling wanted to hear about what he’d done with his life. It was an interview, sure, but the kindness in Sterling’s words and the quiet domination he exuded resonated with Cedric. He fed off Sterling’s vibe and mirrored it. If Sterling wanted to be approached as an equal, then it was what Ce
dric would do. Age separated them, but there was no reason to disparage himself simply because his experiences were limited by time. Cedric had done a lot of growing in the last five years. It was time to show off who he’d become.

  He would make Sterling understand his truth.

  “I’m a professional Dom.” Cedric kept his posture straight but his shoulders relaxed. He met Sterling’s eyes when he spoke, staring down those pools of blue to make it clear that he wasn’t afraid. The prestige Sterling held over him would not divide them. Cedric was worthy. “Over the last four years, I’ve made a name for myself in the kink community as a professional, dependable, and courteous service provider. I deliver release from the pressure of modern life for men and women both, of any genetic variation, but I specialize in omega services.”

  “Why omegas?” Sterling’s eyes showed mild interest sharpened by something Cedric couldn’t quite put his finger on. Engagement? Curiosity? Whatever it was, it left him feeling eager to continue to explain himself.

  The answer came easily. “Because omegas deserve release just as much as anyone else. The men and women who seek my services give their all in competitive fields, and strive to maintain positions of authority. Alphas and betas in high-pressure jobs have been the ones who traditionally seek submission, but there is a stigma around omegas seeking the same—as though if they go after what they really want, it makes them weak, or that giving in to the pleasures of submission is inextricably linked to their biological drive. In my opinion, the truth is far more nuanced than that.”