Widow - A Reverse Harem Romance, page 1
Widow
Maya Nicole
Copyright © 2020 by Maya Nicole
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
For permissions contact: mayanicoleauthor@gmail.com
This book is currently available exclusively through Amazon.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real people, living or dead, businesses, or locales are coincidental.
Cover design by Jessica Allain - Enchanting Covers
Edited by Karen Sanders Editing
Created with Vellum
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Contents
Author’s Note
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
Infernal Council
Social Media
Also by Maya Nicole
Author’s Note
Widow is a reverse harem romance. That means the main character will have a happily ever after with three or more men. This book also contains light male/male touching, as well as several romantic encounters together as a group. Recommended for readers 18+ for adult content and language.
Prologue
Seven Months Ago
Beep. Beep. Beep.
I groaned with my ham sandwich poised at my lips as my pager went off. I pulled it off my waistband and read the small screen that only displayed numbers. I sighed and looked longingly at my sandwich before quickly rewrapping it and putting it back in the break room refrigerator.
A priority one page to trauma room three meant my dinner would have to wait. It wasn't the first time a rendezvous with a ham sandwich had been interrupted, and it certainly wouldn't be the last.
I hightailed it down the stairs and grabbed a pair of blue gloves out of the dispenser. I snapped them on before pushing the doors to the trauma room open with my hip.
The room was a flurry of motion, and I stopped short as I approached the exam room table they had just moved a woman onto. It was controlled chaos, and I was about to become its leader.
"What do we have?"
"Adult female. Age unknown. Found burned in an abandoned mall parking lot trying to drag herself to get help." One of the nurses filled me in as I stepped forward.
The two EMTs backed away from the table, pulling their gurney with them. One of them turned to me. "Partial and full-thickness burns over eighty percent of her body." He shook his head and looked back at the woman. "I don't know how she managed to crawl or how she's still alive."
The woman had been crawling? She should have been dead on arrival, or at least unconscious. I took in the sight in front of me and stopped myself from cringing.
This was definitely one of those 'oh fuck' moments that doctors don't like to admit we have. But we do. All. The. Time. We are human.
White gauze covered most of her burned body. It was a miracle that her chest moved up and down with her breaths. Our hospital had a state-of-the-art burn center, but even I had never seen so much damage to a living, breathing person before.
Who had burned her? Why had they burned her? Was it an accident?
Her vitals were delivered to me rapid fire. They were almost non-existent. Yet she was whimpering on the gurney like she was suffering from a mere broken bone.
I wasn't the only one in shock over the woman in front of us. The people in the room raised their eyebrows at me in a silent question of how to proceed.
"Call upstairs," I ordered as the nurse hooked her up to our machines. She was flat-lining now, but was moving and mumbling.
Her mouth was opening and closing like she was saying words. I moved farther forward and leaned in. The smell made bile churn in my gut. I was glad I hadn't had a chance to eat my dinner, or it would have made a surprise reappearance.
"Ma'am, what's your name? Can you tell us what happened?" The EMTs couldn't get the information out of her in transit. She was Jane Doe.
More noises that sounded an awful lot like words came out of her mouth.
"Ma'am, can you repeat that?"
Her fingers reached out to grab my arm. They were severely burned and looked foreign on her body, twisted and mangled from whatever hellfire had consumed her.
"Ma'am, we can't understand you."
I leaned even closer, hoping I could understand what she was trying to tell me.
I shouldn't have.
In a movement that was faster than humanly possible, and certainly quicker than she should have been able to move given her injuries, she reached out and pulled me closer, her teeth sinking into the side of my neck.
She was fast, like a viper.
I immediately stumbled back, taking off my gloves, and grabbed a piece of gauze to hold over the wound.
A lot of thoughts go through your head when a patient attacks you. Are they mentally ill? Should I attack back to prevent injury to myself? Are they reacting because of the situation?
It might have been a quick bite, but it was a painful one.
The machines suddenly began beeping like crazy as the woman thrashed on the exam table, trying to break free. She went from having non-existent vitals to sending the machines haywire with erratic readings.
There was an increase in activity as security and more personnel rushed into the trauma room. There wasn't much I could do with a neck wound.
I was led to an empty exam room in a daze of disbelief. I had only been attacked once before, knocked on my ass by a man higher than a kite. That was child's play compared to a bite to the neck.
The bite was deep and left me feeling dizzy. Human bite wounds were the worst. I'd be lucky if I didn't get an infection.
The door opened, and one of the on-call residents came in, looking pale. I couldn't blame him. What we had all just witnessed in that trauma room was a once-in-a-career type of situation.
He snapped on a pair of gloves and took over holding the gauze to my neck. A nurse joined him, and he removed the dressing. His inhale of breath was loud enough to make me flinch.
"Jesus, Lia."
"How bad is it, Roni? No need to sugarcoat it. Will I be stuck wearing turtlenecks for the rest of my life?" I let out a pained laugh and gripped the edge of the exam table.
I hated turtlenecks.
My neck was throbbing, more than it should be from a bite to the neck. It almost felt like there was a foreign object inside of it.
"It looks like... Teresa, have a look at this." He was wiping my neck with an antiseptic wipe. His lips were drawn tightly in a line. "Doesn't it look like..."
Teresa looked around his arm, and her eyes widened before settling on me. She opened a few cabinets and dug around. She returned with a mirror and held it up so I could see for myself.
My breath caught in my throat. Now that the area was clean, it was evident it wasn't a bite from a mouth. My heart rate went through the roof, and I'm sure if I was hooked to monitors, I would have been tachycardic.
"What the actual fuck?" I reached up and probed the area that looked an awful lot like two wounds from fangs.
My hands were shaking as I lowered them to my lap and let them clean the puncture holes and cover them in gauze. Teresa left the room to grab me a new scrub top since mine had blood and fluids from wound care on it.
"You'll need to take antibiotics. Once we get the chem panel back, we'll know if there are any diseases we need to worry about." Roni took his gloves off. "Are you feeling okay?"
I nodded. I was more shocked than anything. It wasn't unheard of that people filed their teeth to resemble those of vampires. Los Angeles was a crazy city. There was never a dull moment in the ER.
It's why I chose to become an emergency room doctor.
The door opened, and Teresa returned with a blue scrub top clutched in her hand. Teresa was tough as nails, so her demeanor didn't ease the dread that had slowly crept into my body.
"The patient has died." She dropped the top on the table next to me. She took my hand. "They figured out what she was saying. Repeating, actually."
I gripped her hand. I didn't like the way this evening had taken an unexpectedly morbid turn. One minute I was about to sink my teeth into deliciousness; the next, a charred woman was sinking her fangs into my neck.
Now I knew how the ham sandwich felt.
The room was silent, besides the faint sounds of the bustling ER on the other side of the closed exam room door. I felt like I was outside my body, looking down at the three of us. The rest of the room blurred,
"She kept repeating, 'find her, find her'." She cleared her throat. "Then she let out a loud screech, and a large spider crawled from her mouth. It moved so fast we couldn't kill it."
My eyes went wide, and I brought my hand to my neck.
"The other doctors think she was on something. Possibly burned herself doing drugs. That a spider crawled into her mouth while she was crawling in that parking lot." Teresa was thinking out loud. It wasn't helping. At. All.
Whatever had happened in that trauma room wasn't natural. I had a bite that looked an awful lot like a spider bite on the side of my neck, a spider had crawled from a woman's mouth, and now that woman was dead.
Little did I know it was much more than just a bite.
Chapter 1
Everyone thought I was insane for taking shifts on major holidays such as Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It wasn't crazy if your only family consisted of a deadbeat mother and father who enjoyed cooking something illegal more than cooking a holiday ham for their family.
I wasn't about to deal with the headache of holiday traveling when the only thing that would greet me in West Virginia was drama. Drama and a whole lot of heartbreak.
Year after year, I celebrated alone. Well, mostly. Once upon a time, I had a husband. Sometimes I celebrated with friends.
This year, I needed to celebrate alone.
Not because I wanted to. But because there was a hunger inside of me that needed to be fed, and I couldn't risk hurting the people I cared about.
I could go a month at most before the hunger took over, and I lost myself completely. I made that mistake in my first month. I resisted. The spiders took over, and I had no choice in who they chose. They seemed to have a particular taste that I didn't completely understand.
I had hunted six times. Six times I had scrubbed my skin until it was raw. Six times I had vomited until my throat bled. Six times I couldn't say a word to anyone about what I had done. What they had done.
The first time they had killed, I had gone to the ER. Sleep deprivation, they said. I was tired and needed time off. Maybe that was partly true, but I knew what I’d done. What I’d witnessed before and after.
Luckily, I blacked out during. I didn't even want to imagine what the spiders did to the victims.
When I had been bitten, the wound had healed up beautifully. Almost too well, considering its nature and location. It should have scarred or become infected.
For a solid month afterwards, everything was fine. Or at least that's the way it seemed. None of my work colleagues even seemed to remember what had happened that night in the ER.
A month after the incident that had left me shaken to my core, I woke up and found a spider on the pillow next to me. It was black and looked similar to a black widow, but definitely wasn't. There was something... foreign about it.
It just sat there, on the white of the pillowcase, and looked at me with its creepy spider eyes. I had never paid attention to a spider's eyes before because I was more concerned about how to kill it.
It had looked at me like I was its savior.
She jumped and crawled into my skin. There one second, gone the next.
I was confident it was a she. I just had a gut feeling about it.
A few weeks later, a hunger had started developing inside of me. I couldn't explain it, but I first noticed it when I was around men at work. Particularly married men. My skin itched. My stomach churned. It was like the spider inside of me knew those men were up to no good.
After that first time, I decided I wouldn't let them have that much control of me ever again.
It was simple really: find a new bar each month, find a less than savory character. I got a feeling when my prey was within my grasp. It was like my very own spidey sense.
Except I wasn't the good guy.
I didn't want to do it. But I had to. Back when I first discovered I was different, I tried to fight it, but that increased the risk of an innocent getting killed instead. Plus, it just pissed her and her minions off.
I did not want to piss them off.
I pulled open the door to Blue Wave, a hot new restaurant in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. It was one of the few restaurants and bars open Christmas Eve night.
Thank God, because I was pushing it in terms of feeding.
I looked around the restaurant, surprised that it was so busy. I guess I wasn't the only one without family. Or one they didn't want to be around.
"Ma'am, can I get you a table? It will be about a forty-minute wait." The hostess was wearing a Santa hat, which was out of place for a mermaid-themed establishment.
The restaurant area was large and very blue. I felt like I was under the ocean with the chrome, blue, and turquoise decor and finishes. There were aquariums everywhere with tropical fish.
Maybe the spiders would leave me alone with all the water around. Spiders hated water. They reminded me every time I took a shower by tickling under the surface of my skin.
A bath was out of the question. I used to love a nice bubble bath. Now all I had was a box of unused bath bombs.
“Thanks, but I'm headed to the bar."
As I weaved my way through the tables, several sets of eyes tracked me. I didn't feel confident or seductive, but somehow my persona exuded it when I was on the hunt.
My hair became fuller, and my eyes became glossy. When I walked, my hips swayed with just the right amount of sashay.
None of the onlookers caught my interest.
The monster always knew who she wanted. She preferred married men who cheated on their wives. Men who had secrets to hide.
I had no idea how she knew, but she did. And she wanted them dead. All of them. One by one. One month at a time.
As I approached the bar, I watched the blue-haired mermaids swim in the tank behind it. What made someone wake up one day and decide to be a bar mermaid? It was a genius idea. Even I could admit that it was relaxing to watch them swim.
I managed to find a seat at the bar and slid onto the stool. I grabbed the bar menu and examined the special drink choices. Was I in the mood for something tropical tasting on Christmas Eve?
I knew I should have taken some time off and gone to an exotic location. The thought of being in an airplane made me shiver, though. Usually, I didn’t mind flying, but now I had hundreds of extra passengers.
Imagining hundreds of spiders spilling out of me inside a plane made me shudder.
“What can I get for you this evening?” I looked up from the bar menu and felt like I was looking into the soul of another darkened spirit.
His eyes were as dark as night, as was his hair. It took me a moment to recover from how attractive he was.
This is how most bars work: hire the most attractive males and females to lure in the customers. If I ever went to the same bar twice, it would definitely be this one.
“Let me try your signature drink, the Blue Wave.” I placed the bar menu back in its spot.
He turned and started to make my drink. The guy next to me, who had been staring into his drink glass, tapped a finger on the rim, drawing my attention in his direction.
He looked over at me. I bit my lip to stop my jaw from dropping. Holy hell. Of all nights, why were there so many attractive men tonight, a night I needed to hunt?
“The Blue Wave is not a Christmas Eve drink. Unless your goal is to get drunk. It’s Kai’s take on an AMF.” His voice was deep and commanding without being loud. It made my stomach clench, and not because spiders were lurking somewhere inside me.
“What’s an AMF?” I perused the man next to me. He was dressed way too formally to be sitting at a place that had mermaids swimming in a tank. He must have attended a Christmas party. A fancy-ass Christmas party that required tuxedos.
