Wolf (Filthy Rich Alphas)

Chapter 1

The Stalker’s Song

Wolf

Me,

following her home.

Her,

thinking she's alone.

Brown skin and red hair.

Most nights she snuck off in jeans, boots, and a black scarf that covered half of her face. She understood the rules. If the cops and public didn’t know her identity, then they couldn’t blame her for the graffiti.

I stayed several feet behind.

She never noticed, never glanced over her shoulder, never wondered whose footsteps that was in the shadows, never cared. She had a goal. The buzz of creation. A dream. Some hot, throbbing thing that tugged at her insides and forced her to rush out into the evening, and create the vision burning through her chest.

Bags of spray paint dangled in her hands. She crept all over Miami, decorating brick walls with the ill images that flashed in her mind.

For hours, I watched her paint,

I sat in the darkness.

I marveled at her talent.

Years ago, before the money and underground fame, I’d been just like her, a youngster with something to say, a rebel of street art, leaving my mark on public buildings, to taunt the government and humor the public.

Now I was a business man. My graffiti covered public walls all over the world. A private company sold prints of my street images at insane prices, gave me my portion of the profits, and kept my identity secret, still to this day.

People called me, Lobo.

That was Spanish for wolf.

Growing up in Miami’s Little Havana, every Cuban boy had a nickname that just stuck with them. Wolf clung to me, and then imprinted. As I grew older, with each year, I transformed into that creature, stalking and praying on many.

And with her hair,

so red,

she’d caught my eye.

Then, her murals captured the rest of me.

My little red riding hood.

Brown skin and long red hair.

On the streets, I asked around about her. Someone claimed she was Cuban. Others decided she was a mix of something. People came up with many things—Black and White, Haitian and Cuban, Jamaican and Korean, and on and on. But no one truly knew. She kept to herself, not running in any of the other art circles in the city.

So, I watched her.

My little red riding hood.

And in my bed and with my eyes closed, I pictured those red strands. My old ongoing nightmares shifted to fairytale dreams of a naive girl in red, just making her way to grandmother’s house, and me, the fierce beast that stood in the shadows, just waiting to take a bite of that soft flesh.

During the day, her stilettos clicked on the streets of Miami.

I stayed close by, whispering her name and wondering if one day she’d turn around and look my way.

I dreamed of Red.

I imagined her brown skin between my teeth, those crimson strands outlining her nude body, my tongue tracing long lines down the swell of her breasts, my nose breathing her in, no longer from a distance, but her naked body against mine,

soft, twisting, and sliding down,

our limbs entangled.

And when I finally got a chance to thrust into that moist flesh between her thighs,

nothing would save her,

not grandma

nor the lumberjack.

Chapter 2

Three Stooges

Red

Mary, Coco, and I left the elevator and stepped onto the twelfth floor of a swanky high-end apartment building in the Brickell District. That area was the posh part of Miami—where women’s fake lips formed artificial smiles and men’s gazes only fell on make-up-coated, ex-beauty queens.

I hated Brickell, but the 420 party was located here, and wherever the marijuana went, I followed.

The couple that had been riding the elevator with us, strolled by and waved at us. “Happy 420!”

Like us, they were dressed in designer clothes and masks.

I winked and waved back. “Happy 420 to you too!”

The term 420 had embedded itself in weed culture even before I’d been alive. Most used it as a codename to identify other smokers. Some went as far as posting 420-friendly on their dating profiles. True stoners made 4:20pm their ceremonial time to partake of a smoke.

Almost all celebrated and smoked April 20. It was our cannabis holiday. From London to Los Angeles. South Africa to Iran. One could yell out the term to strangers. If they smoked, they nodded and understood, maybe even shared a little something with the person.

There were so many origin stories on the term 420. Crazy tales flooded the internet. Sites claimed that in the 70s a group of California kids coined the phrase due to that being the time they would always meet in a certain area and smoke. Apparently it caught on and spread. Old stoners declared that Grateful Dead fans made it up. Youngsters boasted about 420 being a plot from the government, some secret way to discover all of the weed violators.

None of that mattered to me. I just loved having a day to smoke with others, to stop hiding and sneaking around with the habit, and to just have one day to freely say, in the privacy walls with a select group of people, “Let’s smoke!”