GROWL OF A STOLEN BLOODLINE

Locker Room Warning

POV: Marlowe Reyes

"So, I know this is out of nowhere," Eli said, falling into step beside me outside the lecture hall, "but there's this thing on Friday, a bunch of us are going, and I was wondering if you'd want to come. With me. Specifically."

I looked at him properly for the first time. Sandy haired, easy smile, the kind of ordinary handsome that didn't make my pulse do anything strange at all. That, more than anything, was what made me say yes.

"Sure," I said. "Yeah. I'd like that."

His whole face lit up, and something in my chest loosened for the first time in days. This was normal. This was a boy asking a girl to something on a Friday, nothing growled, nothing shaking, nothing I needed to lie awake decoding.

"Great," he said. "I'll find you at lunch, we can figure out details."

He didn't find me at lunch.

I heard about it before I saw any of it, fragments of it moving through the courtyard faster than I could keep up with. A fight. Security. Someone hauled off holding his jaw. By the time I pushed through the crowd gathered near the science building, campus security already had Eli by the arm, his lip split, his eyes wide with a kind of confusion that told me he had no idea how he'd ended up there either.

"I didn't do anything," he was saying, to no one in particular. "I don't even know what happened."

"What's going on?" I asked a girl standing near me.

She looked at me like I'd asked something obscene. "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"He got jumped. Two guys, no warning, dragged him out back and worked him over." Her eyes flicked over me, cataloging something. "Word is it's about you."

"Me? I don't even know those guys."

"Doesn't matter," she said, already stepping back like I was contagious. "You're a Bane now. Things happen around you people."

The whispers followed me for the rest of the day, thickening every time I passed a new cluster of people who stopped talking the second I got close. By the time classes ended I'd stopped trying to explain myself to anyone, because there was no explaining a thing I didn't understand either.

I found Matteo near the parking structure, alone for once, no crowd orbiting him, no audience to perform indifference for.

"Did you do that?" I said, before I'd even fully closed the distance between us.

He turned slowly. "Do what?"

"Don't." My voice cracked, and I hated it. "Don't do that thing where you make me spell it out like I'm imagining things. Eli. The boy who asked me out this morning. He's in the nurse's office right now with a split lip because two guys jumped him for no reason anyone can explain, and everyone at this school seems to think it's my fault. So I'm asking you. Did you have something to do with that?"

Something moved behind his eyes, guilt or anger, I couldn't tell which, maybe both.

"He shouldn't have touched you," Matteo said, low.

"He asked me to a party, Matteo. That's it. That's all that happened."

"I know what happened."

"Then you know there was nothing to protect me from."

"You don't understand," he said, and his voice had an edge to it now, frustration cutting through the careful ice he'd been wearing at breakfast, at every meal since, every hallway we'd passed each other in without a word.

"Then explain it to me."

"I can't."

"You can't, or you won't?"

He crossed the space between us fast, the same way he had in the entryway two nights ago, and this time when his hand closed around my wrist, it wasn't gentle, wasn't careful. It was a man holding onto something because letting go felt worse than the alternative.

"I don't understand it either," he said, and his voice had dropped, rough and low, stripped of every wall he'd built since breakfast. "I don't know what's happening between us. I don't know how to stop it. I've spent two days trying to convince myself it's nothing, that it'll pass, that I imagined how it felt to say that word to you, and I can't, Marlowe. I can't make myself stop wanting you, and I don't know how much longer I can keep standing in front of you pretending that I don't."

I couldn't breathe.

His hand was still wrapped around my wrist, his thumb pressed against the pulse there like he needed to feel it racing to believe any of this was real, and for one suspended second neither of us moved, the whole parking structure gone silent around us the same way the entryway had two nights before.

"Matteo," I started.

His phone buzzed in his jacket pocket, once, sharp against the quiet.

He didn't let go of my wrist to check it, but the screen lit up anyway, angled just enough that I caught the message before he could turn it away from me, a name I didn't recognize sitting above three lines of text that stopped every word in my throat.

He's asking about the girl. Handle it before he does.