Scars and Stadium Lights

The first thing anyone tells you about the Ironclad Wolves is that you never see the owner. The second thing is that you don’t ask why. I’ve been in the building for eleven minutes, and I’ve already broken both rules. “Is he real?” I ask the security guard who’s scanning my badge for the third time. “Dominic Vale. Or is he one of those myths, like the guy who owns half the internet and nobody’s ever met him?” The guard, a mountain of a man with a name tag that says OKAFOR, T., looks at me the way you’d look at a dog that just walked into a church. “Top floor,” he says. “Glass wall. Don’t stare.” “I wasn’t going to stare.” “Everybody stares.” He hands back my badge. It has my face on it, a terrible photo where I look like I’ve just been told bad news, and underneath, in clean block letters: WREN CALLAHAN, SPORTS MEDICINE INTERN. I run my thumb over the words. Four years of undergrad, two jobs, one student loan I try not to think about, and a clinic where I volunteer three nights a week so I can say I’ve touched real injuries and not just textbook diagrams. It all came down to this laminated rectangle. I’m inside. I made it. The Ironclad Wolves training facility doesn’t look like a place where people sweat. It looks like a place where people sign contracts. The lobby is all black stone and brushed steel, with a wall of windows that looks out over the practice fields, and a massive silver wolf’s head mounted above the reception desk. Its eyes are some kind of amber glass. I swear they follow me across the floor. I check my phone. One text from Tessa, my best friend and roommate, who believes in capital letters the way other people believe in prayer. TESSA: YOU ARE GOING TO BE AMAZING. DON’T FIX ANYONE’S HEART, JUST THEIR HAMSTRINGS. I smile, type no promises, and slide the phone into my back pocket. There’s another message below it, from Dad, sent at 5:52 this morning because Frank Callahan has never in his life slept past dawn. DAD: Did you take your vitamins? I did. The small brown bottle lives on my bathroom shelf, and every morning, one capful of the bitter amber liquid goes down my throat, followed by a face I can’t control. He’s been handing me those bottles since I was six. I’ve never asked why a man who thinks kale is a conspiracy takes my nutrition so seriously. I text back a thumbs-up. Then I square my shoulders and follow the signs for the medical wing. Dr. Priya Raman is a small woman with a silver streak in her black hair and a handshake like a vise. She’s the head team physician, and she doesn’t waste a single word on small talk. “You’re the new intern.” “Yes, ma’am. Wren Callahan.” “Don’t call me ma’am. I’m not that old, and you’re not that polite.” She studies me for a second, her dark eyes sharp. “You have good hands. I read your file. You fixed a gymnast’s dislocated shoulder at your clinic last spring without a physician on site.” “I had a physician on the phone,” I say. “He talked me through it.” “And you stayed calm.” She nods once, like I’ve passed something. “Good. The players here don’t heal like normal people, and they don’t like being told they need to rest. You’ll need to be firm.” “Don’t heal like normal people?” Something flickers across her face, quick and quiet. “They’re elite athletes. They heal fast. That’s what I meant.” It’s a smooth answer. It’s also the kind of answer you give when you’ve said it a hundred times. I file it away. She walks me through the facility at a pace that makes me practically jog. Hydrotherapy pools. A strength room so big it has its own weather. A film room where a dozen enormous men are watching a screen and arguing in low, rumbling voices. The whole place hums with a particular energy, like the air before a thunderstorm, and I can’t shake the feeling that every head in every room turns just slightly as we pass. “Is it always this quiet?” I ask. “They’re being polite.” “They don’t look polite.” “No,” Dr. Raman agrees. “They look curious. You smell new.” I blink at her. “Fresh hire,” she says, without missing a beat. “New hires have a, ah, newness. Come on.” We stop outside a treatment room where a man is sitting on the table with his shirt off, one arm wrapped in ice. And I do what I’d been warned not to do around athletes. I stare. He’s built like somebody carved him out of something harder than marble. Dark hair that’s a little too long, a jaw with a bruise on it, and eyes the color of storm clouds that lift to mine and stay there. He’s grinning, which is somehow worse. “Jax Mercer,” Dr. Raman says, with the weariness of a woman who’s said that name many times and regretted most of them. “Star wide receiver, team captain, and the most stubborn patient I have. Jax, this is Wren. She’ll be assisting with your rehab.” “Wren,” Jax says, rolling the name around like it’s candy. “Cute. Like the bird.” “Like the bird who’s about to tell you to stop flexing that elbow.” His grin widens. “I’m not flexing.” “You’re flexing, and you’re going to make the sprain worse.” He looks at Dr. Raman. “I like her.” “Don’t,” says Dr. Raman, and walks out. I’m alone with a shirtless wide receiver and a bag of melting ice. I do my best impression of a professional. “Let me see the arm.” He holds it out. The skin is swollen and purple along the inside of his forearm, a deep bruise that spreads like spilled ink. I press two fingers along the muscle, and he hisses, which I take as a good sign, because a patient who yelps is a patient who can feel. “When did this happen?” “Yesterday.” I frown. A bruise like this, with this much swelling, should be a day and a half from yellow at least. But when I look closer, the edges are already fading. The color is draining out of it even as I watch. “That’s weird,” I murmur. “What is?” “It’s healing. Fast.” I glance up. “Like, really fast.” For half a second, Jax’s smile slips, and something wary takes its place. Then he laughs, easy and warm. “Good genes.” “Must be.” “Must be,” he agrees, and holds my eyes a beat too long. I spend the next hour doing what I came here to do. I check range of motion. I show him the stretches. I tape the arm in a pattern that I know will hold. Jax talks the entire time, about the team, about the new season, about a bike he’s rebuilding in his garage, and I find myself laughing against my will. When I tell him to stay off the arm for three days, he swears he will, and we both know he’s lying. It’s not until I’m washing my hands afterward that I feel it. It starts as a prickle at the back of my neck. A warmth, strange and deliberate, as if someone had pressed a palm flat between my shoulder blades. I go still with the water running over my fingers. Someone is watching me. I look up and into the mirror above the sink. There’s nothing there but my own face, pale and a little startled, my brown hair coming loose from its braid. Behind me, the treatment room is empty. The door is closed. But the feeling doesn’t go away. If anything, it sharpens, pulling my attention toward the ceiling, toward the far end of the building, toward the very top. Top floor, the guard said. Glass wall. Don’t stare. I shut off the water and dry my hands slowly. I don’t look up. I don’t. I’m a professional. “Everybody stares,” I whisper to myself. By the time my shift ends, the sky outside is turning the color of a bruise. Dr. Raman gives me a short nod, which I’m choosing to interpret as approval, and I walk out through the lobby with my bag over my shoulder and my feet aching in my cheap work shoes. The silver wolf’s head watches me go. I don’t look at it. In the parking lot, the air is cold and clean and smells of rain. I fish for my keys, and that’s when it hits me again, stronger this time: the prickle, the pressure, the unmistakable sense of being seen. I turn, slowly, and look up. The Ironclad Wolves headquarters rises against the sky, black glass and steel. Right at the very top, on the highest floor, there’s a wall of windows lit gold from behind. And in the middle of that gold stands a figure. A man. Too far away to see his face. Just a tall shape, perfectly still, one hand in his pocket and the other resting against the glass. He’s looking at me. I know it the way you know you’ve missed a step in the dark, in my bones and before I can think. My heart gives one hard knock against my ribs. I should look away. That’s the rule. But I don’t. For one long, strange moment I stand in an empty parking lot and stare back at a man I’ve never met, and something under my skin, something I don’t have a word for, turns over and wakes up. Then he steps back from the glass and is gone. I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. My phone buzzes in my hand, and I nearly drop it. TESSA: SURVIVED DAY ONE?? I stare at the screen. My fingers feel clumsy. Barely, I type. Tell you everything at home. I have my clinic shift tonight first. I climb into my battered little car and lock the doors, which feels ridiculous, and sit there while the first drops of rain tap against the windshield. I have no idea yet that in a few hours a stranger on a motorcycle will bleed on my clinic floor and call me by a name I never told him. All I know is that the owner of the Ironclad Wolves just looked at me like I was something he’d been waiting for. And I have never, in my whole life, been so sure that I should be afraid.