Scars and Stadium Lights

Cold Welcome

I don’t sleep. I lie on my narrow bed in the apartment I share with Tessa, staring at the water stain on the ceiling that looks like Florida, and turn the little silver button over and over between my fingers. Sometime around four in the morning the rain stops. Sometime around five I give up, shower, braid my hair with hands that aren’t quite steady, and swallow my capful of amber tonic with the usual grimace. It tastes the way it always does, like licorice and pennies and something green and bitter underneath. Today it takes longer than usual to go down.

Tessa is already in the kitchen when I come out, hunched over a mug of coffee the size of a soup bowl, her black hair piled in a knot on top of her head and her glasses sliding down her nose. She takes one look at me and sets the mug down very slowly, the way you’d put down something you might need to throw. “You look like you’ve been haunted,” she says. “Did something happen? Was it a man? Is it a man? Is he hot?”

“Nothing happened,” I say, which is the second lie I’ve told in twelve hours, and it comes out easier than the first. “Bad night at the clinic. Someone came in who needed a lot of stitches.”

“Mm,” says Tessa, who has known me since we were eleven years old and can smell a half-truth through a brick wall. She doesn’t push, though. She just slides the second mug across the counter, the one with the chipped handle that’s technically mine, and says, “Drink. And text me when you survive today, because I need to hear everything about the billionaire who lives in the sky.”

“I haven’t even met him.”

“Yet,” she says darkly, and goes back to her coffee.

The button is in the front pocket of my jeans as I leave, a small, warm weight against my hip. I tell myself I’ll throw it out. I tell myself that all the way to the bus stop, and again on the long ride across the city, and one more time as the Ironclad Wolves headquarters rises up in front of me, black and gleaming against a pale morning sky. I don’t throw it out.

The staff meeting is held in a conference room on the second floor, and the first thing I notice is that nobody sits in the chair at the head of the table. It stands there empty, a tall, black leather thing pushed in neatly, and every person who enters glances at it and then away, the way you might avoid looking at a sleeping dog. Dr. Raman is already seated halfway down, a tablet in front of her and a frown on her face. A handful of trainers, two physical therapists, a nutritionist, and a dozen others I haven’t met fill the rest of the seats, and the low murmur of conversation stops the moment I walk in.

I find a chair near the end and sit, trying to take up as little space as possible. Someone slides a folder in front of me. Someone else pours coffee I didn’t ask for. It’s all very courteous and very strange, and underneath it, I feel the same thing I felt in the hallway yesterday: a ripple of attention that follows me wherever I go, quiet and careful and unmistakable.

“Everyone, this is Wren Callahan,” Dr. Raman says, without looking up from her tablet. “She’s our new sports medicine intern. Be nice.”

A few people nod. One of the physical therapists, a cheerful woman with freckles, gives me a small wave. And then the door at the far end of the room opens, and the whole mood in the room changes, like a window being thrown open in winter.

The man who walks in is tall, taller than anyone else in the room, with close-cropped dark hair, deep brown skin, and a dark gray suit that fits him so precisely it looks like it was poured on. He moves without hurry, but there’s a quality to his stillness that I recognize, the same watchful quality I’d seen the night before. He doesn’t sit in the empty chair at the head of the table. He stands beside it, one hand resting lightly on its back, and surveys the room with a gaze so cool and measured that I feel it land on each of us in turn.

“Good morning,” he says. His voice is smooth and low and carries without effort. “I’m Rhys Okafor. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, I serve as Mr. Vale’s chief of staff. Mr. Vale is unavailable this morning, as he is most mornings, so I’ll be conducting the meeting.”

A murmur of assent ripples around the table. I notice that nobody looks surprised. I also notice that the name Okafor sounds very familiar, and I’m trying to place it when his eyes find mine and hold.

“Ms. Callahan,” he says. “Welcome.”

It is the least welcoming welcome I have ever received. There’s no warmth in it, no curiosity, not even the polite, practiced neutrality of a man greeting a new hire. There’s only a flat, assessing coolness, and underneath it something sharper, like the edge of a blade held very carefully behind a back.

“Thank you,” I say.

“I trust your first day went smoothly.”

“It did.”

“And your evening?”

The room seems to go very quiet. “I’m sorry?”

“Your evening,” Rhys repeats, in the same even tone. “I understand you volunteer at a community clinic on the east side of the city. Three nights a week, I believe. That’s an admirable commitment.”

My pulse picks up. I never told anyone here about the clinic. It’s on my résumé, one line near the bottom, but nobody has asked me about it. I look around the table, but Dr. Raman has gone very still, and the others are studying their folders as though they contain the secrets of the universe.

“It’s just a few hours a week,” I say carefully. “I like to keep my skills sharp.”

“I’m sure you do.” He tilts his head, a small, precise motion. “Have you had any interesting patients lately?”

He knows.

The thought arrives whole and certain, and it makes the skin on my arms prickle. I don’t know how he knows, and I don’t know what he knows, but I can read it in the careful blankness of his face and the way his gaze drops, just for an instant, to the front pocket of my jeans. To the small, round weight I’ve been carrying all morning.

Then he looks up again, and his expression hasn’t changed at all.

“No,” I say. “Nothing interesting.”

“Good,” says Rhys. “I’d hate for you to be burdened with anything unnecessary.”

He moves on to the agenda as though the exchange never happened. Practice schedules, injury reports, a dull discussion of hydration protocols. I take notes in my folder with a pen that doesn’t feel like it belongs to me, and I don’t hear a single word.

It’s after the meeting, in the narrow corridor outside the conference room, that he catches me alone.

I’ve almost made it to the stairs when I hear his voice behind me, quiet and unhurried. “A moment, Ms. Callahan.”

I turn. The corridor is empty now, the others having filed off to their various departments, and the fluorescent light overhead makes the sharp lines of his face look carved from something colder than stone. Up close, he’s even more imposing, and I’m suddenly aware of how very far I am from anywhere I could call for help.

“Mr. Okafor.”

“Rhys is fine.” He doesn’t smile. “I’ll be brief. I’m aware you’re new to this organization, and I understand that new employees often feel a certain, shall we say, curiosity about the people they work for. I’d advise you to resist it.”

“I wasn’t aware I was being curious.”

“You were staring at the top floor yesterday.”

My face goes hot. “Your security guard told me not to.”

“My brother is very thorough.” A faint, dry edge touches his voice, the first hint of anything human. “He also told me that you asked whether Mr. Vale was real. I thought that was a rather good question.” His gaze sharpens. “Here is the answer. He is very real, Ms. Callahan, and he is very private, and the people who work here understand that privacy is not a courtesy. It is a rule.”

“Understood.”

“I hope so.” He takes a step closer, and I smell something faint and clean on him, like cedar and cold air, and under it, for just a moment, the same wild, woodsy scent that clung to the stranger in my clinic. My heart gives a hard, startled thump. Rhys’s eyes narrow, as if he heard it.

“Is there something else?” I ask. My voice is steadier than I feel.

For a long moment, he says nothing. Then he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a slim black card, plain except for a phone number embossed in silver. He holds it out between two fingers.

“If anything unusual should happen,” he says, “to you, or to anyone you meet, you will call this number. Any hour. You will not discuss it with your friends, your family, or your colleagues. You will call this number.”

I take the card, because it seems like the only thing to do. It’s heavier than it looks. “Anything unusual like what?”

“Anything at all.” He turns to go, then stops, his back to me, one hand resting briefly against the wall. When he speaks again, his voice is lower, almost gentle, which is somehow worse.

“And Ms. Callahan? Stay away from the Eastside clinic after dark.”

My breath catches. “Why?”

He doesn’t answer. He just glances back over his shoulder, a single, unreadable look, and then walks away down the corridor, his footsteps silent on the polished floor.

I stand there for a long time, the black card cold in my fingers and the silver button warm against my hip, listening to my own heartbeat.