The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

CH.7 - Stay Away From Him

Anna's POV

I don't sleep much.

Every time I close my eyes I'm back in that room, watching the fight go wrong. The way Evan went still over Liam, like something in him had switched off and something else had switched on. The way his eyes came up and found me across all that noise and there was nothing behind them for a second, nothing human, and then there was, like someone walking back into a house they'd left dark for a long time. I keep replaying the exact moment he stopped. My voice did that. I told him to quit and he quit, mid-swing, his fist already coming down, and it just froze in the air like I'd reached across the whole room and caught his wrist.

I don't understand why that worked. That's the thing that won't let me sleep. Not the violence. The fact that I stopped it with three words when nobody else in that screaming crowd could.

By the time grey light starts coming through the curtains I've given up. I take my coffee out to the back step and watch the boats go out. Dad left with the tide hours ago, before I was even pretending to sleep. The sea's flat and colourless and completely ordinary, gulls picking along the waterline, the same view I've woken up to my whole life, and none of it matches the thing turning over and over in my chest.

I press my hand against my sternum without thinking about it. There's an ache there. Small, low, constant. It's been there since the night I went into the water, and I've been telling myself it's a pulled muscle from the fall, or the cold getting into me, or nerves. I've been telling myself a lot of things.

Elsie catches me in the hall at school before I've even finished the coffee.

"Okay." She falls into step beside me, close, her voice dropping the way it does when she's about to be serious. "Spill. You were a ghost all through that party and then you disappeared into thin air. What actually happened with the fight?"

I decided somewhere around four in the morning that I'm not telling her the whole of it. Partly because I don't have the words. Mostly because it feels like it belongs to him, whatever it was, and I can't explain to myself why I feel protective of a boy I've spoken to exactly three times, but I do, and I've learned to trust that feeling even when I can't justify it.

"Nothing happened," I say. "Liam got in the ring, some guy beat him, I told them to knock it off before someone got hurt. That's the whole story."

"That's the whole story." Elsie gives me a look that could strip paint. "Anna. The guy who beat him. That was Evan."

"So?"

"So." She catches my arm and steers me off into the alcove by the vending machines, the one we retreat to when she has something she needs me to actually absorb. She plants herself in front of me so I can't sidestep. "I need you to really hear me this time. Stay away from Evan. I mean it."

"You've said. Repeatedly."

"I'm saying it again because you've got the look." She points at my face, close enough that I go cross-eyed. "That exact look. The one you get right before you do something stupid specifically because somebody told you not to."

She's not wrong. That's the infuriating part. She's known me since we were eleven and she can read me like a tide chart.

"He's bad news," she says. "And I don't mean the fun kind. I don't mean brooding-boy-with-a-motorcycle bad news that turns out to have a heart of gold. I mean the real kind. Do you even know what people say about him?"

"People say I smell like low tide," I say. "You'll understand if I don't take the school's word as gospel."

"This is different, and you know it's different." She lowers her voice further, glancing down the hall. "He came out of nowhere. No family here, no history anyone can find, doesn't talk to a soul if he can help it. Spends all his time out past the docks with that crew, the ones who run the fights and the gambling. He's got money and nobody can tell you where it comes from. And the girls, Anna." She ticks it off like evidence. "He goes through them and never keeps one. Never a girlfriend, never anything that lasts, just here and then gone. He is not a puzzle for you to solve. He's just trouble that hasn't picked a target yet, and I would really, really rather it wasn't you."

I let her finish. And while she talks, I'm turning over everything that doesn't fit.

The boy on the boat who looked at my face when I was standing there in a soaked shirt, and kept looking at my face, when every other boy at this school would have looked anywhere but. The boy in the doorway of the equipment room who got the door open somehow, got me out, and said you owe me a favor like it had cost him nothing at all, when I could see it had cost him something. The fist in the air last night. Coming down slow. Stopping.

None of it matches the story she's telling me. And that's exactly the problem. If Evan were only the rumor, I could file him under trouble and forget him and go back to my life. It's the pieces that don't fit the rumor that kept me on that back step at dawn.

"I hear you," I say.

"You hear me. You're not listening."

"I'm listening, Els."

"Then say it back to me. Say, Elsie, I solemnly swear to stay away from the scary fight-club boy and go on nice, normal, uncomplicated dates with nice, normal Liam instead."

"Liam hasn't asked me on a date."

"He will." She says it with total confidence. "He lights up like a lantern when you walk past. That boy is gone for you. And he's kind, and he's uncomplicated, and he would sooner cut off his own arm than scare you. You could do so much worse." She softens, the lecture draining out of her, and what's left underneath is just my friend, worried. "I've got a bad feeling about Evan. Not a gossip feeling. A real one, in my gut. Please. Just keep your distance."

I make a sound that could pass for agreement if you weren't paying close attention, and she lets it go, because the first bell's about to ring and she's already half into her own morning.

But I'm not thinking about first period.

I'm thinking about how fast he moved in that ring. Not fighter-fast. I've watched Liam train, I've watched the crew's fighters, I know what fast looks like on a person. This was past that. Fast enough that some animal part of the back of my brain flinched a whole second before the rest of me caught up, the way you flinch from a thing before you've consciously seen it. I'm thinking about how completely still he went right before, like something listening for a sound underwater. And now that I'm looking, other things start lining up behind it. The gull on the dock the night I fell, the one that just sat and watched him and didn't startle, didn't shuffle away the way gulls do from people. I didn't think anything of it then. I think about it now.

None of that means anything on its own. People are fast. People are strange. Half the boys in this school are odd in one direction or another and I don't lose sleep taking inventory of them.

But I press my hand to my sternum again, to that low steady pull that's been there since the water, the one I keep explaining away, and I can't make the pieces lie flat no matter how I turn them. There's a shape to him I can't find the edges of. And whatever that shape is, it isn't the one the rumors are drawing.

Here's the thing about me that Elsie knows and the rest of this school doesn't.

I have spent my entire life as the thing people decided about before they bothered to learn the truth. Fish girl. Poor girl. The one who smells like the docks. Easy to laugh at, easy to lock in a supply closet, easy to dismiss. And every single time, without exception, the story they told about me was wrong, and the real thing was sitting right there underneath it the whole time, waiting for anyone who cared enough to actually look.

So when the whole school looks at Evan and sees a playboy with a rap sheet of rumors, and I look at him and see something that plainly, obviously does not add up, I know exactly which of those instincts I've learned to trust.

I'm going to look.

It isn't a dramatic decision. It just settles into me, quiet and final, by the time the bell rings and the hall starts to empty. Elsie told me to stay away. Every sensible part of me agrees with her completely. And I'm going to do the exact opposite, because there is a boy in this building hiding something real, and I have never once in my life been able to leave a thing alone just because I was warned it might hurt me.

I find him at his locker between first and second period.

He sees me coming. I watch him see me, watch something cross his face fast and vanish just as fast, and then the shutters come down and he goes deliberately, carefully blank, a boy watching the sky and deciding it's going to storm.

I stop in front of him.

"You owe me a favor," I say. "I'm here to collect."