The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

CH.18 - The Locker Room

Anna's POV

The corridor swallows the noise behind me until it's just a low thud through the concrete, the bass of the crowd like a heartbeat in the walls. The light out here is bad, one bare bulb every few yards, and the doors are all shut, and the air smells of damp and rust and, faintly, that chemical sharpness that turns my stomach now.

I try a door. Locked. I try the next. A storeroom, dark, stacked with folding chairs. Not a way out.

My good shoes are loud on the concrete and I make myself slow down, quiet down, because some animal part of me has decided that being heard in this hallway is a bad idea, and I've learned this week to listen to that part. My pulse is going in my throat. Somewhere back through the crowd Elsie is laughing at something, drink in hand, with no idea what building she dragged us into, and I've lost her, and I've lost the exit, and every closed door in this hallway feels like it might have the man from the harbor behind it.

The third door isn't locked. It gives under my hand and I slip inside and pull it shut behind me, and I lean my back against it and breathe.

A locker room. Or it used to be, before the cannery closed and the crew moved in. There's a row of dented metal lockers along one wall, half of them hanging open, and a bench bolted to the floor, and a single flickering strip light overhead that buzzes like a trapped fly. It stinks of sweat and liniment and, under it, that same chemical smell, stronger in here, close.

I should catch my breath and go back out and find Elsie and drag her home. That's the plan. That's the only sane plan.

The door opens behind me.

I spin, my back hitting the lockers, a sound like a struck drum, and my heart leaps into my throat, and it's him.

Evan.

He fills the doorway, still stripped down from the ring, a sheen of sweat on him, his chest still working from the fight, and his silver eyes find me pressed against the lockers and something in his face cracks wide open. Relief and fury and fear, all of it at once, none of it hidden the way he usually hides everything.

"What are you doing here." His voice is low and rough and it shakes, just slightly, at the edges. He shuts the door behind him and the buzz of the strip light fills the silence. "Out of every place in this town. Out of every door you could walk through. You come here. Tonight."

"I didn't know." My own voice comes out thin and I hate it, so I push off the lockers and stand up straight, because I will not be small in front of him, not even now. "Elsie set up a stupid double date. She didn't tell me where. I swear to you I didn't know until we pulled up and by then I couldn't just..."

"You could have left." He crosses the room, and there's that too-smooth speed to it, that wrongness, and then he's close, closer than he's let himself get since the dock, and the heat is coming off him and the cedar-and-cold scent of him floods everything and the pull in my chest snaps so tight it hurts. "The second you saw where you were. You could have turned around and walked out and instead you came inside, into the middle of it, into the exac...t"

"I was trying to get Elsie."

"You were watching me fight." He says it and then looks like he wishes he hadn't, like it slipped past the guard, and something flickers across his face that isn't anger at all.

I don't deny it. There's no point. He saw me. Our eyes met across the whole screaming room and we both know exactly what I was doing.

"You hold back," I say instead, quiet, because it's been sitting in me since I watched him and it won't stay down. "In the ring. You could end it in a second and you don't. You drag it out. You let them hit you. Like you're being careful. Like you're keeping something on a leash the whole time and the fight isn't the hard part, the leash is."

He goes very still. The strip light buzzes. His eyes hold mine and there's a whole war in them, and for one second I think this is it, this is where he finally tells me, and my heart is slamming and I don't move because I'm afraid if I move he'll stop.

"Anna." My name comes out of him like it costs something. He's so close now I can see the shadows under his eyes, the exhaustion he wears like a second skin. "You have to stop seeing so much. It isn't safe. For you. The more you see, the more..."

The door bangs open.

We spring apart, and Will is standing there, filling the doorway, and the easy grin he wears is nowhere on his face. His eyes go from Evan to me and back to Evan, quick, calculating, and there's a nervous energy coming off him, a jittery wrongness, his weight shifting foot to foot, his hand opening and closing at his side.

"There you are." He's talking to Evan but he's looking at me, and I don't like the way he's looking at me, like he's pricing me, like he's filing me away to tell someone. "The man upstairs wants to see you. Now. Not later. Now." His gaze flicks to me again. "Who's this?"

"Nobody." Evan steps between us, smooth, casual, and just like that the mask is back, the bored cold nothing, like the last five minutes didn't happen. "Girl got lost looking for the bar. I was pointing her back."

Will looks at me a beat too long. My skin crawls under it.

"Bar's the other way, sweetheart," he says. "You want to get back to it. This isn't a part of the building for wandering." Then, to Evan, harder: "Upstairs. He doesn't like waiting."

"I'm coming."

Will holds the door, waiting, making it clear neither of us moves until he's satisfied, and Evan shoots me one last look, and it's not cold at all, it's urgent, it says go, go now, get out, and then he's walking out past Will and the two of them are gone and the door swings shut and I'm alone in the buzzing light with my heart going like a hammer.

I don't wait around. I've pushed my luck far enough for one night. I go for the door, and that's when I see it.

The trash can by the bench. Overflowing. Tape and wrappers and empty bottles, and there, sitting right on top, catching the sick flicker of the strip light, a syringe.

Used. The plunger down. A bead of something still clinging to the needle.

I stop. I stand there and look at it, and my stomach turns over slow and cold, because I know that smell now, the chemical sharpness that's been under everything in this building all night, and here it is, the thing itself, the thing that puts a boy on a bollard with his hands shaking, sitting in a trash can in a room where men fight for money.

Why is there a syringe here. Nobody in a boxing ring needs a needle.

I already half know the answer. I've been circling it for two weeks, the ruined ex-fighter, the too-fast movements, Will's nervous hands. But knowing a thing from the outside and standing over the proof of it in a dim concrete room are two different things, and looking at that needle, I feel the whole shape of it click into place, ugly and complete.

Something is being put into these fighters. Something that makes them fast and takes their minds. And I am standing in the middle of the place it happens, alone, and a man who looked at me like a thing to be sold just walked out that door.

I get out. I don't run, running gets you noticed, but I move fast and quiet back down the concrete corridor toward the noise and the crowd, and my mind is racing the whole way, because now I have proof, now I have seen it with my own eyes, and there is no unseeing it.

I find Elsie by the bar, flushed and laughing, and I take her drink out of her hand and set it down and tell her we're leaving, now, and something in my face must be serious enough that for once she doesn't argue.

But the whole drive home, while Elsie chatters and Marcus talks about his car, I'm somewhere else entirely. I'm standing over a syringe in a buzzing concrete room, understanding at last exactly what I've walked into the middle of.

And I'm thinking about a boy who holds back in the ring, who was just summoned upstairs to see a man even he's afraid of, and I'm wondering, with a cold weight in my chest, whether he's going to walk back out of that building tonight at all.