The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

CH.15 - The Space Between Us

Anna's POV

He doesn't get far.

I don't decide to follow him, exactly. My feet just start moving, up off the dark end of the harbor and after the shape of him melting into the shadows past the net sheds, and maybe it's the stupidest thing I've done all week, chasing the boy who just told me to run the other way, into the same dark a man tried to drag me off in ten minutes ago. But my chest is pulling me after him like a hooked line, and I've never been good at ignoring that pull, and I'm done pretending I am.

"Evan."

He stops. He doesn't turn around. His shoulders go rigid under the dark jacket, and for a second I think he's going to keep walking, keep melting off into the night and leave me standing here. Then his head drops, just slightly, and I hear him let out a breath.

"You're supposed to be going home," he says. Still not turning. "That was the whole point of what just happened. I put a man on the ground so you could go home. And instead you're following me deeper into exactly the place I told you to leave."

"Then walk me home." I stop a few feet behind him. "If you're so worried about it. Walk me home and I'll go, and you can go do whatever terrifying thing you're about to go do, and we'll both have gotten what we wanted."

He turns around then. In the dark I can't read his face, just the pale catch of his eyes and the tired set of his mouth, and for a long moment he just looks at me like I'm a problem with no good solution.

"Fine," he says. "Come on."

We walk.

The harbor road is empty and dark, the streetlights spaced too far apart, pools of orange with long stretches of black between them, and the sea goes on beside us, low and endless, the boats knocking softly at their moorings. He keeps a careful distance, half a step ahead and to the side, close enough that I could reach him and far enough that I can't do it by accident, and I'm so aware of the space between us that it's almost a physical thing, a charged gap I keep wanting to close and don't.

Neither of us says anything for a while. Our footsteps, the water, the wind coming in off the sea and tugging at my still-damp hair.

"Who was he," I say finally. "The man. He knew my name. He knew who I was."

Evan is quiet for a few steps. "Someone who works for the crew. The ones who run the fights."

"I gathered that. That's not what I asked. I asked why he knew my name. Why he was sent to find me. Why someone's watching my house." I glance at him, at the sharp line of his profile in the dark. "You said leverage. Back there, when you had him against the wall, he said leverage. On you. So somebody thinks I'm worth something to you, Evan, worth enough to watch my family's house in the dark, and I would really like to understand how a boy I've spoken to a handful of times decided I'm worth anything to anyone."

He doesn't answer right away. We pass under a streetlight and I catch his face in the orange wash, jaw tight, something working behind his eyes.

"You're not," he says. "Worth anything to them. That's the point. You're not, and they've decided you are, and that's the most dangerous thing you can be to people like this. Something that matters to someone, held by someone who'll use it." He shakes his head. "It doesn't matter how it happened. What matters is it did, and now there are eyes on you, and the only way to make them lose interest is for me to stay so far away from you that watching you stops being worth their time."

"That's your plan. That's the whole plan. You just, what, vanish, and I go back to my life like none of this happened."

"Yes."

"And the man in the trees outside my house?"

His jaw works. "Goes away, once there's nothing to see. Once you're just a swim-team girl who has nothing to do with me." He looks at me, and there's something raw under the cold, something that costs him. "That's how I keep you safe, Anna. By making sure you're not mine to take."

The words land strange in my chest, mine to take, and the pull goes tight and hot, and I have to look away from him and out at the black water to keep my face from doing something I'd regret.

"That's a terrible plan," I say.

"It's the only one I've got."

"It's terrible because it's already too late." I stop walking. He takes another step, then stops too, a few feet ahead, and turns back to me in the dark. "You can't un-ring the bell, Evan. They already think I matter. Me disappearing from your life doesn't erase that I was ever in it. And even if it did." I swallow. "Even if it did, I'm not going to. I'm not going to pretend the last two weeks didn't happen. I'm not built that way, and you knew that about me the first night on the boat when I bit your hand away instead of thanking you for the rescue."

Something moves across his face. It's almost a smile. It doesn't make it.

"I know," he says quietly. "That's the problem. You don't back off. Everyone else I've ever met, you give them one good reason to walk away and they take it, gratefully, they can't get away fast enough. You I could give a hundred reasons and you'd just get more stubborn." He drags a hand through his hair. "It should make this easier, you being smart enough to be scared. It doesn't. It makes it worse. Because I keep hoping you'll do the sensible thing and I keep being glad when you don't."

We're standing close now. I don't know when that happened, which of us closed the gap, but the charged space between us has shrunk to almost nothing and I can smell him again, cedar and cold air and something wild underneath, and I can feel the warmth coming off him, and the pull in my chest has gone from an ache to something insistent, something that wants.

"Then stop hoping I'll leave," I say, barely above the sound of the sea. "And start telling me the truth."

For one second I think he might. I watch it happen on his face, the truth right there behind his teeth, whatever it is, the answer he keeps guarding, and I watch him almost, almost let it go.

Then his eyes cut away from mine, out into the dark, and his whole body changes, alert, hard, listening to something I can't hear.

"You need to go inside," he says, and his voice has dropped, gone low and urgent. "We're at your gate. Go in, lock the door, and don't come out tonight no matter what you hear."

I look up. He's right, we've reached my house without my noticing, the kitchen light warm and gold behind the curtains, my whole ordinary life waiting on the other side of the door. And whatever he's hearing out in the dark, I can't hear it, but I can see what it does to him, the way it pulls him taut, the way his eyes have gone flat and pale and dangerous again.

"You're going back," I say. "To the fight. The one you're afraid of. The one with the person who's been asking about me."

He doesn't deny it. That's how I know it's true.

"Go inside, Anna."

"Be careful." The words come out before I can stop them, soft and frightened and far more than I mean to give him. "Whatever you're walking into. Whoever wants to look at you tonight. Be careful."

Something flickers in his face, surprise, and then something warmer and more painful that he catches and locks away. For a second his hand twitches at his side like he might reach for me, and my whole body leans toward it before I've decided anything.

He doesn't. He steps back instead, putting the careful distance between us again, and the loss of the almost is a physical thing, a door closing on a room I wanted to stay in.

"Go inside," he says one more time, gentler now. "Please. For me. Just this once, do the thing I ask."

So I go. I make myself walk up the path and open the door and step into the warm and the light, and I look back once, and he's still there at the gate, a dark shape against the darker night, watching me until I'm safe inside.

Then he turns and walks back the way we came, toward the harbor, toward the fights, toward the thing that scares even him, and I stand at my window with the curtain pushed aside and watch him go until the dark swallows him whole.

And I understand, standing there with my heart in my throat, that whatever's about to happen to him tonight, I can't follow, and I can't stop it, and I can't do a single thing but wait and hope he comes back in one piece.

I've never hated anything as much as I hate that.