The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

CH.16 - The Backer

Evan's POV

The cannery smells like rust and old blood and three hundred people who came to watch someone get hurt.

I feel it the second I come through the side door, the heat of the crowd, the smoke hanging under the high broken windows, the roar of them packed around the ring in the middle of the gutted factory floor. Somebody's already fighting up there, two men I half know, and the crowd's screaming for it, money changing hands in the dark at the edges, and under all of it, threaded through the sweat and the smoke, that chemical tang I've learned to hate. The drug. It's in the room. It's in somebody's blood right now, making them fast, taking pieces of them they'll never get back.

Will's waiting for me by the changing area, and he lights up when he sees me, that big warm grin, arms spread like I'm a son come home.

"There he is." He claps me on both shoulders, grips hard. "I was starting to think you'd gone soft on me, kid. Thought I'd have to come drag you out of whatever hole you've been hiding in."

Six months ago that grin would have meant something to me. Will was the first person in this whole town who looked at me and didn't see a problem to be managed. He gave me a room when I had nowhere. He gave me a way to make money that didn't involve explaining who I was or where I came from. He called me kid and I let him, because I hadn't had anyone call me anything soft in a long time.

Now I look at that grin and all I can think about is a boy on a bollard by the harbor with his hands shaking and his eyes sliding out to sea, and the smell of the drug in the air, and a man in the trees outside Anna's house.

"I've been around," I say.

"Sure you have." He steers me toward the changing area, arm heavy across my shoulders. "Listen. Tonight's different. Tonight matters. You remember I told you about the new money?"

Something in my chest goes still and cold. "You mentioned it."

"He's here." Will drops his voice, and there's something in it I've never heard from him before, something careful, almost nervous, and Will doesn't do nervous. "Tonight. Come to watch. Come to watch you, specifically. So you go out there and you put on a show, you understand me? You give him everything. This guy, Evan." He shakes his head. "This guy is a whole different level of money. The kind that changes everything. You do right by him tonight and neither of us ever has to worry again."

"Who is he."

"Doesn't matter who he is."

"It matters to me. If I'm performing for him, I want to know who I'm performing for."

Will's grin flickers, just for a second, and underneath it I catch it, the nervousness again, and something else. Fear. Will is afraid of the new money. That's the thing that lands in my gut like a stone. In all the time I've known him, running his fights, laundering his bets, I have never once seen Will afraid of anyone. He runs this whole rotten operation like a king. And tonight he's got the flinch of a man who's realized he's not the king anymore, he's just another piece on a board somebody bigger is playing.

"You don't need to know who he is," Will says, and the warmth is back, forced now. "You just need to fight. Now get changed. You're on after this."

He leaves me. I change in the gutted concrete room that used to be some kind of office, and I try to find the quiet I need before a fight, the careful control, the tight grip on the thing inside me that the blood in that room is already stirring. I took the suppressants an hour ago. I can feel them working, the low hum, the wolf pushed down. But he's not asleep. He's never asleep anymore. He's up and pacing, and he's been pacing since the harbor, since the man grabbed her arm, since I put him down and had to fight not to keep going.

I think about Anna at her window, watching me walk away. Be careful, she said. Nobody's said that to me in three years. I didn't know how much I needed to hear it until she said it, and now I can't stop hearing it, and it steadies me and unmoors me both at once.

Then I'm called, and I go out into the noise.

The fight itself is nothing. That's the truth of it, the ugly truth I've never said to anyone. When I'm in the ring and I keep the wolf leashed, I'm still faster and stronger than any human I'll ever face, and it's not a contest, it's a performance, a careful piece of theater where I win convincingly without ever letting the thing off the chain. My opponent's a big man, drugged, I can smell it on him, fast in the jerky wrong way the drug makes them fast, and I dance him around the ring and let him land a few that don't matter and then I put him down clean, no blood, no loss of control, exactly the kind of win Will wants to sell.

The crowd roars. And the whole time, the whole fight, I can feel it.

Someone watching me.

Not the crowd. The crowd watches the way crowds watch, hungry and shapeless. This is different. This is a single point of attention somewhere above the floor, in the dark of the old mezzanine where the good money sits behind a rail, and it's fixed on me with an intensity that makes the hair on my neck stand up, that makes the wolf go very still and very alert inside me, ears forward, because the wolf knows what I'm only starting to understand.

Whoever's up there watching me isn't human either.

I can't see him. The lights are on the ring and the mezzanine's in shadow, just shapes behind the rail, but I can feel him, and more than that, when the wind from the broken windows shifts the smoke, for half a second I catch something under the rust and the blood and the drug. A scent. Faint, controlled, almost buried, but there, and it's wrong for this place, it's wrong for a room full of humans, and every instinct I have goes cold and certain at once.

Wolf. There's a wolf up there. Watching me.

I finish the fight on autopilot, my hand raised, the crowd screaming, and I don't hear any of it because my whole body has gone to ice. Someone from the Pack world. Here. In my town, in my hiding place, in the one corner of the earth where I've spent three years being no one, and he's not just here, he's the money, he's the thing above Will, he's the one who's been asking about Anna.

They found me. After three years, they found me, and they didn't come to drag me home. They came quiet. They came with money and patience and eyes in the trees. They've been building something around me for months and I was too busy hiding to see it.

I get out of the ring. Will's saying something, beaming, triumphant, but I can't hear him. I'm scanning the mezzanine, trying to see, and the shapes behind the rail don't move, and then one of them lifts a hand, just slightly, an acknowledgment, a greeting, almost lazy, the gesture of someone who has all the time in the world because he's already won.

My phone buzzes in my bag in the changing room. I feel it more than hear it, and something makes me go get it, push through the crowd, away from Will, into the concrete quiet.

One message. Unknown number.

Impressive. You've learned control. Your father would almost be proud.

I stare at it. The floor drops out from under me.

Then a second message, while I'm still staring at the first.

We should talk about the girl. Anna, isn't it? The little swimmer. Such a strong reaction you have to her. I'm very curious what she is to you. We'll have all the time in the world to discuss it.

And then, last, the one that stops my heart:

Don't run again, Evan. We found you once. And this time, we know exactly what you'd be running to protect.

I stand in the concrete dark with the roar of the crowd on the other side of the wall and the phone shaking in my hand, and I understand that everything I built, the false name, the distance, the careful nothing of my life, is over. They know who I am. They know where I am. And they know about her.

The one thing I have left to lose, and I painted a target on her back the very moment that I couldn't stay away.