The Exiled Alpha's Human Mate

CH.17 - The Double Date

Anna's POV

"It's a double date," Elsie says, for the third time, fixing my collar in the mirror like a mother sending a kid to church. "That's all. Two nice boys, two nice girls, somewhere with music and no fists involved. You need it, Anna. You've been walking around like a ghost for two weeks."

"I don't need a date."

"You need something." She meets my eyes in the mirror, and under the bossiness there's real worry, the kind she doesn't say out loud. "You've been somewhere else since the party. You don't sleep, you don't talk, you jump every time your phone buzzes. Whatever's got its hooks in you, one night out with normal people isn't going to fix it, but it might remind you that normal people exist. So put your good jacket on and let me have this."

I put my good jacket on. Because she's my best friend and she's scared for me and she's not wrong, exactly. I have been somewhere else. I've been on a dark harbor watching a boy move too fast to see, replaying it, waiting for a phone that doesn't ring, worrying about someone who told me to stay away and then walked into the dark. Elsie doesn't know any of that. Elsie thinks I'm mooning over the fight or over Leo or over some ordinary heartbreak, and I can't tell her the truth, because the truth doesn't fit in words that don't sound insane.

So I let her fix my collar and I go.

The boy she's set me up with is called Marcus, and he's perfectly nice, a friend of the boy she likes, tall and easy and completely uninteresting to me in a way that isn't his fault. He talks about his car on the drive. I nod in the right places. Elsie's in the front seat glowing, certain she's fixing me, and I don't have the heart to tell her that the thing that's wrong with me can't be fixed by a boy who talks about his car.

It's only when we pull up that the wrongness starts to prickle at the back of my neck.

We're not at a bar. We're not anywhere with music and nice lighting and other normal people on normal dates. We're on the industrial stretch past the docks, in the dark, in front of a building I recognize with a cold drop in my stomach because I've been asking questions about it for two weeks.

The cannery.

"Els." I catch her arm as we get out. "Where are we?"

"Marcus knows the guy who runs it." She's already walking, buzzing, oblivious. "It's like a club night, sort of? There's music and drinks and stuff to watch. Come on, it's fine, everyone comes here."

Everyone does not come here. I know exactly what comes here. But she's ahead of me and the boys are ahead of her and I can either follow or stand alone in the dark on the industrial stretch, so I follow, and my heart is going, and every question I've been asking for two weeks is about to have its answer handed to me whether I want it or not.

Inside it's heat and smoke and noise.

It hits me all at once, the press of bodies, the low red light, the smell of sweat and beer and cigarettes and something chemical underneath that I recognize now, that I'll always recognize, the smell that clings to a boy on a bollard with shaking hands. Money moves in the dark at the edges of the room. There's drinking, hard drinking, and smoking, and a wildness to the crowd that has nothing to do with a club night, and in the middle of it all, raised up under the only real lights in the place, a ring.

A boxing ring. Full. Two men in it throwing punches while three hundred people scream.

"Els," I say again, louder, over the noise. "This isn't a date. This is the fights. This is the thing the whole town pretends isn't happening. We have to go."

"What?" She can't hear me, or won't. Marcus is pulling her toward the bar. "It's fine! Loosen up!"

I'm about to grab her, about to plant my feet and make a scene and drag her out of here, because every instinct I have is screaming that this is the worst place I could possibly be, watched, cornered, exactly where the man in the trees and the man at the harbor came from.

And then the crowd shifts, and the fight in the ring ends, and a new one starts, and I see him.

Evan.

He steps up into the ring under the lights, stripped down, and the whole room seems to tilt around him. My breath stops. I've seen him fight once before, at the party, but that was chaos and a crowd and a boy I barely knew. This is different. This is him at the center of the only light in a dark room, and I can't look away, and I hate that I can't look away, and the pull in my chest goes so tight it aches.

He moves like nothing human.

I knew that. I've known it since the party, since the harbor. But watching it now, watching him in his element, it's undeniable, and the crowd doesn't see it because they don't know to look, they just see a fast fighter, a good show, money well bet. But I see it. I see the way he's holding back, the way every movement is controlled, deliberate, a fraction of what he could do, like a man being careful with something breakable, and I understand with a chill that he's not fighting his opponent. He's fighting himself. He's keeping something on a leash the whole time, and winning anyway, easily, and the leash is the hard part.

He puts the other man down clean. No blood. The crowd roars.

And for one second, as his hand comes up and the noise crashes over him, his eyes sweep the crowd, and they find me.

I feel it land. Across the whole dark room, over three hundred screaming people, his eyes find me standing at the edge in my good jacket next to a boy I don't want, and everything in his face changes. The performance drops. For half a second there's just raw shock, and then something like horror, because I'm here, in the one place he told me never to come, in the middle of the exact danger he's been trying to wall me out of.

He mouths something. I can't hear it. I don't need to. It's my name, and it's a question, and it's furious and frightened all at once.

Then Marcus is at my elbow with a drink I didn't ask for, and Elsie's laughing at something, and the crowd surges, and I lose him in it.

I need to get out. I need to get Elsie and go, right now, before the man from the harbor sees me, before whoever's been watching my house realizes the swim girl walked right into their den like a fool. I turn to find Elsie and she's gone, swallowed into the crowd with Marcus and the other boy, and I push after them, through the press of bodies and smoke, and the room is a maze of shouting strangers and I can't find her, and the panic starts to climb.

I push through a gap in the crowd, through a doorway, into a corridor that's suddenly, blessedly quieter, dim and concrete and lined with doors, the noise of the crowd dropping to a muffled roar behind me.

I've lost the party. I've lost Elsie. I don't know where I am.

And somewhere in this building is the man who grabbed my arm, and the money that's been watching my house, and a boy with silver eyes who just watched me walk into the one place he begged me to stay away from.

I pick a direction and start walking, fast, looking for a way out.

Behind me, a door opens.