THE ALPHA BIKER 'S HEARTBEAT

Chapter 5 — Lab Rat

"Absolutely not," I said.

"You haven't heard the proposal."

"I don't need to hear the proposal, the word 'experiment' was in the first sentence, Kade, and I've been a lab rat for exactly zero people in my entire life and I don't intend to start with the local Alpha."

We were alone in the exam bay. Tito Bo had gone to lock up the front, muttering something about needing air and also possibly a drink, leaving me and Kade and the flickering fluorescent light and approximately four feet of space that felt, suddenly, much smaller than it had any right to.

He was leaning against the exam table where I'd stitched him twice now, arms crossed, watching me pace a groove into the concrete floor with an expression that was somewhere between patient and pained.

"I'm not asking you to be an experiment," he said. "I'm asking you to help me understand what's happening to my own body. That's different."

"Is it, though? Because what I'm hearing is 'let's find out exactly how much of my nervous system reboots when you touch me,' which — I want to be extremely clear — is not something they cover in med school ethics."

"You said it yourself. Twenty minutes ago. You wanted to understand the mechanism."

"That was before I understood I would be the mechanism." I stopped pacing and pointed a gloved finger at him, which probably would've been more intimidating if I hadn't still been holding a suture kit. "There's a difference between clinical curiosity and letting a werewolf turn me into his personal defibrillator."

Something crossed his face — not quite hurt, but close enough to it that I felt an unwelcome twist of guilt in my chest, which was insane, because I had absolutely nothing to feel guilty about. He was the one who'd sliced his own arm open for an excuse to sit in my exam chair.

"I'm not trying to use you," he said quietly. "I know how it sounds. Believe me, I've had three years to imagine every possible way this could go, and 'walk into a stranger's clinic and ask her to keep touching me so I can feel my own heartbeat' was not on the list until yesterday."

"So what changed?"

"You did." He said it simply, like it wasn't a whole sentence's worth of terrifying. "I didn't choose this, Mila. I don't get a say in who does this to me. I just know that for three years I've been running a pack, making decisions that get people hurt or keep them safe, and I have felt none of the weight of any of it — not pride, not grief, not fear — and then you put your hand on my ribs to stitch a wound and for one second I felt like a person again instead of whatever I've been instead." His jaw worked. "You can understand why I'd want to know if that was real, or if I imagined it out of sheer desperation."

I stood there for a long moment, arms crossed, chewing on the inside of my cheek the way I do when a diagnosis is sitting right in front of me and I don't like where it's pointing.

"One test," I said finally. "One. Controlled. And I get to design it, not you."

Something in his shoulders eased, just slightly. "Fine."

"I'm serious about the controlled part. No knives. No fake injuries. No more mystery forearm lacerations." I pulled my gloves off and tossed them in the bin, mostly to give my hands something to do that wasn't fidgeting. "I check your pulse now, with no contact, as a baseline. Then I touch you — somewhere neutral, wrist, nothing weird — and I check it again. If there's a measurable spike, we talk about what that might mean medically. If there's nothing, you go home and stop stabbing yourself for attention."

"Deal."

I grabbed the stethoscope off the counter, because apparently I was doing actual vitals now, in my uncle's garage, on a werewolf, at ten-thirty on a Tuesday, which was not a sentence I'd ever expected my life to produce. "Sit."

He sat. I pressed two fingers to the inside of his wrist first, counting silently, watching the second hand on the wall clock — steady, slow, almost sluggishly even, exactly the kind of resting heart rate you'd expect from someone meditating, not someone who'd walked into my clinic two nights running with self-inflicted wounds.

"Sixty-two," I said. "That's abnormally low for someone your size and build. You said you can't feel your own wolf — do you know if this is baseline for you, or if it's changed since—"

"Since my father died. Yes. This is what it's been since then."

I filed that away, the way I file every piece of a differential diagnosis, promising myself I'd come back to it later, because right now I had a controlled variable to test and I was not going to let myself get distracted by the very obvious tragedy sitting four feet in front of me with his sleeves rolled up.

"Okay." I set the stethoscope down and reached for his wrist again, this time with my palm flat instead of two fingers, deliberately more contact than the clinical minimum required, because if I was going to test this, I wanted a real result, not a maybe. "Here we go."

The second my skin touched his, he went still — not tense-still, not bracing-still, but the specific stillness of someone listening very hard to something only they can hear. And under my palm, faint at first and then unmistakable, his pulse kicked up. Fast. Not dangerously fast, but a clear, measurable, undeniable jump from the sluggish sixty-two I'd counted seconds before.

"There," I said, quiet, more to myself than to him, watching the second hand tick around the clock while his heart hammered under my palm like something waking up after a long, cold sleep. "That's real."

"Told you."

"Shut up, I'm working." But my voice had gone soft despite myself, some clinical part of my brain cataloging heart rate and respiration rate and pupil dilation, and some other, much less clinical part of my brain very aware of exactly how warm his skin was under mine, how his breath had changed, how he hadn't moved a single inch since I touched him, like moving might break whatever was happening.

I should have let go the second I had my data. That was the plan. One measurement, controlled, professional, done.

Instead I stood there a second too long, my palm flat against the inside of his wrist, watching his pulse hammer against my fingers like a second, borrowed heartbeat, and when I finally did move — when I shifted my hand up, meaning to check his pupils next, meaning to keep this scientific, meaning to stay in control of a situation that was very quickly stopping making sense — my palm slid up and landed flat against his chest instead.

He flinched.

Not away from pain. Toward something. His whole body went rigid under my hand like I'd pressed a live wire straight to his sternum, his breath catching hard and audible, his eyes squeezing shut for one full second like the sensation was almost too much to hold — and when they opened again, they weren't flat anymore. They weren't controlled. They were wide, and dark, and fixed on me with an intensity that had nothing clinical left in it at all.

"Kade—"

"Don't," he said, low, rough, barely more than a breath. "Don't move your hand. Please."

And God help me, I didn't.