Chapter 13 Jabari
JABARI
Jealousy hit hard and fast, heat climbing my spine until every room felt too small.
I kept my face still anyway, because I learned young what people decide a Black man’s anger means before he ever opens his mouth.
I made myself disciplined on purpose, hands visible, voice even, violence packed away neat until I decided it was time to take it out.
Meridian liked to pretend we were above the world outside the gates. We weren’t, and the only difference was that inside these walls my restraint was a choice instead of a requirement.
This was different, and I hated it felt personal. This had a name I refused to give it at first, because giving it shape would make it real.
My scalp prickled under the weight of my dreadlocks, roots damp as sweat slid down the back of my neck. I dragged my forearm across my mouth and tasted salt, then forced my breathing to stay steady.
I took it to the gym because that was where excess went when it threatened to become a problem. Meridian built rooms for men like us on purpose, because even monsters needed a place to bleed off their worst impulses without painting the halls.
The training floor was empty at this hour, concrete cool beneath my boots and the air thick with iron and old sweat. The lights hummed overhead, heavy bags hanging motionless.
I stripped off my jacket and dropped it where it fell, then flexed my hands until my fingers stopped shaking. My muscles felt tight as wire beneath my skin.
I hit the heavy bag hard enough to make it sway, and the impact traveled up my arms and into my shoulders in a clean pain that made sense. I hit it again, then kept hitting until the rhythm drowned out the thought circling my head.
Each strike landed with a dull, satisfying thud that reverberated through my frame. I welcomed the hurt because it gave the violence somewhere to go, and right now I needed a target that would not look at me with knowing eyes.
Sweat broke fast across my back, and my breath turned harsh as I worked the bag. It helped, and that made me angrier, because it helped without fixing a damn thing.
The pressure stayed lodged beneath my ribs, simmering instead of breaking, and my alpha paced under my skin, restless and mean. It wanted release, and it did not care whether that release was righteous.
I switched to the weights and loaded the bar heavier than I needed, letting the metal bite into my palms as I lifted. My shoulders burned, my lungs refused to keep up, and I counted the reps under my breath, not to calm myself but to keep from thinking.
Elijah’s forced bond did not live in my body, so I could not feel it the way he did. What I felt was the fallout, the way it shifted pack gravity and made everybody pretend that wasn’t dangerous.
I saw it in the way he had looked at her before Malachi locked him down, the kind of focus that had nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with possession. I saw it in the way the cameras caught him staring too long when he thought nobody was watching, shoulders too tight, jaw working.
Now he was contained, kept behind reinforced steel and medical protocol, but the bond still tugged at the pack.
Even locked away, Elijah pulled at the air around Nyx, and that invisible pull made men sloppy.
No man carried that kind of claim on an omega, not in a pack where hierarchy was law, and watching it sit on him.
Watching it warp him scraped at my instincts, and watching her endure it scraped worse. I told myself it was about order and about keeping Meridian clean, but the lie tasted thin.
Nyx Brooks moved through Meridian, and everything around her adjusted when she passed. Voices lowered, movement shifted, and men remembered their manners the way they remembered to breathe.
My shoulders tightened when her scent drifted down a corridor, not because a bond was tugging on me but because it reminded me something inside the pack was already off balance.
The kind of imbalance that got omegas hurt always started small, and I had never been good at letting small things fester.
I racked the bar harder than necessary, and the clang carried across the room. My hands itched, and the itch lived in my fingertips, the place I kept my restraint.
I couldn’t help but look around. The gym was empty except me. My dick throbbed and I slid my hands into my shorts. I fondled my Prince Albert piercing and tried to relax.
Her peach scent was in my nostrils. I breathed it in. I squeezed my dick giving it the bite of pain I loved so much. I couldn’t find my completion. Nyx Brooks was underneath my skin and although I wanted to relieve myself on my own, I’d rather shove my piercing against her cervix.
With an irritated huff, I pulled my hands out of my pants and cleaned the gym. I tried not to think of her as I put away the weights. But I couldn’t lie to myself.
I told myself it was about hierarchy and the fact that something broken was being allowed to exist inside the pack, and those were clean explanations Malachi respected. They were not the whole truth, and I felt it in the way my mouth went dry when she entered a room.
I felt it in the way my gaze wanted to lock on her. Some part of me had already decided she should have been mine, and the thought came with a shame as sharp as it was possessive.
Wanting did not make something real, and it sure as hell did not make it right. Wanting was weakness, and weakness got people killed.
I was on rotation when the internal alert came through, level three, the kind that meant pack business. It meant mistake, breach, or somebody had forgotten where they stood.
I moved before the second chime sounded, because my body knew the building as well as my mind did. I took the stairs two at a time, boots hitting concrete hard enough to jar my knees, and the violence in me was grateful for the outlet.
The air changed as I descended, growing warmer and less filtered, and that lower corridor held tempers the way old wood held smoke. I scented her before I saw her, bruised peaches and restraint threaded with the thin chemical edge of suppression fighting to hold.
It cut straight through me and hit something low and territorial I did not want to name.
Nyx was pressed back against a reinforced door near the elevator bank, the one Meridian used to funnel traffic in and out of the lower level.
She should not have been standing there without an escort.
If she was outside her room, somebody had opened a door for her, and that meant somebody had responsibility.
One guard stood too close, a man who should have known better, and he was angled in a way that crowded her space. His head was dipped.
There was something else beneath it too, a faint medicinal bitterness that did not belong on him. He had stepped where he should not have, and whatever told him to do it had picked the wrong hallway. I did not shout and I did not warn him.
I put my hand on his shoulder and hauled him backward with enough force to make his boots scrape before his feet left the floor. He hit the wall hard, and the impact knocked the air from his lungs in a sound that satisfied something dark and eager in my chest.
“Move along, now,” I said.
My voice stayed low and even, the polite that made men pray. I did not raise it, because raising it would make this a spectacle, and I did not give enemies a show for free.
The soldier’s eyes flicked to mine, and understanding hit him all at once. Fear bled into his scent, sharp and sour, and he tried to fill the silence with excuses.
“I said nothing,” he started.
“No, sir, you didn’t have to,” I replied.
I stepped closer and crowded him, letting my alpha roll forward just enough to make the hierarchy unmistakable. He shrank back, spine tapping the wall again, breath stuttering.
“You forgot where you stand, son,” I said. “And you forgot who she is.”
My gaze cut to Nyx, and she was watching me now, not sure she could afford gratitude yet, only assessing. It was fear sharpened by calculation, her omega gone still, instincts folding inward as my violence filled the corridor.
I saw the moment she weighed retreat against risk, and I saw her decide to stay.
“Go on, now,” I told her.
The word came out harsher than I meant, because softness could be read as weakness and I was not about to let this hallway turn into a lesson for the wrong men. Nyx did not move.
She held her ground, eyes locking on the soldier and then back on me, tracking every breath and every shift of weight. Her shoulders drew back instead of in, chin lifting a fraction as if she was bracing to witness whatever came next rather than flee it.
The corridor felt tighter with her attention fixed there, and the air thickened as my alpha surged and found no release in her refusal. She stayed on purpose, not frozen and not defiant, just watching.
Her scent thickened as the seconds stretched, not sweet and not inviting, only sharp with fear and control held too tight. Bruised peaches over metal and concrete, cut with the brittle edge of restraint, and it wrapped around us both and coated my lungs with every breath I dragged in.
My alpha reacted to it, vision narrowing, instincts screaming to dominate the space until the threat was erased. The hallway went quiet except for my breathing and the soldier’s choking gasp.
He tried to push off the wall, and I did not give him the chance.
I hit him again, fist driving into his ribs hard enough to make something give. He folded with a wet sound and slid down the wall, and my vision tunneled as my alpha surged forward without permission.
“On your knees, now,” I roared.
The sound filled the corridor and bounced back at me, raw and uncontrolled, and the soldier collapsed, hands scrabbling at the floor as he struggled to breathe. I hauled him upright by the collar just long enough to slam him face-first into the wall again.