Chapter 4
Riley
Sunday mornings on campus were usually a graveyard. The silence was thick, heavy with the collective hangover of the student body. The air smelled like cold ash and regret.
For me, the regret was a living thing. It sat on my chest, pressing down on my lungs, making every breath a conscious effort.
I was hiding in the Sanctuary.
That was what I called the Equipment Room at the ice arena.
It was my domain, a windowless bunker of concrete and wire mesh tucked deep beneath the stands.
It smelled of skate sharpening dust, aggressive laundry detergent, and the lingering, copper tang of dried blood on jerseys.
Most people found it claustrophobic. To me, it was heaven.
The wire mesh cages were locked. The door was bolstered with a keypad only three people knew the code to.
I was safe here.
Or I should have been.
I stood at the long metal workbench, a pile of shoulder pads in front of me that needed sanitizing, but my hands were idle. I was staring at a spot on the concrete wall, replaying the last forty-eight hours on a loop that I couldn't turn off.
Am I your territory?
Why had I asked that? Why, in the dark, intimate quiet of that pantry, had those words slipped out of my mouth? It was suicide. It was inviting the predator in.
And his answer...
You smell like something I shouldn't want.
I shivered, dropping the bottle of disinfectant spray. It clattered loudly on the table, the sound echoing in the empty room.
"Get a grip, Bennett," I hissed to myself, snatching the bottle up. "He’s an Alpha. He was pumped full of adrenaline and party pheromones. He would have said that to a lamp post if it smelled like estrogen."
That was the logical conclusion. The scientific one. Spike Thorne was a biological machine driven by instinct. I was just the nearest available female who wasn't currently terrified of him.
But the logic felt thin. It felt like paper trying to stop a bullet.
I scrubbed the shoulder pads violently, the repetitive motion grounding me. I needed to focus. I had work to do. Henderson had left a list of repairs a mile long, and if I finished them, I wouldn't have to think about the fact that half the campus was whispering about the "altercation" at the Hive.
Maya had texted me three times this morning.
Did the Butcher really choke Kyle out?
Did he really drag you into a closet?
Did you guys kiss? OMG tell me you kissed him.
I hadn't replied. I couldn't tell her the truth: that we hadn't kissed, but what had happened felt infinitely more dangerous. We had acknowledged the pull. We had looked at the invisible thread tying us together and, instead of cutting it, we had tugged on it.
The keypad on the outer door beeped.
Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. Click.
I froze. Henderson never came in on Sundays. He was a badger shifter; Sundays were for sleeping and eating. Coach Miller was at church with his family.
The heavy steel door groaned open.
A figure stepped out of the shadows of the tunnel and into the harsh fluorescent light of the equipment room.
It was Spike.
My heart did a traitorous double-backflip, slamming against my ribs.
He looked... terrible.
That was the first thing that registered.
The Butcher of IMU, the golden god of the ice, looked like he had been run over by a truck.
He was wearing gray sweatpants and a black hoodie with the hood pulled up, casting his face in shadow.
But I could see the dark circles under his eyes, bruises on top of bruises.
His skin, usually a warm, tanned olive, was sallow and pale.
He held his left arm close to his body, cradled against his stomach as if it were made of glass.
He didn't look at me. He walked straight to the back of the room, past the cages, toward the industrial first-aid station mounted on the wall. He moved stiffly, lacking that fluid, predatory grace that usually defined him.
I stood paralyzed behind my workbench, clutching a dirty shoulder pad like a shield.
He reached for the first aid kit with his right hand, fumbling with the latch. His fingers were shaking. He couldn't get it open. He tried again, a low, frustrated growl rumbling in his throat, but his coordination was off.
He slammed his good hand against the metal cabinet. "Fuck!"
The sound cracked through the room.
I flinched, but I didn't run. The scientist in me took over. The part of me that analyzed behavior saw past the aggression and saw the distress.
"You're going to break the cabinet," I said, my voice quiet but steady.
Spike froze. He didn't turn around. His shoulders went rigid, the muscles bunching under his hoodie.
"Go away, Mouse," he rasped. His voice sounded like he had been gargling broken glass.
"I work here," I said, putting the shoulder pad down. I walked around the workbench. I kept my movements slow, deliberate, telegraphing my approach so I didn't startle him. "You're the one breaking into my office on a Sunday."
"I have a key code," he muttered, still facing the wall.
"You stole Henderson's code," I corrected. I stopped three feet behind him. Close enough to smell him—rain, pain, and the sharp, metallic scent of fresh blood—but far enough to retreat if he snapped. "What's wrong with your hand?"
"Nothing."
"Spike," I said, my tone slipping into the one I used when he refused to read the textbook. "You're holding your left arm like it's detached. And I can smell the blood from here. Did you get into a fight?"
He turned around then.
The sight of his face stopped me cold.
He wasn't angry. He wasn't the arrogant, smirking Alpha who had trapped me in the library. He looked exhausted. His eyes, usually that burning amber, were dull and rimmed with red. There was a vulnerability in his expression that stripped away the monster mask and left just a tired, hurting boy.
"I didn't get into a fight," he said softly. "I punched a wall."
"Why?"
"Because the wall didn't talk back." He let out a breath that was half-sigh, half-shudder. "And because I couldn't punch what I really wanted to."
"Which was?"
"Myself," he admitted.
He held out his left hand.
I gasped.
It was a mess. The knuckles were split wide open, the skin shredded. But that wasn't the worst part. His hand was swollen to twice its normal size, turning a gruesome shade of purple and black. Shifters healed fast—supernaturally fast. A wound like this should have closed up in an hour.
"It's not healing," I whispered, stepping closer without thinking. I reached out, my fingers hovering over his injured hand. "Why isn't it healing?"
"The wall in the Hive," he gritted out, wincing as he tried to flex his fingers. "It's old construction. Lath and plaster. But the studs..."
"Iron nails," I finished, the realization hitting me. "Cold iron."
Cold iron was poison to Shifters. It slowed their regenerative abilities to a crawl and caused the tissue to necrotize if not treated. It burned them like acid.
"There are fragments in the cuts," I said, my eyes scanning the mangled flesh. I could see the dark glint of metal embedded in the raw red meat of his knuckles. "Spike, you have iron in your bloodstream. You’re septic. That’s why you look like death."
"I can't go to the campus clinic," he said, his voice tight with pain. "They'll report it. If Coach finds out I injured myself in a tantrum, I'm benched. If I'm benched..."
"You fail the semester," I finished for him.
"I need to get it out," he said, looking at me. "But I can't do it one-handed. And I can't trust anyone else to keep their mouth shut."
He didn't say please. He didn't have to. The look in his eyes—the desperate, guarded hope—was loud enough.
I looked at his hand. It was grotesque. It was dangerous.
I looked at his face.
"Sit down," I ordered, pointing to the metal stool by the workbench.
Spike blinked. "What?"
"Sit down before you fall down," I said, moving past him to the first aid cabinet. I popped the latch easily and grabbed the tweezers, the antiseptic, and the saline. "And take off the hoodie. I need access to your arm to check for tracking lines."
He hesitated for a second, then obeyed. He sat heavily on the stool, his knees spreading wide. He struggled to pull the hoodie off one-handed.
"Here," I said, putting the supplies down. "Let me."
I stepped between his legs.
The intimacy of the position hit me instantly. I was standing in the V of his thighs, close enough to feel the heat radiating off his chest. I reached down and grabbed the hem of his hoodie, pulling it up.
He lifted his arms—one easily, one with a wince—and I pulled the fabric over his head.
I had seen him shirtless before, from the safety of the media box. But this was different. This was high definition.
His chest was a landscape of muscle and scars. The tattoos on his torso were tribal, thick black lines that wrapped around his ribs and disappeared into the waistband of his sweatpants. His skin was hot, fever-hot, and damp with sweat.
I tried not to look. I tried to be a doctor.
"Your arm looks okay," I said, my voice sounding breathless even to my own ears. "No black lines going up the vein. The poison is localized to the hand."
I grabbed the stool next to him and sat down, pulling the rolling tray of supplies closer. "Give me your hand."
He laid his massive, battered hand in my lap. It was heavy. His palm engulfed my thigh. The heat of him seeped through my jeans, burning my skin.
"This is going to hurt," I warned, picking up the tweezers. "I can't give you painkillers because they don't work on your metabolism."
"I know," he said. He watched me, his eyes tracking my movements. "Just get it out, Riley."
I took a deep breath and began.
For the next twenty minutes, the only sounds in the room were the hum of the refrigerator in the corner, the clink of metal on metal as I dropped iron shards into a kidney dish, and the sharp intake of Spike's breath.
He didn't scream. He didn't pull away. He just sat there, his jaw clenched so hard I thought his teeth would crack, sweating through his t-shirt.