The Alpha's Power Play

She didn't sleep well that night, which she blamed on the new apartment, a studio above a laundromat that hummed until eleven and started again at five, and not at all on the gold flash she kept replaying every time she closed her eyes.

By her second morning, she'd built herself a story that made sense. Colored contacts. A trick of fluorescent light bouncing off wet eyes. Stress hallucination, hers, not his, brought on by hearing her father's name out of a stranger's mouth for the first time in years. Any of those was more reasonable than the alternative, so she picked the contacts theory and held onto it like a life raft.

The locker room was louder that morning, actual music playing, actual trash talk, and she told herself that was proof she'd imagined the tension the day before too. New job nerves. That was all.

"You survived the owner," said a voice at her elbow. She turned to find a woman about her own age, dark hair scraped into a bun, wearing a lanyard that read TEAM PR in block letters. "I'm Iris. I do communications, which mostly means I keep reporters away from things they shouldn't see."

"Marlowe. Athletic trainer."

"I know who you are." Iris's smile was friendly, but her eyes did the same flicker Rhys's had, the specific attention of someone deciding how much to say. "Simon Hale's kid, right? He used to interview me for quotes back when I was an intern here."

"You knew my dad?"

"Everybody who's been here more than five years knew your dad." Iris said it lightly, but there was a weight underneath it, the careful weight of someone picking each word. "He was good at his job. Too good, some people thought."

"What does that mean?"

Iris glanced toward the door, toward the hallway Marlowe had wandered into yesterday, and her smile went a little brittle. "Nothing. Bad joke. Look, I've got a scrum in ten, but if you want the real tour sometime, not the HR one, find me. This building's got history nobody puts on the plaque."

She was gone before Marlowe could ask what she meant by that, which seemed to be the house style around here: say something loaded, then vanish before the follow-up question landed.

Marlowe spent the morning taping ankles and telling herself she wasn't going to go looking for that hallway again. She lasted until lunch.

The keypad door was unlocked this time, propped open a few inches by someone's careless equipment bag left half in the doorway, and the cold air she'd felt yesterday rolled out stronger now, carrying a mineral smell underneath it, like a cave, like wet stone.

She should have walked past it. She thought about her father's name coming up more than it should have and pushed the door open instead.

The stairwell beyond it was concrete, unfinished, lit by bare bulbs strung along one wall, and it went down farther than the arena's foundation should have allowed. She counted turns instead of steps, telling herself she'd go one more flight and then stop, one more flight, one more, until she came out into a space that made her stop counting altogether.

It looked like a training facility built for something other than hockey. Padded walls scored with claw marks too deep for any glove. A circular room with a domed skylight cut straight up through solid concrete, currently shuttered, that had to be for moonlight, there was no other reason to build it that way. And along one wall, a row of steel doors like bank vaults, each one stamped with a name.

CALLAHAN, W.

She was still staring at that name, Wes Callahan, the brother, when she heard the growl.

It came from behind her, low and layered, more than one throat, and when she spun around there were two men in the doorway she'd come through, except they weren't standing quite like men anymore, shoulders hunched wrong, hands curling into something that wasn't hands, eyes gone the same molten gold she'd seen in Rhys's the day before, except these didn't blink back to normal.

"You shouldn't be down here," one of them said, and his voice came out wrong too, gravel dragged through a throat that wasn't built for human words anymore.

Marlowe backed up until the steel door at her spine stopped her, heart slamming so hard she could feel it in her teeth, and every rational explanation she'd built for herself over the last twenty-four hours collapsed at once, contacts and fluorescent lights and stress hallucinations, gone, because there was nothing rational about what was standing eight feet away from her showing teeth that had definitely not been that long a minute ago.

The nearer one took a step forward. The steel door behind her rattled, some automated lock system engaging with a heavy clunk that she felt more than heard, sealing her into the room with both of them, and the last thing she registered before her vision started to gray out at the edges was that the lights along the domed ceiling had started to pulse, slow and rhythmic, like the whole room was breathing.