by R. E. Butler
“Why would that trainer want to poison you?” she asked.
Cairo looked at the unconscious man. “He’s on loan from the arena. I hadn’t met him before my last fight. I don’t know why I didn’t put two and two together when I saw him again.”
“If he wanted you to lose, the million dollar question is ‘why’?” Mason wondered. He looked at Alyssa. “Are you okay, sweetheart?”
She flinched and looked guilty as Mason reached out his hand to her. Cairo didn’t understand that reaction, because she seemed to like Mason as much as she liked him.
“I’m fine,” she said stiffly.
Someone opened the door and announced, “Ten minutes, Cairo.”
“Good.” Cairo growled.
“What should we do with the trainer?” Mason asked.
“I’ll tie him up and come back for him later.” Using his athletic tape, Cairo bound the trainer’s hands behind his back and his ankles together, then taped his mouth before shoving him in the supply closet and leaning a chair underneath the door handle.
Mason said, “Alyssa, we should go back to our seats and pretend that everything is normal.”
She nodded, walked over to a row of sinks and wet a paper towel, folding it and wiping under her eyes.
“You think she’ll be okay? He didn’t hurt her at all, did he?” Mason asked quietly.
“She was in complete control of herself and her beast. She could have torn him to pieces without breaking a sweat. I don’t know why she started to cry, or why she’s acting so strangely now.”
“I don’t know. It’s like we break down one of her walls and she throws up two more in its place,” Mason mused unhappily.
Cairo walked over to Alyssa. She met his eyes in the mirror. “I called you back here to ask for a kiss for luck. I had no idea you’d be my lucky charm.” He touched her shoulder and was glad when she didn’t flinch. “I would have drunk that whole glass of water. The guy out there, he’s not better than me, but if I was incapacitated like I was when I faced Ivan, he could easily have put me in the hospital, if the drug didn’t kill me. So I wanted to thank you, for standing up for me. Besides my brothers, no one has ever done what you just did.”
Turning slowly, she went up on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “Good luck, Cairo.”
Just like that, she and Mason were out of the locker room and he was on his way to the ring, the air crackling with the electricity from the crowd. He didn’t plan to pretend to be drugged, to play at the whole thing to give his opponent, Francis, a false sense of security. The moment the bell rang, he turned on the other man. He gave him no mercy, showed no weakness, to honor what Alyssa had done for him. If she hadn’t been fast enough to stop him from drinking the drug or clear-headed enough to stop the trainer, he wouldn’t have known that someone wanted him out of commission. He had a feeling that the trainer was just the tip of the iceberg, and he had plans to interrogate the guy until he spilled his guts. Literally and figuratively.
When Francis lay bleeding and unconscious at his feet and he only sported a black eye from a lucky shot, he looked for Alyssa. She was grinning, standing up and cheering for him right next to Mason, who was whistling. The only person missing from the night was Dante. They would have been a complete group then, because he was more certain now than he’d been before that Alyssa was the fourth for their group. He was already crazy about her. If he could just figure out why she was so intent on keeping them in the friend-zone, he was sure that she wouldn’t object to their lifestyle. After all, what woman wouldn’t want to be worshipped and pleasured by three men for the rest of her life?
* * * * *
Dante found it hard to believe that quiet Alyssa had attacked a man to defend Cairo. She never ceased to amaze him. Unfortunately, the trainer had been set free by the time Cairo was finished with his match. They assumed that the other trainer had come back for him. A part of him wanted to believe that now that the trainer had been thoroughly threatened he’d clear out and never show his face again. But the larger part of him, the practical and suspicious hyena, didn’t believe that things were over yet.
He wished that he’d been able to see Alyssa defend Cairo. He was certain she was a thing of beauty in her rage. They’d only known for her a bit over two weeks, but he couldn’t deny that he cared about her, more than an employer should. And he knew that Mason and Cairo cared for her a great deal as well. He was just afraid to take that step and be rejected again. It was too soon, anyway. She had her own demons to fight, and she behaved for the most part as if she was content to have a working relationship and nothing more. Dante wanted to forget the pang of jealousy that had slid through him when Cairo talked about their shared kiss.
When she came into work on Monday afternoon, she was back to her office-friendly demeanor. Hardworking, friendly to the clients, and willing to help with any request.
“The arena promoter said the two trainers assigned to that locker room were on loan from another gym in the area. Guess which one?” Cairo drew him back from his musings.
“Not Grady?” Dante asked.
“The very same. And according to what Mase was able to find out, Grady lost a bundle on that fight. He bet heavily on Francis.” Cairo settled back in the chair across from Dante’s desk.
Grady ran a gym just outside of Dalton. He was shady, bet on and against his own people, and wasn’t above strong-arming to get his way. He was a low-level low-life. Other than trying to stop their purchase of the land for the gym, they hadn’t had much interaction with him, except for seeing him at the matches. And of course when he had one of his people seduce their receptionist into giving him their client list.
Dante rubbed his chin with his fingers. “If the trainer drugged you the first time on Grady’s orders, then doing it again just seems foolish. As if we wouldn’t have put it together eventually that you were drugged during two matches against his fighters.”
“If I had survived.” Cairo snorted and cracked his knuckles. They were all aware of just how close a call it had been.
“Have either of you talked to Alyssa at all?” Dante asked finally.
They both shook their heads. “When she refused to go out to dinner after the fight, I offered to bring her to the house yesterday for a cook-out but she declined,” Mason said, leaning against the wall behind Cairo.
“Yeah, and I asked her if I could take her to lunch today to thank her for Saturday and she got all weird like I’d asked her let me mount her over the desk or something,” Cairo said with a frown.
Dante glanced out the door where she was standing with the trainer schedule, talking to three young men. Already they’d had an upswing in business because Cairo had not just won the match, but had obliterated Francis. He was now the man to beat in the ring. With his next fight a month from now, there would be plenty of men looking to take a go at him, but only the best would get that chance.
“What if this...lack of interest on her part,” Dante said finally, “is just the universe’s way of letting us know that she’s not meant for us?”
Mason growled, “No, no way. I know you keep trying to act like there’s nothing there, Dante, but we all feel it. She’s meant to be ours. We just have to figure out what’s keeping her from opening up to us.”
“You didn’t hear the tone in her voice when she said I was hers, man. She’s probably just as frightened of making a commitment as we are, and it’s not as if we’ve told her about that part of ourselves. I think under that sweetheart exterior is a wildcat. Don’t you?” Cairo added.
“I don’t know,” Dante lied. He wanted to believe that. Believe that she was starting to care for them as much as they cared for her, and that she could accept them. The thought of her rejecting them, not just as individuals but as potential clanmates, made his heart fill with dread.
He’d had to chase his brothers out of the gym. Every day they lingered longer and longer past their normal work times. Once Cairo was passing twelve-hour days, he knew he had to
rein them in, not just because of Alyssa but for their own health.
When his brothers left for the night, he pulled her file out from the drawer. It was the only one he’d actually bothered to file in the last few months, and he had it in the wide bottom drawer in the desk, not the tall filing cabinet that was a stuffed-full disaster.
She had the slightly messy handwriting of someone who, if they didn’t try, would have totally illegible writing. She’d filled it out completely, except for one spot – emergency contacts. He wasn’t sure what to make of that.
He finally came out at eleven to lock the front door. “Alyssa, can you join me in the office for a few minutes before you head home?”
She turned off the computer and followed him. She smiled nervously as she sat down. “I kind of feel like I’m going to the principal’s office.”
Hmm. He didn’t know whether to see that as a tantalizing fantasy or a disappointment that she thought of him as an authority figure to be frightened of.
“No, it’s nothing bad I promise. You just forgot to fill out this one part of your employment forms.”
He turned the folder around to her and laid a pen across the empty section. She leaned over and looked at it, her hair slipping over her shoulder delicately.
“I didn’t forget.”
“But it’s blank. Isn’t there someone that would want to know if something happened to you?” Besides us?
She lowered her eyes and chewed on her lower lip. “I’m not…I wasn’t the kind of girl that people cared about.”
Stunned, he stared at her blankly, not sure he’d heard right. “What are you talking about?”
Embarrassment flushed her cheeks pink and she said, “I just wasn’t. My mom left when I was eighteen to follow an alpha; I haven’t heard from her since. My sister lives on the West Coast and only calls once a year. I think she’d only care about me if I died, and then only if the funeral didn’t interfere with her life.”
“But the pack? I thought wolves were like a big family.”
She snorted unhappily and stood up abruptly. “If that was true, then I wouldn’t have been able to walk away from them as easily as I did. No one cares that I’m gone, and no one would care if I disappeared entirely.”
In complete disbelief, he watched her walk out of the office with her head down, grab her things off the desk and leave. He ran to the door, because he didn’t like her walking out to her car alone at night, but she was already peeling out of the parking lot, her metallic-blue Camaro’s taillights disappearing quickly.
If he thought she was stand-offish before their conversation Monday night, he hadn’t known the definition. Perfectly professional, she graced them with the frozen smile she used to keep the clients at arm’s length as well. Mason and Cairo were furious with him, but he couldn’t justify her reaction. She was hurt and broken, but not in any mood to let any of them in.
At ten-thirty on Thursday night, he walked out into the empty gym and stopped in front of the front desk. “Lock the door behind me; I’m going to run the deposit out, I’ll be gone about twenty minutes.”
“Sure.”
She followed him to the front door. He turned, his hand on the push handle. “Alyssa, I’m sorry if I upset you by asking about your past. You’re so closed off with us. We just want to get to know you better.”
“Holy shit, you guys are persistent,” she groused. Anger. At least that was an emotion, not the blank nothingness they’d been faced with.
“Because we care.”
“Oh yeah, sure.” She snorted derisively.
“Of course we care. Why would you think otherwise?”
“I know exactly the kind of caring that you guys are interested in, and I don’t play like that anymore,” she snapped, fury in the depths of her pretty eyes. He stepped back and his shoulder bumped against the glass.
“Wait, wait, what do you think we’re looking for?”
“I know just what you’re looking for. Every time I’m around you guys I’m drowning in lust. I can’t fucking handle this. I left the pack to start my life over and you’re trying to trap me into the same thing again. I won’t play party favor. I’m not a toy. Leave. Me. Alone.” She shoved him out the door and snapped the bolt in place, stalking back to the desk with anger and hurt radiating off her in waves. He couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d sprouted wings and started whistling.
He stared at her as she sat down in the desk chair and buried her face in her hands. He hadn’t meant to upset her; that was the exact opposite of what he wanted. He walked to his car, realizing for the first time that because she was were, she would have the scenting abilities that human women didn’t. Of course she’d be aware of how she affected them physically, the same way they were aware of it with her. They’d not ever bothered to try to hold back their lustful thoughts of her, and he was just as guilty of that as his brothers. He believed she was attracted to them, but she was holding back, and now she might try to quit because of it. His brothers would never forgive him. He had to fix this.
He idled the car in the parking lot for several minutes. He knew he had to go back in and apologize. And he needed to tell her everything. If he waited any longer, they would all lose her, and the sudden thought of that filled him with so much dread that he was now more certain than he’d ever been before that she was meant to be theirs. Not long ago he could have fought that truth, but the last few days that she’d spent withdrawing further left no doubt in his mind: she was their bride.
His music had been blaring so loud over the engine that he suddenly felt deaf when he turned off the car and got out. Until he heard a piercing scream from inside the gym. Running full tilt to the front doors he sucked in a sharp breath to see two men in black ski masks with Alyssa. One of them held her arms behind her back, while the other delivered a stunning slap to her face.
He didn’t give a second thought to the thick security glass of the front doors as he let his beast free, backed up a few steps and surged right through them with a roaring war cry. He felt his clothes tear, his skin scratch and bleed, but he ignored all of it.
Tackling the one who had slapped her, he slammed his head into the floor. The man went still under his hands, and he surged up to where the second man still held Alyssa. A knife he hadn’t seen before was pointed into her neck, a trickle of blood dripping down her skin. He could taste her fear, but underneath that, in the depths of her eyes, he could see that she trusted him to save her. Or at least hoped he would.
“Let her go.”
“Yeah, right. I have my instructions.” He dug the knife tip further into her neck and she whimpered.
“If you hurt her again, it won’t matter what your instructions are. Let my mate go and I’ll let you live.”
The man started to pull her with him towards the door. “Grady says your brother takes a dive in the next fight. That’s three weeks from now. I’ll just keep her warm for you until then; make sure he does what he’s supposed to.” There was nothing good about the look in his eyes through the holes in the face mask. Dante’s beast roared at him to stop this thug from taking Alyssa, but the human part of him knew the blade was too much of a risk to her fragile neck.
And then he remembered that he was faster because the man was human. He acted like he was giving up, tapping into his beast as he hung his head in pretended shame and raised his hands in defense. It worked; the human relaxed somewhat and lifted the knife slightly away from her as he tried to maneuver the both of them over the threshold of the broken door. Dante took the opportunity and shot forward while he was distracted, slamming the man’s arm into the door and jerking the knife free. Alyssa fell to the floor, choking on a sob, before getting to her feet and moving away.
The man fought against him, but he was already gone to his beast, his eyes yellow and bright, his fangs aching to tear the intruder’s throat out. “She. Is. Mine!” he roared, wrapping his hand around the man’s neck and pulling him inside, lifting him off the ground.
<
br /> Suddenly, the man that he’d thought was unconscious was on his back, digging the fallen knife into his shoulder. A bolt of pain radiated through him, but he ignored it and did not loosen his hold on the man against the wall. He was aware only of the sound of tearing fabric and then a snarling growl as the other man was ripped off his back. A dark gray wolf rolled to the floor with his attacker, then leapt to her feet and stalked towards him.
Dante pulled the blade from his shoulder and jammed it into the other man’s palm, anchoring him to the wall as he shrieked and tried to pull the blade out. Alyssa lunged at the thug on the floor before Dante could call to stop her, and the man caught her with his leg and threw her into the mirrored wall. Something cracked, and she crumpled to the floor as a glittering rain of mirror shards poured down on her suddenly very still form.
