Santi

The back door slammed shut behind me at eleven oh one at night, and I was already three strides into the alley before it latched.

I’d clocked out the second the clock rolled over. Tyler had waved me off from behind the bar without looking up from the cocktail he was building, and I’d grabbed my backpack out of Marco’s office and bolted before he decided to change his mind. Tyler closed my shift for me the five nights a week I worked in Threadbare, and I owed him for that the same way I owed him for everything else.

Marco knew about it and looked the other way because Tyler had been at Threadbare longer than he’d owned the place, and because the bar ran more smoothly when Tyler was happy. The arrangement was mine, but the cover for it was Tyler’s. Marco would’ve laughed me out of his office the day I asked him to cut my shift short, but he hadn’t said a word when Tyler walked in and told him I was leaving at eleven from now on.

Friday and Saturday nights in downtown Orlando got rough after midnight. Shifter fights broke out over omegas in heat, and the cops came through to clear the bar more than once a month. The Bureau ran sweeps through the clubs on Magnolia twice a year looking for unregistered primordials to add to the database. I didn’t want to be near that, and lately, Tyler had been pushing the curfew earlier.

Tonight, that arrangement was the only thing standing between me and a heat in the middle of a closing shift.

I stuffed the night’s cash into the inside pocket of my backpack and clutched the canvas against my chest like a baby. Tonight had been a good night. Triple what I usually pulled in a week, which meant a good chunk of it was going straight into the coffee can on top of my fridge.

Abuela Rosa’s emergency money. The stash she’d started for me the day she figured out what I was, the day before her heart finally gave out on her, and the only safety net I had left in this world.

I’d made it the full nine minutes without losing it. Nine minutes of pouring shots and smiling at the last stragglers while the heat clawed at my insides and the werewolf’s cedar scent rotted in the back of my throat. Nine minutes of pretending my hands weren’t shaking when I unbuckled my tip belt and shoved it into my backpack on my way out.

The night air hit me the moment I cleared the threshold, and I almost moaned out loud at the change.

Fall was coming, and I hadn’t realized how close until the cool air slid up under the open weave of my shirt and dragged across my chest. My nipples drew tight against the lace before I suppressed them, and a full-body shiver rolled down my spine and pooled low in my belly. The bear under my ribs lifted its head and exhaled for the first time since the doors had opened at five. My blood ran hotter than a human, but I wasn’t exempt from the season turning.

I kept the Hyundai parked at the far end of the alley under the busted streetlight, knowing Marco’s regulars never wandered that far back to puke.

The sedan was as old as me, twenty-six years of Florida sun bleaching the gray paint down to the shade of bone, and the back bumper had a dent in it from before Abuela Rosa had even bought it off her neighbor’s son. It was hers, and now it was mine, and I’d rather have slept in it than sold it.

I dug into the front pocket of my backpack as I half-jogged toward the car. The keys were in there somewhere, underneath the lip balm, the bottle of suppressants, and the spare hair tie I never used.

My fingers were trembling and refused to cooperate. I fumbled past a tube of something that wasn’t the keychain twice before I finally caught the cool brass of the key ring with my pinky and dragged it up out of the bag.

The hinges on the back door of Threadbare squealed behind me.

A familiar scent reached me before the door even finished closing. Bay rum aftershave and the faint trace of the lime he’d been muddling at the bar all night.

Tyler had left his post mid-shift. He didn’t walk off the bar for anything, which meant only one thing justified pulling him out the back door after me, and I didn’t have to think hard to guess what it was.

I shoved the key into the lock and twisted it hard, and the driver’s door popped open under my hand. I had one foot off the pavement and my backpack already swinging into the passenger seat when a wide palm slammed flat against the window frame above mine and the door shut again with enough force to rock the whole car on its suspension.

“Shit, Tyler. What the fuck.”

I spun, my back hitting the metal of the door behind me, clenching my fist so tight around the keys that the teeth of them were biting into my palm.

Tyler smirked, but there was no heat in it. His other hand came up to rake through the dirty blond curls falling loose at his temple, the way he did when he was trying to keep himself from spitting out words he lacked the power to take back. His eyes stayed on the pavement between us.

“You really gonna ask me that?” His words came out rough at the edges in a way I’d never heard from him before. “Every fucking alpha in that bar smelled you tonight, Santi. You think I didn’t?”

I forced my lungs to do their job, dragging a thick pull of the autumn night down my throat to keep the rising panic from choking me on the spot.

His green eyes lifted to mine, and that was worse. He didn’t even look angry. He was hurting, and I knew that look because I’d put it on his face four times in the last two months, and every time I told myself I’d find the words to fix it before it broke us both.

The thing I hated most had nothing to do with the Bureau or the suppressants or the way my body went into open revolt every month. It was this. It was watching the people I loved fold themselves into smaller shapes to fit around what I failed to give them. Not that there were many people left. Abuela Rosa was in the ground, my parents were a story I didn’t tell anyone, and Tyler was the only person on this earth left.

“Tyler.” I tried for his name, and my throat closed around the second syllable. “I’m sorry.”

The words came out wrong. Too small for what they had to carry. I’d used every other excuse I had for him already. “The suppressants are causing a toxic reaction. I’m tired. I think I’m getting sick. I’m stressed about rent.” For two months I’d handed him one lie after another, and tonight, with the heat coming on and the keys cutting into my palm and the night air drying the sweat at the back of my neck, I didn’t have a single excuse left.

So I told him the truth. Or close enough to it that I planned to live with the shape of it later.

“I don’t want this.” Tears burned hot at the corners before they fell, and I let them. “I don’t want any of it. I want you. My body just isn’t letting me. It knows the season is turning and I’m supposed to be mated and carrying before the weather gets cold. It’s tearing me apart from the inside out, and the pain gets worse every single year. I don’t know how to fix it. I respect you, Tyler. I would never betray you. Not with anyone. I’d drink a whole bottle of suppressants down before I let myself.”

All the color drained from his face.

I’d been hoping for relief on his face for two months. What I got instead looked closer to a man who had just watched a door close on the wrong side of him.

He crouched down in the alley with his hands over his face, and I heard him say, muffled into his palms, “Oh fuck. What have I done?”

I lowered myself to crouch in front of him. The full-body shivers were starting now, the heat clawing higher, and my balance gave out, forcing me to catch myself on the asphalt with one hand while the keys clattered against the pavement.

Tyler moved before I scrambled back up.

He pushed up onto his knees and pulled me into him, both arms around my back, one hand sliding up into the hair at my nape and pressing my face into the side of his throat. He was an alpha but not a shifter, so he didn’t have the bulk of a primordial. He was lean and corded, and he held me as if he were trying to hold a memory.

His nose pressed into the skin under my jaw. He breathed me in, and the rumble vibrating in his chest belonged to a man mourning a terrible mistake.

“I’m sorry,” he said into my throat.

The way he said it landed wrong in my gut. The animal in me lifted its head and started growling.

I swallowed. My mouth had gone dry.

“Tyler.” I tried to pull back, and his hand at my nape tightened before he let me go.

I got my hands up between us and pushed off his chest hard enough to put a foot of space between his face and mine. His hands fell away and hung at his sides like he’d forgotten what they were for, and his eyes stayed on the pavement between our boots.

“What’s going on? You’re scaring me.”

“I thought you didn’t want me anymore.” He was talking to the asphalt now, his shoulders rounded forward. “I watched you tonight with that werewolf. The way you leaned across the bar for him. The lace. The fucking glitter. And I called them, Santi. Before I knew. Before I saw your face just now, I’d already called them, and I’ve been sitting with that for the last ten minutes trying to figure out how to undo it.”

A sudden silence dropped over the alley, broken only by cars passing on the street and the bass bleeding faintly through the back wall of Threadbare.

“Called who, Tyler?”

The words didn’t feel like my own. My boots stayed planted where they were, but somewhere behind my sternum, my body had already understood what my mouth was still trying to ask.

He finally looked up at me.

“They were offering money.” His mouth worked around the next words like they tasted bad. “A lot of money. Enough to get me out of this shithole and open my own bar. And I was angry, Santi. I was so fucking angry that you wouldn’t let me touch you, and I told myself you must be letting someone else, and tonight when that werewolf walked up to the bar, you looked at him like that, I just — "

I stepped back, and I almost went down a second time because the heat had hit my knees, but I caught the side mirror of the Hyundai with my hand and held myself up by it. I wanted the asphalt to open up under me. I wanted Abuela Rosa speaking right in my ear, telling me what she’d told me on her deathbed about secrets and the people who came for you when you forgot. I wanted to be anywhere on this earth except this alley with this man and the keys lying on the pavement between us.

“The werewolf.” I made myself say it. My lips were quivering and I failed to stop them.

Tyler reached for me.

“Do not fucking touch me.”

It came out of me harsh and ugly, and the gag rose in the back of my throat at the thought of his hands on me, the same hands that had walked into Marco’s office and arranged my early curfew like a man building a cage with the door left open for the people he had already called.

“Answer me, Tyler.”

My hand was still locked around the side mirror, the metal warm under my palm from the engine the Hyundai hadn’t run all night, and I struggled to figure out how that made sense, but I held on anyway because my knees were going to give out if I let go. If Tyler hadn’t known the werewolf, he would’ve flinched at the question. He would’ve asked me what I was talking about. He would’ve done anything except stand there with his hands on his thighs and his shoulders pulled in around his ears.

“Did you know him?”

“Yes.” He yelled it down, and the word cracked at the end. “Yes. I know him. I’ve known him for three weeks.”

I leaned harder into the mirror. The animal in me had stopped growling and had gone perfectly still in the way an animal goes still right before it bolts or right before it decides to bite. I didn’t know yet which one it was going to be, and neither did the rest of me.

“The Bureau,” I said it without inflection because I didn’t trust myself to say it any other way. “You sold me to the Bureau.”

Tyler’s head snapped up. “No.” He closed his hands into fists on his thighs and bit down on his bottom lip hard enough that I saw the color leave it. “No, not to them. Santi, fuck. Not to them.”

“Then who?”

His mouth worked around the word before he got it out.

“Genesis Protocol.”

The ground under my boots tilted, and the side mirror was the only thing holding me upright. The name landed in my chest as a stone dropped into deep water, and for a heartbeat, there was only an absolute, hollow nothingness. Then the cold caught up to me all at once, starting at the base of my spine and climbing into the back of my skull, and the heat in my belly went quiet underneath it because even my body knew when to shut up and listen.

The Bureau wanted you on a list. The Bureau wanted you in a uniform.

Genesis Protocol wanted you in a breeding facility with a schedule pinned to the wall outside your cell, and your name burned out of every record that had ever known it.

The sheer horror of the thought robbed me of my breath. My grip on the car slipped as my knees finally gave out, sending me dropping onto the asphalt, scraping my knees. I stared up at the man standing above me.

“Tyler.” My throat barely opened enough to let the words out. “What have you done?”