Forbidden: Secrets Under The Full Moon

"You're doing that thing again," Dex said.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you go quiet and everyone around you starts getting nervous."

"Good," I said. "They should be nervous."

He laughed and shook his head, and I turned back to face the field.

Bottom of the ninth. Two outs. Game tied. Sixty thousand people were in the stadium all doing the same thing at once—screaming, stomping, holding their breath—and the noise was so thick it felt physical, like something you could press your hands against. 

Then it happened, the way it always did when the moment was real. The sound started pulling back. It didn’t disappear. It just faded, like someone slowly turning down a dial, until the roar of the crowd became something distant and soft and completely irrelevant.

There was just me. And the man across from me.

Ramos. Everyone in the league knew him. He knew he was the best there was, and he'd spent the last two hours making sure everyone in that stadium remembered it. But right now he was staring at me from across the field with his jaw set, and I could tell from the way he was breathing that something had shifted. He wasn't performing for the crowd anymore. He was trying to figure me out.

He threw the first one. I watched it go by without moving. Ball.

He threw the second. I watched that one too. Strike. A few people near the dugout made noise.

Ramos rolled his shoulders. He was committing now.

He wound up for the third, and I saw it the second it left his hand. I read the whole thing before it was halfway to me—the speed, the angle, even where it was going to land. He'd put everything into it. He thought it would end me.

I swung.

The crack was the kind of sound that stopped people mid-sentence. It was sharp and final. The ball climbed, and the stadium went completely still.

There was one second of pure silence. Then it cleared the wall, and the whole place came apart as the fans started jubilating wildly.

I stood at home plate and didn't move right away. Just one second, alone while the world lost its mind around me. My eyes had turned gold.

I knew because I felt the heat of it spreading, that tell my wolf gave away when something real happened, when something I'd fought hard for actually landed. 

I tipped my head back and breathed in the night air, and for that one moment I felt it. Everything I'd held together since I was twenty two. Every night I spent in that empty office after my father died, asking myself if I was strong enough to carry what he'd left behind.

This was the answer.

Then Dex hit me from the side like he had absolutely no concept of personal space, screaming something I couldn't make out over the noise, and then the rest of the team descended and it was chaos; bodies colliding, people yelling, someone spraying champagne directly into my face. 

I laughed. Actually laughed. Dex would tell you that didn’t happen enough.

And he wouldn't be wrong.

The celebration moved downtown around midnight. I showed up, did what a captain was supposed to do, and slipped out two hours later without making a thing of it. Dex noticed—he always did—but one look from me and he let it go.

I ended up back at the stadium.

The building was empty and dark, and I sat in the coaching office alone with the city spread out outside the window. I waited for the restlessness to settle the way it usually did after a win. It didn't.

My wolf had been pacing for two weeks. Not because of a threat, or because of anything I could point at. I could just feel this low, persistent movement under the surface, like something was already in motion somewhere that I couldn't see yet. 

I'd been trying to ignore it, but I'd learned by now that ignoring it was stupid.

I didn't sleep.

Just before five in the morning, my phone buzzed on the desk. A new hire notification from Coach Reeves, an athletic trainer starting on Monday. The memo said he'd pushed the paperwork through fast, which was unusual for him. 

Reeves was not a man who rushed things. He was careful in the specific way of someone who had made one bad decision about the wrong person a long time ago and had never forgiven himself for it.

I read the name. Nadia Cole.

Then I put the phone down and told myself it was nothing. My wolf didn't stop pacing. 

What I didn't know yet—what I had absolutely no way of knowing—was that two floors below me, our east corridor security camera had been recording since 4:47 a.m. And that the footage showed a woman standing outside in the dark, completely still, studying every visible entrance to this building with the kind of focus and patience that had nothing to do with curiosity and everything to do with calculation.

She stood there for six minutes. Then she smiled, turned around, and walked away.

Monday morning she walked back in with a bag over one shoulder and introduced herself as the new athletic trainer.

I shook her hand and felt something in my chest shift in a way it had never shifted before, and I still didn't understand that the most dangerous person to ever walk into this building had just smiled at me.