Chapter 4

Chapter 4: Rhys

*Rhys*

I woke up thinking about her, and that was the first thing that annoyed me about the day.

Not the alarm. Not the game film I still needed to watch. Her. Sloane Reyes, standing in the middle of a dark street with her hands flat against my chest, looking up at me like she'd forgotten how to breathe.

I lay there for a second, staring at the ceiling, trying to figure out why that image was still sitting in my head hours later. It shouldn't have been. I've caught teammates off the ice before, hauled guys up after bad hits, hell, I've caught strangers stumbling out of bars. None of them took up residence in my head like this. None of them made me lie there running the exact weight of them against me, over and over, like my body had filed it under *important* without asking me first.

I got up, splashed water on my face, and told myself to drop it.

I didn't.

I've never liked journalists. That part isn't complicated, and it isn't new. Years ago, one of them decided my family was worth a headline, dug up things that weren't hers to dig up, twisted half of it, and printed the rest without caring who it landed on. I watched what that did. I watched it happen in slow motion, and there was nothing I could do to stop it once the story was out there. People believe what they read. They don't ask if it's fair. They just believe it, and then they move on with their lives while the people the story was about are left standing in the wreckage.

So no, I don't trust reporters. I don't care how nice they seem or how good their intentions sound. In my experience, they don't chase the truth. They chase attention, and the truth is just whatever gets them the most of it.

And Sloane isn't just a journalist. She's an *investigative* journalist, which somehow makes it worse. The kind who doesn't stop digging once she's found an answer. The kind who keeps pulling threads until something unravels. I've seen it in the way she looks at people, like she's already three questions ahead of whatever they just said.

She looks at me that way too. Constantly. Like I'm a puzzle she hasn't solved yet, and it bothers her that she hasn't.

That should annoy me more than it does. Most people I can read in about four seconds what they want from me, what version of myself they're hoping to get. Sloane never once looked at me like she wanted anything from me at all. That shouldn't be as unsettling as it is.

Here's the thing about her that I still haven't figured out. She isn't afraid of me. Everyone else is, in one way or another, careful and polite in that stiff, performing way people get around someone with money and a camera pointed at them half the time. Sloane's never been like that. She argues with me in hallways over parking spots that belong to neither of us. She insults my hockey bag like it personally wronged her. She looks me dead in the eye like I'm just some guy who happens to live across from her, instead of whoever it is she's decided I think I am.

I don't know why that gets under my skin the way it does. I just know it does, and it's been doing it since the week I moved in, long before last night ever happened.

Last night is the part I actually can't explain.

I don't fully understand it myself, if I'm honest. One second I was watching her walk off toward the subway, telling myself good riddance, glad to be done with her for the night. The next second I saw a man's hand close around her arm, and something in me just snapped, clean and total, like a switch flipped somewhere I didn't know I had.

I didn't decide to move. That's the part that still bothers me. There wasn't a thought first, no moment where I weighed the situation and chose to step in. My body was already moving before my mind caught up, already across that street, already between her and the men who'd grabbed her, and it happened so fast I couldn't explain it to anyone even if I wanted to.

That's my wolf. I don't talk about that part of myself, not to anyone, not even to the people closest to me. But I know exactly what it feels like when he takes the wheel, and that's exactly what happened. He didn't ask permission. He looked at her standing there scared, and he decided, faster than I could, that nothing on this earth was going to touch her.

I've spent years keeping him controlled, quiet, locked down tight enough that nobody would ever guess what I am. He doesn't react to strangers. He doesn't care about strangers. I've walked past people in far worse trouble than Sloane was in and felt nothing but the ordinary human urge to help, easily ignored, easily walked past.

Not her. With her, he came up fast and sharp and furious, like she already belonged to him, like those men had put their hands on something that was already his to protect. I still don't have a good answer for why.

When she fell against me afterward, when I caught her and felt her hands grab onto my jacket, felt her heart going wild against my chest, I stood there longer than I needed to. Longer than made any sense. I could have set her back on her feet in two seconds flat. Instead I stood there staring down at her like an idiot, memorizing the exact color her eyes turn in bad lighting, memorizing the way she smelled, rain and something warmer underneath it that I still don't have a name for, cataloguing details about her the way I've never once bothered to catalogue anyone.

Fifteen seconds. Maybe less. It felt a lot longer than that, and some stubborn part of me is still standing on that sidewalk.

Then she shoved me away and started yelling at me for catching her, and that, at least, felt normal again. That, I understood.

I told myself, walking home, that it meant nothing. She tripped. I caught her. My wolf reacted to a threat, the way he's built to. Simple. Explainable. Nothing that needed a second thought.

I almost believed it too, until I got back to my apartment, lay down, and felt something low in my chest stir again, quiet and stubborn, the second I thought about her face tipped up toward mine. It didn't feel like adrenaline was fading, instead it felt like something was waking up.

I don't know what that is. I don't know why it's her, out of every person in this city, every person I've ever met, my wolf decided it was worth that kind of reaction.

But something about Sloane Reyes is different.

I don't understand it.

And I don't like it one bit.