Chapter Three

Amaris

Kenton comes out of the locker room with damp hair, a black T-shirt, and the kind of guarded expression that tells me he already knows why I’m here. That pisses me off before either of us says a word. I keep Axel’s letter folded in my fist because I need something solid to hold. The hallway smells like ice, soap, sweat, and him. His scent hits harder than it has any right to, and beneath my anger something in me shifts awake.

I've been standing here long enough to reconsider this fourteen times. Every time the locker-room door opens, voices spill out and I have to fight the urge to leave before Kenton appears. The last time I stood near this hallway with Axel, he was complaining about somebody stealing his favorite stick tape and making me promise to bring fries after practice. That version of this place is gone. Now the fluorescent lights feel too bright, the air is painfully cold against the sweat at the back of my neck, and every sound behind the door makes my stomach turn because I know the worst thing Axel wrote happened somewhere on the other side of it.

Kenton's presence hits me differently than the building does. I smell him before I have any right to, cedar and clean soap under the cold metal smell of the rink, and my body answers with another rush of heat that feels obscene in the middle of grief. I hate him a little for causing it even though rationally I know he hasn't done anything. Rationality isn't having a productive afternoon.

“Were you Axel’s friend?”

I ask. No hello. No warmup. Kenton’s jaw tightens before he says, “Not really.” I laugh once because that answer is somehow worse.

“Then why did he put your name in his last letter?”

Kenton looks toward the closed locker-room door, then back at me. “He said my name?”

His reaction to Axel's name isn't confusion. That matters. His shoulders pull tight and his gaze drops to the letter like he recognizes exactly how dangerous a few folded pages can be. If he were innocent of every kind of failure, I think he would look puzzled. If he were the monster I have imagined, maybe he would look angry. Instead he looks guilty, and guilt is complicated because people feel it for things they did, things they didn't do, and things they only realize mattered after it's too late.

I don't let him hide inside the silence. Axel can't ask anymore. I can. That has to count for something.

I unfold the paper just enough to show him without handing it over. “He said you saw some of what was happening. He said you stopped some of it. He said he tried to tell you there was more, and then you stopped asking. So tell me what you saw.”

The air feels too hot. My shirt is sticking between my shoulder blades even though the rink hallway is cold enough that everybody else is wearing jackets. Kenton notices me shifting my weight and asks if I’m okay. “Don’t,” I snap.

“Don’t turn this into me. Answer the question.” He takes the hit without arguing, which irritates me because I came prepared to fight.

“I saw comments,” he says finally.

He tells me about the first incident he remembers clearly. Two guys had Axel's bag and were tossing it between them while another one kept making comments about him being gay. Kenton took the bag, gave it back, and made the room stop. He says he told them if he heard it again, they would answer to Coach. The way he describes it's matter-of-fact, not heroic. That almost makes me angrier because the solution sounds so fucking simple when an eighteen-year-old captain is willing to make a room uncomfortable for the right reason.

I ask whether he ever told a teacher or Coach that Axel was being targeted. Kenton says no, not then. He thought shutting it down was enough because the obvious harassment stopped around him. Around him. The phrase is a knife. I ask whether it stopped when Kenton left the room. He can't answer because he doesn't know.

“Shoving. Guys messing with his things. Locker-room bullshit that wasn’t funny.”

His mouth hardens. “When I saw it, I shut it down.” I ask whether it stopped.

“The obvious stuff did.”

“The obvious stuff.” I repeat the phrase, and something sharp twists low in my stomach.

“Axel said there was more. Did you know that?” Kenton hesitates. That pause tells me more than the answer that follows.

I make him keep going. He saw Axel's things disappear twice. Saw an older player shoulder him into a locker once and stepped in before it escalated. He noticed Axel started changing in a bathroom stall instead of in the open room. One afternoon, Axel asked whether Kenton thought people could get in real trouble for something if there was no proof afterward. Kenton asked what he meant. Axel laughed it off. Kenton let him. Every answer gives me another piece without giving me the one I need.

My fingertips start tingling while he talks. I flex them around the letter. The paper smells like my room, dust, the cheap detergent from our last foster house, and faintly like Axel because grief has apparently decided scent can be a weapon too. Kenton's heartbeat speeds up. I can hear it. I should not be able to hear it. I ignore that because I'm too close to the question that has been eating me alive.

“I knew he wasn’t telling me everything.”

Pain grips under my ribs. I suck in a breath and the whole hallway changes. Micah’s heartbeat is suddenly audible through the door. Somebody laughs in the locker room and I can tell exactly how far away he is. Kenton’s scent gets stronger, cedar and cold air and something darker underneath. My skin feels too tight. 

What the hell is happening to me?

“Why did you stop?”

I demand anyway. Kenton’s eyes flick toward the locker room, then somewhere past me as if the answer lives in a place he doesn’t want to look. “It isn’t that simple.”

My laugh comes out breathless. “It’s actually very simple. Who told you to stop asking?”

His face gives him away. Somebody did. I step closer even as another cramp folds through my abdomen. “Who?” Kenton looks toward the locker-room door again, but this time it isn't avoidance. He is checking who might hear. That tells me the person who told him to stop wasn't just some random kid. I ask if it was Coach. No answer. A teacher. No answer. One of his parents. His jaw shifts, and there it is. The answer lives in that reaction even if he refuses to hand me the name yet.

The heat under my skin spikes so hard my vision freckles at the edges. I brace one hand against the wall. Kenton takes half a step forward and stops himself. For the first time since this conversation began, his attention leaves Axel and locks fully onto me. I want to tell him not to use my body as an escape route from the question. Then another cramp tears through my abdomen and makes it difficult to breathe, much less accuse him of anything.

He reaches toward me and stops before touching. “Amaris, we need to get you outside.”

I stare at him. 

There it is. Redirect. Control the room. Make me the problem.

“No. You’re going to answer me.”

My hearing warps around the sentence. Kenton turns his head toward the locker-room door and calls, “Micah, keep everybody inside.” The door opens a crack. Micah takes one look at me and loses whatever joke he was about to make. Kenton repeats himself, and Micah nods before shutting the door.

The hallway turns brutally specific. I hear shower water running behind the wall, a locker slam somewhere inside the room, somebody's phone buzzing on a bench. Micah says something I can't make out, then I realize I actually can hear him through a closed door and several feet of concrete, which is a whole new thing to panic about. My pulse sounds wrong, way too slow for how scared I am. Kenton's breathing changes. His fear sharpens in the air, but there's something underneath it I can't name because my brain doesn't even have a category for wolf yet.

I look down at my hands. The tendons stand out like my fingers are trying to curl into a shape they were never built for. Panic punches through the anger. This isn't a normal stress response. It isn't a migraine. It isn't grief. Whatever is happening, Kenton recognizes it, and that means I've managed to walk straight to the one person I trust least at the exact moment I may actually need him.

Another wave of heat rolls through me. I can smell fear now, mine and Kenton’s, and something wild underneath my own skin that wasn’t there five minutes ago. Kenton goes very still as he breathes in. He doesn’t look at me like a mate or a miracle or anything else I don’t know yet. He looks like somebody who just recognized a medical emergency nobody ever warned me could exist.

Kenton glances toward the rear exit, then back at me. “We have to get you outside.”

I tell him he’s not getting me alone in the woods just because I asked about Axel. He looks like he expected that answer. “I’m not trying to avoid the question.”

His voice drops. “You’re about to shift.”

I stare at him while pain claws up my spine. “Shift into what?”

He doesn’t soften it. “A wolf.” The next cramp hits hard enough to fold me in half before I can decide whether he’s insane.