Chapter 5 Chapter 5
The gym was underground, three levels below the main house, and it smelled like sweat and cold concrete. Alex had brought me here every morning for the past two weeks, and every morning I'd learned something new about myself.
"Again," he said, barely breathing hard as he stepped back from me. "And this time, think about the motion. It's not about strength. It's about efficiency."
I came at him again, trying the combination he'd shown me. Left hook, right jab, spin and strike with the back of my fist. He dodged the hook, caught the jab on his forearm, and spun away from the back fist before it connected.
But this time, when he grabbed me from behind—a move I'd been expecting—I used his momentum against him, dropping my weight and flipping him over my hip.
He landed hard on his back, and for a second, we both just stared at each other in surprise.
Then he laughed. A real laugh, not the cold sound I'd heard from him before.
"Good," he said, letting me help him up. "That's very good."
I was breathing hard, my body humming with the pleasure of movement, of learning, of being able to do something I'd never been taught before. In my pack, they'd kept me sedentary, kept me weak. My time as a nurse had given me functional strength, but nothing like this.
"You're a good teacher," I said, stepping back to give us both space.
"I had good teachers." He grabbed a towel from a nearby rack and wiped his face. "Military training, martial arts from three different traditions, and pure necessity. When you're building an empire in a world where your competitors don't follow human laws, you have to be better than everyone else at everything."
"Is that what this is?" I asked, moving to my own towel. "Teaching me because you need me to be better than your competitors?"
"Partly." He didn't look at me as he said it, which was how I knew he was being honest. Alex lied smoothly when he was looking you in the eye. When he looked away, that was when the truth came out. "Mostly, I'm teaching you because you need to be able to defend yourself. And because there's something about the way you move that suggests you have capabilities you don't understand yet."
I'd been thinking about that myself. The past two weeks, training with Alex, I'd felt something awakening in my muscles. Something that remembered how to be the predator I'd become the night I killed my father.
"Show me how to access it," I said. "Whatever it is that I have inside me. Teach me how to control it."
He finally looked at me, and I saw something flicker across his face. Concern. Maybe even fear.
"That's dangerous, Mia."
"I've been living dangerously my whole life," I said. "The only difference now is I have someone willing to teach me instead of telling me to hide. So teach me."
"Not today." He set down his towel. "Today, we cleaned up. Then I need to brief you on something. There's a job I want you to help with."
"The job you mentioned before? Infiltrating someone?"
"Yes." He headed toward the gym exit. "But first, you need to understand what you're actually signing up for. Come on. There's someone I want you to meet."
The basement level of the mansion went deeper than I'd realized. As Alex led me down a hallway lined with doors that looked like they belonged in a hospital, I began to understand the full scope of his operation.
"How many people do you have working for you?" I asked.
"In this city? About two hundred. Across the region? More like five hundred. Worldwide?" He shrugged. "I've stopped counting. It's not about numbers. It's about quality and loyalty."
He stopped at a door marked only with a number: 7. He knocked twice, then entered without waiting for a response.
The woman sitting on the bed inside looked up with immediate hope in her eyes. She was young, maybe early twenties, with bruises on her arms and a fresh scar on her cheek. Her hair had been roughly cut, and she was wearing hospital-style clothes.
But what struck me most was her eyes. They had that same hunted look I saw in my own mirror sometimes.
"Alex," she said, standing up quickly. "Did you find them? Did you—"
"Not yet, Emma. But I'm working on it." He gestured for me to enter. "This is Mia. Mia, this is Emma. She's been staying with us for about three months."
Emma's expression shifted from hope to suspicion when she looked at me. "Who is she?"
"Someone who might be able to help," Alex said. "Emma, I want you to tell Mia what happened to you."
Emma's jaw clenched. "Why? What's the point?"
"Because Mia needs to understand what we're fighting against. And because maybe talking about it will help you finally let some of it go."
Emma looked at me, and I recognized the calculation in her eyes—another woman who'd learned to assess threat levels quickly. After a long moment, she sat back down on the bed.
"I was kidnapped three years ago," she started. "Taken off the street in broad daylight. They told me I was special. That I had genetic markers that made me valuable. For a while, I thought it meant I could get money, that they were going to help me." She laughed bitterly. "I was so stupid."
"You weren't stupid," Alex said quietly.
"They had me in a facility. Medical facility, they called it. But it was a laboratory. They took blood samples daily. They did genetic sequencing, mapping, something. They wanted to understand how I could..." She paused and looked at me. "Do you know about the supernatural?"
I glanced at Dominic, who nodded.
"I'm part siren," Emma continued. "It's hereditary. My grandmother was fully siren, back before humans didn't know about us. My mother was half-human, half-siren. And I'm... complicated. The researchers wanted to understand if siren genetics could be isolated and used to create abilities in regular humans."
The implications of that made my stomach turn.
"How did you escape?" I asked.
"Alex," she said, looking at him with something that might have been love. "He raided the facility about six months ago. Freed me and fourteen other people. But not all of them made it out. And the facility..." She shook her head. "It was just one of many. The person running them, the person who took me in the first place—he's still out there. Still operating. Still taking people."
Alex's expression had gone cold. "His name is Victor Lenn. He runs underground fighting rings, human trafficking, and the genetic research facility where Emma was kept. He answers to someone called the Alpha King, a figure we're still trying to identify. But Lenn is our priority. He's exposed. He makes mistakes. And I want to take him down."
"How?" I asked.
"With you," Alex said, looking at me. "Lenn has a specific type. Women he perceives as vulnerable, desperate, isolated. Women he thinks he can break. I want you to approach him as a nurse looking for additional income. Get close to him. Learn his operations from the inside. And when the time is right, help me destroy him."
Emma was watching me closely. "You'd really do that? You'd put yourself in that kind of danger?"
I thought about the nurse in me, the part that had spent five years trying to save people and help them heal. I thought about Emma, locked in a basement laboratory, having her blood drawn and her genetics mapped.
"Yes," I said. "I'd do that."
Emma reached out and touched my arm. "Thank you," she whispered. "Thank you for being brave enough to do what I couldn't."
After we left her room, I walked silently next to Alex back through the basement and up toward the main house. The weight of what I'd just agreed to was settling on me like a physical thing.
"When do we start?" I asked.
"Training first," he said. "You need to know how to move through dangerous spaces without being detected. How to gather information. How to lie convincingly. How to get out if things go wrong."
"And if things do go wrong? What will happens to me?"
He stopped at the top of the basement stairs and turned to face me. "Then I burn the entire city down looking for you. We're not doing this unless you understand that this isn't just a job to me."
"Why is it?" I asked. "It's not just because you're a crime boss who wants to eliminate a competitor. It's personal."
"Emma reminds me of my sister," he said quietly. "Three years ago, Emma was being tortured in a laboratory. Three years ago, my sister was sitting in a cell in Victor Lenn's operation, with no one coming to save her. I got lucky. I found her. But there are hundreds of girls like her. Hundreds of people like Emma who nobody is looking for."
He started walking again, and I followed. "So yes, it's personal. And yes, I need you. But if you help me, Mia, you're not just helping Emma or my sister. You're helping everyone that monster has taken."
That night, I couldn't sleep.
I lay in the expensive bed in my expensive room, staring at the ceiling, thinking about Emma's scarred face and the laboratories hidden somewhere in this city. Thinking about Alex's sister, about the years she'd spent in captivity.
Thinking about my own mother, dying to protect me from pack violence that I now understood had been orchestrated by people who wanted to use me.
There was a soft knock on my door. I sat up, and Alex entered without waiting for permission. He was wearing casual clothes, which I'd learned was rare for him. Usually, he kept himself armored in expensive suits like they were medieval armor.
"Couldn't sleep?" he asked, moving to the window.
"Too many thoughts," I said.
"About the job, or about me?"
"Both." I paused. "Who are you really, Alex? Not the crime boss. Not the exiled werewolf. Who are you when nobody's watching?"
He was quiet for a long moment, looking out at the city. "I'm someone who made a lot of mistakes trying to do the right thing. I'm someone who chose power over love because power felt safer. I'm someone who's been running from his past just like you've been running from yours."
"Is that why you recognized me so quickly?" I asked. "At the hospital?"
"Partially. But also because of this." He pulled up his shirt, and I saw scars. Dozens of them. Some old, some newer. Slashes and burns and evidence of things I didn't have words for.
"What happened to you?"
"Pack discipline," he said, pulling his shirt back down. "When I refused the forced mating, when I refused to accept their authority, they made sure I understood the cost. These scars are courtesy of my own family. So when I smelled wolf on you, when I realized you were broken, I didn't see a freak. I saw someone like me. Someone who didn't fit the mold they were supposed to fit into."
He turned to face me. "And I wanted to protect you in a way nobody protected me."
I didn't think. I just moved, crossing the room and taking his hand. His fingers were warm, calloused, strong. He looked down at our joined hands like they were a foreign thing.
"What are you doing?" he asked.
"I don't know yet," I admitted. "But I don't want to be alone tonight. And I don't think you do either."
He didn't pull away. Instead, he led me to the bed and lay down beside me, still fully clothed. I pressed myself against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, feeling the warmth of him like a promise.
"This doesn't change the job," he said into my hair.
"I know," I whispered.
"And I can't promise this is real. I can't promise I'm not broken in ways that will hurt you."
"I know," I said again. "But I'm choosing to trust you anyway."
He held me through the night, and for the first time since arriving at the mansion, I slept without nightmares.