‘Just a feeling, baby,’ her mama had told her affectionately.
She’d been waiting for that good thing. Was this it? Was it him, back again? It couldn’t be.
God, she was a gigantic idiot.
Watching the spectacle in front of her, she tried to see for herself if it was her Alpha before she had to deal with real life.
The fight was probably illegal, which was most likely why it was in such a dungeon-like space in the industrial district, better known as the creepy no-go zone of the city. This was the part of the city kids who wanted to play scary games came to. Mostly, it was just famous for seedy criminal activities. She just hoped no one got raided because the prison wasn't on her bucket list.
The dungeon, if it could be called that, was huge and dark and not like any basement she'd ever seen. The walls were solid rock and the ceiling super high with some huge lights that would honestly be painful to look at directly. The central space was a caged-off ring and the crowd of mostly men and a few women surrounded the cage, with some bouncer-type scary men against the walls keeping an eye on everyone.
"Break his arm, Alpha!" the guy immediately to her right yelled loud enough to wake the dead.
"Spray his fucking blooooood!"
"Knock him out and I'll suck your dick, you beast!" That from a particularly enthusiastic lady somewhere in the room. Zephyr cringed. As long as it wasn’t her Alpha, the lady could suck whatever she wanted. She’d always been irrationally possessive of him.
A violent crash of a body hitting the metal of the cage broke her thoughts, drawing her eyes towards the main event.
Her eyebrows hit her hairline.
A shirtless man, no, a shirtless giant, had another smaller guy (who would've been huge on his own, but looked tiny in comparison) pinned against the cage from the back. She could see what the lady had been talking about. A beast, indeed. He had the smaller guy's arm twisted behind him at an awkward angle, the other holding him down like a dog. But it wasn't just the fight that had Zephyr's attention.
It was his eyes, or rather his one eye. He wore an honest-to-god eye patch over his right eye, his left glimmering a light color she couldn't really make out from afar. Eye patches, in her head, were things pirates wore to look badass as they raided ships and claimed maidens in historical romances. In this day and age, people usually just put in a fake prosthetic eye if they needed. The fact that this veritable giant wore an eye patch to a fight with an opponent of seemingly good vision... damn.
But he looked nothing like the boy from her fateful memories.
"Fuck him up goooood!!!"
Jesus, the guy next to her was really, really bloodthirsty.
"I want him so bad!" another woman's voice said from somewhere. "Can you believe he’s not fucking anyone for over a year now? I’ve tried to hit him up so many times."
"Girl, he scares the living shit out of me. No way I'm going near that."
"Just imagine the sex, though. I've heard he makes you praise the lord."
Zephyr listened to the conversation intently, trying to place if this was him.
She tried not to let the crowd jostle her smaller frame as she watched the fight from the back, her mind occupied for the moment, the weight on her chest heavy.
The beast stepped back from the smaller guy, setting him free, putting his entire frame in her line of sight to her for the first time. A long scar went down from his hairline, under his eye patch, down to the corner of his mouth, permanently pulling it down in a scary frown on one side. A million more scars littered his torso with some tattoos over a million muscles she didn't know a human could possess. And for such a large man, he moved with a fluidity that belied him.
Raw, brutal strength, that's what he was.
Alpha, that's what the crowd had called him, and she could see why. The more she watched him, the more fascinated she became, the more the urge to confirm his identity seeped into her pores.
Shortie turned to him, swinging his arm out, his fist aimed at the black patch, and Zephyr could feel her breath locking in her throat, suddenly invested in not wanting the beast to get hurt. Before she could blink, in a move that she wouldn't have thought he could have caught with his limited peripheral vision, he blocked Shortie and delivered a sharp uppercut on his side, possibly breaking a rib with the force behind it.
Oof.
Shortie gripped his side and howled as the crowd went crazy. Yeah, that would've hurt.
Just as she winced in sympathy, as Shortie stayed bent on the cage floor, this Alpha cracked his neck and looked out at the crowd for the first time. She saw that singular gaze glance over the gathering and pause on her. It was probably her shock of pink hair that caught his eye or her dress. She didn't know, and she didn't really think.
She couldn't think.
It was the same heaviness. There had always been something... intense about being looked at by him. Something so heavy she could feel it weighing down on her chest, escalating her heartbeats, making her palms clammy. A bead of sweat rolled down her neck into her cleavage, and dear lord, she remembered what it had been like being looked at by him with both his eyes.