“I was working as muscle for one of the organized crime families in Chicago,” he said quietly. “I was pulling security at this underground fight club they ran when—”
“Whoa…wait…back up a second,” she said, holding up her hand. “You can’t just drop that on me and not expect me to interrupt with a bunch of questions. How did you end up working for the mob when you promised you’d never get mixed up in that world?”
Hale shrugged and took a long drink of beer. She hoped he was stalling because he was searching for the right words, because he hadpromised.
“I know we talked about getting out of Chicago and going to college together, but after we…well, reality came crashing back down on me,” he said so softly she could barely hear him. “It wasn’t like my parents were going to pay for school anyway, and even if they’d wanted to, I barely made it through my senior year. Going into the family business was the only option I had. Or at least the only option I thought I had.”
Even if their breakup couldn’t be laid directly at her feet, Karissa still couldn’t help feeling like she carried some of the blame for Hale ending up in the family business. He’d once told her that it was herunflagging optimism about his future that gave him the strength not to get sucked into that world. She guessed that after the split, he’d given up on all of that. But there was no changing the past.
“Did you start working for this mobster right out of high school or…?” she asked.
“Pretty much,” he said. “My dad had visions of me working my way up to enforcer or even one of the guy’s lieutenants.”
She did a double take. “Wow.”
“Yeah, I know. Admittedly, it’s not something I ever thought I’d see myself doing, but with my martial arts training, he figured I’d be a natural, I guess.”
She remembered seeing Hale fight that first night in the alley, then again at the hunting preserve, and thinking how skilled he was. “Wait a minute. You didn’t learn martial arts after becoming a cop?”
He shook his head, giving her a wry smile. “After your brothers beat me up, I swore that I’d never again be in a situation where I couldn’t defend myself, so as soon as I moved in with my uncle, I started taking martial arts classes.”
Karissa nodded. “So before I interrupted, you were saying something about being in an underground fight club. I didn’t even know there was a place like that in Chicago.”
“I’d be surprised if youhadheard of the place, considering that’s the whole purpose of theundergroundpart,” Hale said. “There were probably athousand people crammed into a space made for about half of that, and most of them were drunk off their asses.”
“I can already see where this is heading,” Karissa muttered.
Drunk people and confined spaces rarely mixed well.
“The long shot won the fight that night, so a lot of people lost obscene amounts of money,” Hale continued. “The crowd, which was already worked up from watching the fight and being crammed into a tight, windowless space like a bunch of sardines, got pissed really fast. To this day I’m still not sure what happened, but one minute there was a bunch of pushing, shoving, and shouting, and the next people pulled guns and started shooting.”
She didn’t even want to imagine how horrible that must have been. “I’m surprised they let people have weapons in there.”
Hale let out a snort. “It wasn’t the kind of crowd who willingly turns over their weapons. Not that it would have mattered. Something bad was going down after that fight no matter what. Bullets flying and people trampling each other to get out of there was bad enough, but then a fire broke out behind the bar. The damn thing spread like crazy.”
She shuddered. Being trapped in a tight underground place filled with flames was like a nightmare come to life. “What did you do?”
Hale’s eyes were distant as he relived the memory. “I got my boss and his people out, taking a round in the leg in the process. By then, the whole building was on fire. Even once I got outside, I could hear the roar of the flames and terrified screams of everyone who was still trapped in the building. I couldn’t just leave them there, so I went back in to save them.”
“You went back into a burning building?” she asked incredulously.
“I had to,” he said, still lost in thought. “The idea of leaving them down there like that never even entered my mind.”
Karissa leaned forward, holding her breath as she waited for whatever was coming next. She still didn’t understand how all of this was connected to Hale becoming a werewolf and was almost afraid to find out.
“I don’t know how many times I ran down into that burning pit of hell, but it seemed like no matter how many people I pulled out, there were always more,” he said.
“Wasn’t anyone else helping you?” she asked, even though she already knew the answer. How many people in the world, outside of a firefighter, would purposely run into a burning building to save someone they didn’t know?
He shook his head. “No. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there were still people shooting at each other in the middle of a fire. They were moreconcerned with the money they’d lost than the threat of the ceiling collapsing on their heads.”
Karissa tried to wrap her mind around that level of foolishness and failed. Even though she’d seen humanity at its worst since becoming a Paladin, the situation Hale described still defied logic.
“By the time it was over, I’d been shot two more times, burned in more places than I could count, and had half my ribs caved in by a falling support beam,” he said softly. “I lay there on the sidewalk outside the building, certain I was going to die and strangely okay with that because I’d saved a lot of people.”
Hearing the finality in Hale words, it was all she could do to keep from crying. Once again, there was a voice whispering in the back of her head that said this was all her fault. That if she hadn’t left him, then none of this would have happened.
“I didn’t die, of course,” Hale added with a soft, self-deprecating laugh. “Obviously. Instead, I woke up in a hospital room a few days later being told I was some kind of modern miracle because according to the doctor, I should have died from blood loss and multiple lacerations to my lungs and kidneys from the broken ribs. I didn’t really know how I’d lived through all of that or what was going on with me until a few months later when Gage—who’s the alpha of our pack as well as the SWAT commander—tracked me down and explained what happened.”
