#Chapter 10: The Wolf

Lila's POV

Derek was staring at my thigh.

Not at me. At the mark. His eyebrows were drawn together and his nostrils were flared. He had never left that mark. He had never touched me hard enough to leave anything at all. In three years, he had barely touched me. So who had?

I looked away from him before he could ask.

That was when I felt it. A gaze heavier than my ex's, hotter, fixed on the exact same spot. Not curious. Intense. The place where his eyes landed burned.

Professor Aldrich was looking at my thigh.

His expression hadn't changed. The same flat composure he wore in every combat class. But his eyes were on the handprint and they were not flat. They were dark and focused and they stayed longer than they should have.

My heart was beating too fast. I pulled the hem of my dress down and crossed my legs and didn't look at him again.

Aldrich's POV

Pink.

That was the first thing. The skin around the mark was pink, flushed from the heat of the fire, and the bruises sat in the center. Five fingers. Spaced wide. Not anger. Not clumsiness. Someone who knew what they were doing.

Her name is Lila. She was sitting three feet away from me with her hands folded in her lap and her chin down and her pulse visible in her throat. The firelight turned her hair gold. Her face was soft and flushed and she kept biting the inside of her cheek the way she did in class when she was trying not to react to something.

She was my student. Wolfless. Couldn't hold a guard position for more than six seconds. I had no business looking at her thigh.

I looked anyway.

The mark excited something in me that I didn't want to name. Not attraction. Attraction was manageable. This was recognition. Her body, her posture, the way she sat with her knees together and her shoulders hunched. Obedient even when she didn't know she was being watched. She would be easy to train. She would respond to correction, kneel when told, hold the position and look up with those wide eyes and wait.

She smells like ours.

My wolf. I clenched my jaw.

I want her. She's ours. Mark her.

She's my student. Stand down.

Her body is made for us. The scent. Can't you smell it? She's our mate. Our Luna. I've been starving and she's right there—

She is a student in my combat class. Wolfless. Beta. Control yourself or I will.

Fated mate. The wolf's voice was steady, certain, utterly indifferent to my objections. The bond is not optional. You know this.

I knew this. I also knew it was impossible. Fated mates were predetermined by biology and confirmed by both wolves, and she didn't have one. She was a beta's daughter. A girl who wrote essays and failed quizzes and had no supernatural ability to speak of. My bloodline, the purest Alpha lineage in four generations, paired with a wolfless literature student. Not unlikely. Absurd.

And yet. I couldn't stop looking at her.

The firelight caught her face at an angle and I noticed things I had never let myself notice. The curve of her jaw. The way her eyelashes cast shadows on her cheeks when she looked down. The shape of her mouth, slightly parted, slightly pink. Her body was slim and soft in the ivory dress and the thin straps showed her shoulders and I thought, for one uncontrolled second, about what her mouth would taste like.

The thought lasted less than a second. I killed it.

She was one student among hundreds. I was here for a three-year contract and a presidential campaign. My schedule was meetings and council votes and pack expansion proposals and there was no room in it for a girl with no wolf and no status and no reason to be in my head.

Love was noise. My father had told me that when I was eight years old, sitting in his study with the door closed, his voice low and certain. You will be a great leader someday. Love is irrelevant. He would know. He loved my mother deeply, but my mother felt otherwise. She'd married him to hurt her ex, and she had carried that spite into the marriage and the family and the son she'd never quite wanted. She'd never looked at me the way mothers in other families looked at their children. She'd done her duty and nothing more.

I grew up understanding that love was a trap. It made fools of strong men and wreckage of stable packs. Power and position were real. Everything else was noise.

But today. Today I had held her during a dance and felt her heartbeat through the fabric of her dress and my wolf had not shut up since. Today I had watched her pull away and walk off the floor and something in my chest had clenched in a way that was not strategic and not manageable and not noise.

I thought about the girl from the forum.

The one who had walked into the wrong hotel room wearing a purple mask and trembling hands. The one I'd tied with silk and spoken to in the voice I only used in that context and who had run before I was finished. She had smelled like this girl. Her body had been shaped like this girl's body. And her avatar on the forum maybe was the purple-masked woman from that night.

I opened my phone under the table and broke a rule I'd held for twelve years.

I never invited the same woman twice. The separation was the point. One encounter, one night, no attachments, no names. But tonight the boundaries were thin and my discipline was cracked and the girl who'd run from room 619 was the only outlet I could justify.

I sent the invitation. Brief. Professional. Same hotel, same room number.

The reply came in under a minute.

I appreciate it. I'm not feeling well tonight. I'm sorry.

I stared at the screen.

Thirty-two years old. I had never once been refused.