#Chapter 14: The Rescue

Lila's POV

I bit the hand holding my jaw.

My teeth sank in hard enough to taste copper. The man howled and jerked backward, and in the second his grip loosened, I spat. Most of the liquid that had been forced past my lips hit the gravel. Some of it was already burning down my throat.

I ran.

My legs were shaking. My lungs screamed. I sprinted down the dark path with no destination except away — away from the amber eyes and the vial and the hands that wanted to mark me. Branches slashed my arms. My foot caught a root and I stumbled, caught myself, kept running.

"Get her!"

Footsteps behind me. Fast. Wolf-fast.

I opened my mouth to scream for help, but the cloth they'd stuffed in had scraped my throat raw. All that came out was a strangled rasp. The darkness was total. The dormitory lights were a distant glow.

Then something massive hit the man closest to me.

Not something. A wolf. Enormous, coal-black, broad through the shoulders, moving with a speed that made the air crack. The wolf caught the first attacker mid-stride and threw him sideways. The second turned to fight. The third turned to run.

None of them made it.

I pressed my back against a tree and watched through blurred vision as the wolf dismantled them. Not slowly. Not with rage. With efficiency. The calm, methodical violence of something that had done this a thousand times and found it unremarkable. One man went down with a dislocated shoulder. Another crumpled from a blow to the jaw. The leader scrambled backward on all fours, whimpering.

The wolf shifted. The black fur dissolved into skin and muscle and a man standing barefoot in the dark, breathing evenly, not even winded.

Professor Aldrich.

"Are you hurt?"

I wanted to answer. I wanted to say thank you, I'm fine, I'm sorry you had to. But the drug was moving. The aphrodisiac I hadn't fully spat out was threading through my bloodstream, and the world was turning liquid and hot and wrong.

His scent hit me first. Clean. Cedar. Something deeper underneath that made my body lean toward him before my brain could intervene. I grabbed the front of his shirt and pressed my face against his chest.

"Don't leave me." My voice came out small and broken. "Please don't leave."

He went rigid. Every muscle in his body locked. I could feel his heartbeat under my cheek — steady, controlled, faster than it should have been.

He didn't push me away.

The hospital was bright. Too bright. A nurse cleaned the scrapes on my knees and elbows. Another checked my vitals and frowned at the drug residue in my bloodstream.

"It'll burn off," she said. "Cold water helps. And rest."

I sat on the examination table in a paper gown, shivering. The bond rejection pain from Derek hit without warning. A stabbing cramp in my chest. I doubled over.

The professor caught me before I hit the floor. He held me against his shoulder until the spasm passed, grip firm, one hand flat between my shoulder blades.

The pain faded in waves. When I finally unclenched my jaw, my face was wet.

He said nothing. He didn't have to.

After a long moment, I pulled away. "I should shower. The nurse said cold water."

He nodded and stepped back. Cold rushed in where his body had been.

I stood under the hospital shower for ten minutes. The cold water hit my shoulders and the drug's heat receded in stages, from burning to warm to bearable. My head cleared. My hands stopped shaking.

And then I remembered what I'd done.

I'd grabbed my combat professor's shirt. I'd pressed my face into his chest. I'd begged him not to leave me.

Goddess.

I wanted to drown.

When I came out, wrapped in a hospital robe, he was sitting in the hallway. His sweater had been removed, and I could see the gash on his upper arm, a claw mark from the fight, still bleeding through a makeshift bandage.

"You're hurt." I sat down next to him. "Let me —"

He held still when I reached for the bandage. I unwound the cloth and pressed gauze against the cut, taping it down the way my mother had taught me.

My knuckle grazed bare skin. He drew a sharp breath.

I froze. He was shirtless. The scar tissue along his ribcage told a story I'd never asked about, and the warmth of him was radiating through the gauze into my palms.

I let go.

"Done," I whispered.

He stood. "I'll walk you to your dormitory."

We didn't speak on the walk back. He made a phone call on the way, instructions in a clipped, flat tone about the three attackers, patrol routes, campus security. The men who had grabbed me would be processed through the legal system. They would not be handled gently.

At the dormitory entrance, he stopped.

"Get some rest." That was all.

I nodded and went inside.

The next morning, I sat cross-legged on my bed and stared at the ceiling for twenty minutes.

I'd clung to my professor. While drugged. In a hospital gown. I'd begged him not to leave me.

My face burned so hot my glasses fogged.

To distract myself, I opened my laptop. I started typing before my brain caught up, and by the time Gemma woke up for breakfast, I'd written four thousand words.

A duke's daughter. Attacked in the forest. A cold knight who arrives without warning and fights off her assailants with impossible precision. He carries her to safety. She tends his wound by candlelight. Neither of them speaks about what passed between them in the dark.

It was the best thing I'd ever written. It was also a thinly veiled autobiography.

I was editing the third paragraph when my phone buzzed. The forum app. A message from a familiar username.

The dom. Again.

The second time.

You left something unfinished. I don't like unfinished things.

I stared at the screen.

Two invitations. From a man who never invited anyone once.

My thumbs hovered over the keyboard.