#Chapter 5: The Cufflink (II)

Aldrich's POV

I didn't come to bars to socialize.

The whiskey was decent, smoky, a single malt, and the corner table was far enough from the speakers that I could still think. Saturday nights at these places were predictable. Loud music, louder people, girls in tight dresses hoping to catch someone's attention. I came because the apartment was too quiet sometimes, and the noise here had a shape to it. Orderly chaos.

I was reviewing pack expansion proposals on my phone when the crowd near the stage shifted.

A girl had climbed onto the platform. She was trying to dance on the pole. Trying hard. Her movements were stiff, her grip unsure. She hooked a knee and nearly slipped. Someone in the front row whistled.

She kept going. I should have looked away. She was drunk and out of her depth, and I had five more budget reports to get through before tomorrow's council call. But my eyes wouldn't move.

I noticed her body against my will. The dress was short and black and cut to show her collarbones and the line of her waist. She wasn't polished or practiced. She moved with something rawer than technique, anger, maybe. Or defiance. Her hips caught the rhythm of the bass and her chin tilted up and she looked like someone daring the whole room to tell her she couldn't.

My wolf stirred.

Look at her.

I set my glass down. She's —

My student. She looked like one of my students. I couldn't place which one from this distance. The lights were low and her makeup was different and her hair was up in a way that changed the shape of her face. But there was something in her frame. The narrow shoulders. The way she held her chin.

I want her.

I tightened my grip on the glass.

She smells like —

No. I couldn't smell her from here. That was my wolf projecting, inventing proximity where there was none. It happened when the wolf fixated, and I wasn't about to let it.

I shut the thought down. She was a student. Possibly. And even if she wasn't, I didn't have time for this. I had a campaign to run, a three-year teaching contract to honor, and a reputation that couldn't survive a photo of me leaving a bar with a girl half my age.

I went back to my phone. My eyes drifted up three more times before she stopped dancing.

Lila’s POV

The room was spinning, but slowly, a manageable kind of spinning, the kind where I could still walk in a straight line if I concentrated.

I stepped off the platform with shaking arms and pushed through the crowd toward the bar. Gemma was talking to a tall guy near the speakers and gave me a thumbs up.

That's when I saw him.

The man in the corner. He was leaning back in his chair with a glass of something amber, sleeves rolled to his forearms. Dark-haired. Jaw set hard. Not smiling, not frowning, just watching the room with no intention of joining it.

He was beautiful. The kind that made you stupid.

I was already stupid. I was four cocktails into the worst decision-making of my life and I'd just pole-danced in a borrowed dress. What was one more bad idea?

I walked over.

"Hi." My voice came out too bright. "I'm — can I get your number?"

He didn't look up from his phone. Just pulled a business card from his breast pocket and held it out between two fingers without breaking stride.

I took it. The card was heavy stock, matte black, silver embossed. One name. One number. No title, no company.

I read the name. My blood cooled by three degrees.

It was the same. The same name as the dom on the forum. The legendary one whose posts I'd studied for months, the one who never showed his face.

I stared at the card, then at the man. He still wasn't looking at me.

I swallowed hard. No. No, this was a coincidence. It was a common enough name. Plenty of people shared names with internet strangers. I was drunk and my brain was connecting dots that didn't exist.

"Thanks," I said, and backed away.

Gemma caught me near the bar. "Who was that?"

"Nobody. Just some guy."

"Some guy?" She grabbed my arm. "That 'some guy' looked like he could bench-press this building. Tell me everything about the hotel. You never finished the story."

"There's nothing to tell." I tried to pull away. "It was dark. I didn't see his face."

"But his body?"

"I was blindfolded." My face burned. "Can we not —"

"So you felt his body." Her mouth fell open. "He was, wasn't he. You are SO red right now."

I pressed my cold palms to my cheeks. "Stop."

Before she could push further, a hand closed around my upper arm.

Not hers.

The fingers were thick, sweaty, and too tight. A man stood behind me, mid-thirties, red-faced, drunk enough that his grin listed to one side. He smelled like cheap beer and cigarettes.

"Hey, pretty thing. Saw you dancing up there." His other hand landed on my hip. "You looked lonely."

"Let go of me." I pulled back. His grip tightened.

"Come on, don't be like that —"

"She said let go."

The voice came from behind the drunk man. Low and level.

I knew that voice.

The drunk man turned. His hand released me immediately, not because he chose to, but because someone had closed a fist around his wrist and was bending it backward at an angle that made his face drain white.

Professor Aldrich stood there in his rolled sleeves and his cold expression and he didn't look angry. He looked inconvenienced. He twisted the man's wrist another degree.

"Walk away."

The man stumbled back, cradling his hand, and disappeared into the crowd.

I was shaking. From the alcohol, from the adrenaline, from the fact that my combat professor had just materialized in a bar and peeled a stranger off me without raising his voice.

"Thank you," I said. "I —"

I grabbed his arm. I didn't mean to. My balance was gone and the room was tilting and he was the nearest solid thing. My fingers curled around his forearm.

That's when I felt it. Something small and cold and hard, sewn into the fabric of his cuff. My thumb traced it before I could stop myself. Smooth enamel. Silver edge.

A cufflink.

My drunk brain took three seconds to catch up. Then it hit me all at once.

Cobalt blue enamel inlaid in silver. Heavy for its size. The kind of piece made once, for one person. I had the matching one in my nightstand drawer.

The room stopped spinning. The music went distant.

The dom from that night. The stranger in room 619. The hands. The silk. The voice that said stay.

It was him.

Professor Aldrich.