2.

Chapter Two

Laila’s POV

The door didn’t open.

It came off the wall.

One second Rico was leaning over me, phone in hand, red camera light blinking. The next, wood cracked and the whole door swung back so hard it bounced off the shelf and sent three bottles crashing to the floor.

The man who walked in wasn’t tall in a way that made you think model or athlete. He was tall in a way that made the room shrink. Big through the shoulders, a black jacket sitting on him like it was built for his frame. A cigar burned between two fingers, smoke curling lazy and slow like he had all the time in the world.

He looked at Rico first.

Then he looked at me.

His eyes moved over the room fast. The broken glass. My torn skirt. My face. He took it all in and something behind his eyes went very, very flat.

Rico straightened up and tried to look unbothered. “Private business, man. Walk away.”

The man took one long drag of his cigar. Blew the smoke out slow . Set the cigar carefully on the edge of a shelf like he was setting down something he planned to come back to.

Then he crossed the room in four steps.

What happened next was not a fight. A fight means two people have a chance. This was something else entirely.

He grabbed Rico by the collar and put him against the wall so hard the shelves rattled and a bottle of gin fell and shattered. Rico threw a punch.

The man leaned back just enough to let it miss, then drove his fist into Rico’s stomach once, twice, a third time until Rico was doubled over making sounds that didn’t belong to a human being.

I couldn’t move. I just stood there, back against the shelves, watching.

Rico tried to grab him. Tried to headbutt him. The man sidestepped it like it was nothing, got behind him, and slammed him face first into the wall.

Then he grabbed him by the back of the neck and drove his knee hard into Rico’s groin, once and again, until Rico was sliding down the wall screaming in a high broken pitch that the crowd noise outside barely covered.

“Please,” Rico wheezed. “Please, stop.”

The man crouched down to Rico’s level. His voice came out quiet. The kind of quiet that is worse than shouting.

“You put your hands on her.” It wasn’t a question. “You thought that was yours to take.”

Rico whimpered something. An excuse maybe. I couldn’t hear the words.

The man stood back up. Picked his cigar up from the shelf. Looked at the burning tip for a second.

Then he pressed it against the inside of Rico’s dick.

Rico’s scream cracked something in the air. He thrashed and kicked but the man held his arm steady without even looking strained.

“You ever,” the man said, still in that same quiet voice, “put your filthy hands on a woman again.” He paused. Let the silence do the rest of the work. Then he let go and stepped back.

Rico curled on the floor, shaking, cradling his arm, making small broken sounds.

The man looked down at him for a moment. Then he pulled his foot back and kicked him once in the ribs, hard enough that Rico slid a few inches across the concrete.

“Get out of this bar,” he said. “And if I ever hear your name again, you better hope I’m in a worse mood than I am tonight.”

Then he turned around.

And looked at me.

All that cold fury in his face smoothed out. Not completely. But enough. His eyes moved to my torn skirt, the bruise already rising on my cheek, my hands shaking at my sides.

“You okay?” he asked.

I shook my head. I couldn’t speak. My throat had closed up completely.

He looked at the state of me for a second, then shrugged his jacket off. He held it out. I flinched back before I could stop myself, just a reflex, just my body reacting to the last twenty minutes.

He didn’t push it. Didn’t move closer. He just sighed quietly and set the jacket down on the shelf right next to me, gentle as setting down something made of glass. Then he stepped back and gave me space.

I stared at it. Black jacket, heavy leather, warm from his body. A patch on the chest I couldn’t fully read in the low light. I picked it up slowly and pulled it around my shoulders without putting my arms through the sleeves.

He gave Rico one last look, then kicked him lightly in the leg. “I said get out.”

Rico scrambled up, half bent over, and stumbled past me out the door without looking at me once.

The man grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the shelf without even checking the label. He looked at me one more time and there was something in his face I couldn’t name. No pity. Something steadier than that.

Then he walked out.

Just like that.

I stood there in the wreckage of that small room, broken glass everywhere, the smell of spilled rum and cigar smoke hanging in the air, and I finally let myself breathe. One long shaking exhale that felt like it had been sitting in my chest for an hour.

He was gone.

I hadn’t even told him thank you.

I didn’t know his name. I hadn’t seen his face clearly, just the jaw, the set of his shoulders, the way he moved like someone who had never been afraid of anything in his life. And the tattoo. Something dark and detailed running up his left forearm, shapes I couldn’t make out in the low light.

I sank down against the shelf until I was sitting on the cold concrete floor, knees pulled to my chest, jacket wrapped around me. And I cried. Not pretty crying either.

The ugly kind, the full body kind, the kind that comes out when you have been holding everything together so long and then suddenly there is nothing left to hold.

I cried for my mom in that hospital bed. I cried because my brother trusted me to handle this place tonight and I couldn’t even handle one man in a back room. I cried because Rico had been my brother’s friend and I never saw it coming and that scared me more than anything.

I sat there until my legs went numb and the sounds from the bar started to thin out.

Then I called Maya.

She picked up on the second ring.

“Hey, I was just about to…”

“Maya.” My voice came out wrecked. Cracked right down the middle.

Silence for half a second.

“Oh shit.” Her voice dropped. “I’m coming. Where are you?”

“Storage room. Behind the bar.”

“Ten minutes. Don’t move.”

She made it in nine. She came through the door with Jacob two steps behind her, both of them scanning the room before they even looked at me. Jacob was solid and quiet the way Beta soldiers always were, high ranking, from a good family, the kind of man who assessed a situation before reacting. He took one look at the broken glass and the state of the room and his jaw tightened.

Maya dropped straight to the floor next to me. No hesitation. She wrapped both arms around me and didn’t say anything for a long moment. Just held on.

“I’ve got you,” she said against my hair. “I’ve got you, okay? You’re safe.”

I held onto her and cried some more.

Jacob caught Maya’s eye over my head, nodded once, and headed back out toward the bar counter without being asked. He would handle the drinks, keep things running, keep anyone from coming back here. He was good like that.

Maya pulled back after a while and looked at my face. Her expression flickered when she saw the bruise. Her eyes went sharp and still in that way they did when she was fighting down her wolf.

“Who did this?”

“Rico.”

Something moved across her face. “Rico. Your brother’s friend Rico.”

“Yes.”

She closed her eyes for two seconds. I opened them. “Okay. Come on. Upstairs.”

She got me up to the small apartment above the bar, into the bathroom, started the shower running while I sat on the edge of the tub staring at the wall. She found clean clothes from my room and set them on the counter without a word.

I got in the shower. Made it too hot. So hot it stung, then burned, but I didn’t turn it down because I needed to feel something other than his hands and his breath and that cold storage room. Maya reached past the curtain after a few minutes and turned the dial down herself.

“Laila. Stop.”

I leaned against the tile and let the warm water run over me instead.

When I came out she had my bed turned down and a cup of tea on the nightstand that I hadn’t asked for. She sat cross legged on the end of the bed and waited while I dried off and pulled on the clean clothes.

I sat down next to her.

She looked at me. “Tell me everything only when you’re ready .”

So I did.

By the time I finished she had her hand over her mouth and her eyes were wet. She blinked it back because Maya never cried where you could see it. She reached over and squeezed my hand hard.

“You should tell Darius,” she said quietly. My brother’s name sat heavy between us.

“I can’t.” I shook my head. “He’s in town handling Mom’s treatment. He has enough. If I call him with this he’ll come straight back, he’ll go after Rico, and then what? Mom’s payment doesn’t get handled, Darius ends up in a fight, and everything falls apart.” I looked at her. “I can’t do that to him.”

Maya pressed her lips together but she didn’t argue. She knew I was right.

She looked around the room after a moment, and that was when she noticed it. The black jacket sitting on the chair by the door where I had dropped it without thinking.

“Whose jacket is that?”

“The man who saved me.” I looked at it. “He came in through the door and he just… he took Rico apart. Like it was nothing. Then he covered me with his jacket and left.”

“And you don’t know who he is?”

“I never even saw his face properly. Just the tattoo on his forearm.” I stood up without deciding to and walked over to the jacket. I picked it up. I turned it over in my hands. The leather was thick and worn soft, the kind that took years to break in. It smelled like cigar smoke and something underneath that, something warm and dark that I couldn’t name.

There was a patch on the chest.

Iron Fang MC.

“Maya.” I looked up at her. “I didn’t even thank him.”

“Laila…”

“What if he’s still downstairs?” I was already moving toward the door. “What if he leaves and I never see him again? I can’t just keep his jacket and never say thank you.”

Maya stood up. “It’s late. You just went through something terrible. You don’t need to tell him thank you this night”

“I need to find him.”

I was already in the hallway, jacket in hand, moving toward the stairs.

Maya grabbed my arm. “Laila, wait. Just wait one second.”

I stopped. Turned.

She was staring at the jacket in my hands. Specifically at the patch. Her face had gone a color I had never seen before.

“What?” I asked.

She looked up at me slowly. “Iron Fang MC.” Her voice came out strange. Careful. Like she was choosing each word. “Jacob mentioned that name tonight when we pulled into the parking lot. He saw the bikes outside and told me to stay close to him.”

I stared at her. “Why?”

She swallowed.

“Because Iron Fang doesn’t just pass through towns, they are ruthless and dangerous Rogues Laila. They own them.”