3.

Chapter Three

Laila’s POV

“I need to thank him, Maya. That’s it. Just thank him.”

Maya looked at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe I had. She sat on the edge of my bed with her arms crossed and that expression she wore when she had already decided something was a bad idea but knew arguing with me was pointless.

“You just went through something awful,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything tonight.”

“I know I don’t have to.” I pulled the hoodie down over my head and pushed my arms through the sleeves. It was Darius’s old one, three sizes too big, faded grey, the kind of soft that only came from years of washing. I pulled the joggers up and tied the waist. “I want to.”

She watched me walk to the mirror.

I stood there for a second and looked at myself. Swollen cheek. Eyes still red and puffy. My hair pulled back because I hadn’t had the energy to do anything with it after the shower.

And underneath the hoodie, even with all that fabric, I could still see the shape of me. The chest that I had spent years trying to hide. The hips and thighs that filled out everything I owned no matter how big I bought it. I had worn baggy clothes to work tonight and it still hadn’t been enough. Rico had still looked at me like I was something on a menu.

I stared at my reflection and felt something tired settle in my chest.

Maybe I just wear this from now on, I thought. Maybe if I disappear inside big enough clothes, people will stop seeing me. Stop staring. Stop thinking I owe them something just because of how I was built.

I wiped the last of the dried tears off my jaw with my sleeve.

I knew what would have happened if that man hadn’t walked through that door. I knew what Rico would have taken from me. And I knew what it would have meant. In our world, in pack culture, a woman who had been violated before finding her mate carried that wound forever. Some packs still called it contamination. Some mates still walked away. I had heard stories growing up and always pushed them to the back of my mind because they were too ugly to sit with for long.

Tonight they came roaring back.

That man in the black jacket had saved more than my body. He didn’t know it. He probably didn’t think about it at all. He just walked out with a bottle of whiskey and didn’t even look back.

I needed to thank him. Properly. With words, to his face.

“Fine,” Maya said from behind me. She stood up and smoothed her top down. “But I’m coming with you.”

“I know you are.”

“And if anything feels wrong we leave immediately.”

“Maya.”

“I mean it, Laila.”

“I know.” I turned around. “Thank you.”

She rolled her eyes but her face was soft underneath it. She reached out and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear, careful around the bruised side of my face, and didn’t say anything else.

We went downstairs together. She held my hand on the steps, which she probably thought I didn’t notice. I noticed.

The bar had thinned out some since fight night peaked but it was still loud, still warm, still smelling like beer and bodies and the grease from the kitchen that never fully aired out. Jacob was behind the counter, moving smooth and efficient, filling glasses without being asked twice, making eye contact with everyone who needed attention. He saw us come down and gave Maya a look that she answered with a small nod.

He was good, Jacob. Solid. The kind of man who showed up and handled things quietly. Maya had gotten lucky and she knew it. I could see it in the way she looked at him sometimes, like she still couldn’t believe he was real.

I scanned the bar.

Tall men. A few of them. But none with that particular stillness, that particular weight in how they held themselves.

I looked for a man wearing similar jacket. The patch. The tattoo.

Nothing.

“See him?” Maya asked close to my ear.

“No.” The word sat flat in my mouth. I hadn’t realized how much I was counting on him still being here until he wasn’t. “Maybe he already left.”

Then the noise shifted.

It happened the way crowd noise always does when something pulls everyone’s attention at once. A ripple, then a surge, voices rising, bodies turning, everyone moving toward the far side of the bar where the fight section opened up. The raised platform, the rope boundaries, the hanging lights that made everything look more dramatic than it was.

Maya and I moved with the current without meaning to.

I heard it before I saw it. The sound of impact, fists and breathing and boots on the platform floor. Then the crowd reacting in that particular way they did when something was genuinely impressive, not polite impressed, actually stunned into it.

We got close enough to see.

There was a man in the middle of the platform. No shirt. Sweat running down his chest and over a torso that was all muscle and ink, tattoos crawling up his ribs and across his shoulders and down both arms. Four men were around him, or what was left of them. Two were already on the floor. One was swinging and missing. The fourth hung back like he was reconsidering every decision he had made tonight.

The man in the middle moved like he wasn’t working hard at all. He caught a punch, turned it, put the man down in two moves that happened so fast I almost missed them. Then he looked at the fourth one and just waited.

The fourth one stepped back.

Smart.

The referee rang the bell. The crowd went loud. The man stood in the middle of it all, chest rising and falling, sweat gleaming under the lights, and looked completely unbothered. Like he had just taken a short walk.

Then I saw his forearm.

The tattoo. Dark ink, detailed, curling up from his wrist toward his elbow. A dragon, scales and lines I could actually make out now in the better light.

My breath left my body.

It was him.

As if the air between us had its own current, he turned.

His eyes found mine immediately. Not after scanning the room. Not after a moment of searching. Immediately, like he already knew exactly where I was standing.

I forgot how to move.

He was more than I had registered in that dim storage room. Broader. Harder. The kind of face that didn’t do soft, a strong jaw, dark eyes that caught the light in a way that made them impossible to read. A scar ran through his left eyebrow, thin and old. He looked like someone who had been through things and come out the other side not softer but sharper.

He picked up the brown envelope from the referee without looking at it. Thick with cash, the sides of it already dark from the sweat on the referee’s palms.

And then he walked toward me.

The crowd moved out of his way. Not because he asked them to. Just because something about how he moved made people step aside without thinking about it.

He stopped in front of me.

He was so tall that when I looked straight ahead I was looking at his chest. At the ink across his collarbone. I could smell the sweat on him and underneath it something else, leather and smoke and something warmer that I didn’t have a word for.

I made myself look up.

His face gave nothing away. He looked at me the way he had in the storage room, that same steady look that wasn’t pity and wasn’t curiosity. Something in between that I couldn’t name.

He held out the envelope.

“Take it,” he said.

His voice was low. The same voice that had said get out of this bar in the same quiet dangerous tone and made Rico scramble off the floor.

I stared at the envelope. At his hand holding it. The knuckles were split and raw, bruised across all four in the way that only happened when you had been hitting things with real force. Fresh damage. From just now, from those four men on that platform.

He had won that money tonight with those hands.

I shook my head.

“No.” I found my voice from somewhere. “I can’t take that.”

He didn’t move. Didn’t pull the envelope back. Just kept holding it out like he had all night and my answer was a temporary inconvenience.

“It’s yours,” he said.

“It’s not mine. You won it.”

“You need it more.”

Something about those four words, the flatness of them, the way he said it like it was just fact and not charity, made my throat tighten. I didn’t know if I wanted to cry or argue.

I chose to argue.

“You don’t know anything about what I need,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I expected.

Something shifted in his face. Not much. A flicker at the corner of his mouth that might have been almost something.

“I know you’re running a bar that’s half empty on fight night,” he said. “I know your back storage room has a broken door. I know you called for help and nobody came.”

The words landed quiet and accurate and somehow that made them worse than if he had shouted them.

Maya’s hand found my arm from behind. A small careful pressure. Not pulling me away. Just letting me know she was there.

I looked at the envelope. Then back at his face.

“I came down here to thank you,” I said. “Not to take your money.”

“Then thank me.”

“I just did.”

“You said two words.”

“You walked out before I could say anything at all.”

Another flicker. Definitely something this time at the corner of his mouth.

I took a breath. Squared my shoulders the way Darius always told me to do when I was nervous and didn’t want it to show.

“Thank you,” I said. “Properly. What you did tonight, I don’t have words for it. You didn’t know me. You didn’t owe me anything. You just came in and you…” I stopped. Swallowed. “Thank you.”

He looked at me for a moment.

Then he reached out and took my hand, the one hanging at my side, and pressed the envelope into it. Closed my fingers around it with his. His hand was rough and warm and huge around mine and I felt my heart do something complicated and stupid.

“Keep it,” he said. Just that.

He let go.

I turned to walk away.

“Wait.” The word came out before I decided to say it.

He stopped. Looked back over his shoulder.

“Can I at least get you a drink?” I said. “You and your team. On the house. It’s the least I can do.”

He studied me for a second.

“Stay the hell away from me Laila” he said in a quiet authority tone that made my heart skip a bit.

“How did he know my name and so much about me when I don’t have an idea who he is ?” I thought to myself while I watched his body disappear in the crowd.