4.

Chapter Four

Laila’s POV

Maya had my arm before I even took a step.

“Don’t,” she said.

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You’re about to follow a man who just told you to stay away from him into a crowded bar.” She steered me back toward the stairs with the kind of grip that meant she was done discussing it. “Jacob will handle things down here. Come on.”

I let her pull me up the stairs because my legs were still not fully reliable anyway and because part of me knew she was right. The smarter part. The part that wasn’t still feeling the warmth of his hand closing around mine.

Maya tucked me back into my room, pulled the blanket up like I was twelve years old, and sat with me until her own eyes started going heavy. She was asleep before midnight, curled on the other side of my bed with one arm across my waist, the way she used to sleep over when we were kids and the world felt too big at night.

I lay there and stared at the ceiling.

The envelope sat on my vanity. Brown and thick and wrong feeling in a way I couldn’t shake.

I knew what debt did to people. I had watched it hollow out my family over the past three years, slow and quiet and relentless, the way water ruins a foundation. My mother’s kidney had failed eight months after my father left. The rejection curse did that sometimes. When a mate walked away, the bond didn’t just break in the heart. It broke in the body too. My mother’s body chose her kidneys to fall apart in, and then the rest tried to follow.

We needed a donor whose wolf would match hers. Not just blood type. Wolf rank and lineage. That kind of match was rare and expensive to find and we were still looking.

The chemo was just to buy time.

Every dollar that came in went toward buying more of it.

I sat up quietly so I wouldn’t wake Maya and moved to the pink fluffy vanity chair in the corner. The one Darius had found at a secondhand shop three birthdays ago and carried up three flights of stairs by himself because I had mentioned once that I wanted one. He never forgot things like that. He remembered everything I said in passing and then showed up with it weeks later like it was nothing.

I needed to call him tomorrow. Not about Rico. Just to hear his voice.

I picked up the envelope.

It was heavy in a way that felt indecent. I pulled the flap open and looked inside without taking anything out. Stacks of folded bills. More money than the bar made on a good week. More than two good weeks maybe.

I closed it.

I didn’t count it because if I counted it I would start thinking about what it could cover and then I would never give it back.

Jacob had already handed me the night’s sales before he left, a decent envelope on its own, enough to cover this week and send something to Darius for the treatment fund. We didn’t need this. We would manage without it the same way we had been managing. One week at a time, one payment at a time, one quiet prayer at a time.

I set the envelope down and looked at the jacket on the back of the chair.

I don’t know why I reached for it.

I just did.

I slipped it on over my hoodie and sat back down. The leather was heavy on my shoulders. Warm even now, hours later, like it held heat differently than other things. I pulled the front closed and sat with it for a moment.

It smelled like the woods after rain. Like cedar and smoke and something underneath both of those that was harder to name. Raw and dark and alive. Nothing like the cheap cologne and bar smell I had been breathing all night. This was something else entirely.

I sat there in the quiet with his jacket wrapped around me and my fluffy pink crocs on my feet and thought about how strange the world was. How you could have the worst night of your life and the most confusing one at the same time.

How did he know my name.

That was the thing that kept coming back. Not the warning itself. Not even the flatness in his voice when he said it. The fact that he had used my name like he already knew it, like it belonged in his mouth, and then walked away before I could ask him how.

I stood up before I decided to.

I picked up the envelope.

Tiptoed to the door, checked that Maya was still breathing the slow even way of deep sleep, and slipped out into the hallway. I pulled his jacket tighter around me as I went down the stairs, keeping my hair down so it fell around my face, keeping my steps light on the old wood.

The bar was dark and locked. Jacob had closed up clean, chairs up on tables, lights off except the low ones behind the counter. But through the door at the back of the hallway, the one with the red light strip along the bottom, I could hear the bass.

The extension. The strip club side that woke up when the bar shut down.

I had never gone in there at night. Darius didn’t allow it and even without the rule I had never wanted to. But I stood at that door for a moment with the envelope in my hand and thought about the way his eyes had found mine across the room, immediately and without searching, and I pushed the door open.

The bass hit me first. Low and heavy, the kind that settled in your chest. Then the lights, low red and blue, moving slow. The smell of expensive perfume and cheap smoke and something sweet underneath that I didn’t want to think too hard about.

It was busy for 2am. Men at booths along the walls, women moving between them, music filling all the space between. I kept close to the edge of the room, one hand on the wall, hair covering as much of my face as it would.

I wasn’t here for the room. I was here for one person.

I scanned for height. For the particular set of shoulders I had memorized without meaning to. For the dragon tattoo.

Nobody matched.

I moved further in, slow and careful, and then I saw a man near the back in a black jacket and my heart lifted and I started walking before I checked properly. I was halfway across the room before I realized it wasn’t the right jacket and definitely wasn’t the right man.

I stopped.

The music was loud enough that nobody noticed me standing there looking lost.

Then from the hallway on the far side of the room, the one with three doors and a bouncer standing at the end of it, I heard something.

Not music. Not the usual sounds of this kind of place.

A crash. Something hitting a wall. Then nothing.

My stomach dropped.

I didn’t think. I just moved, past the bouncer who barely had time to register me before I was past him and down the hall, because I knew what a body hitting a wall sounded like and I knew what it meant and I was not going to stand outside a door again while something happened on the other side of it.

The first door was quiet.

The second door was where the sound had come from but when I pressed my ear to it there was nothing. Just music bleeding through from the main room.

The third door at the end of the hall was open. Not all the way. Just enough.

I pushed it and looked in before I thought about whether I should.

It was him.

I knew it before I fully processed what I was seeing. The dragon tattoo on the forearm was the first thing my eyes found. Then the rest of it.

He was not in danger. He was not in a fight.

He was in a chair with a woman naked , sucking down on his lips . Spit and also was all round and she was making a choking raw sound at the back of her throat but she wouldn’t stop and kept on going harder. Her boobs bouncing to the rhythm.

I didn’t move.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Long enough. Long enough for something cold and sharp to settle into my chest in a place where I had no business feeling anything at all. He didn’t owe me anything.

He had helped me and then warned me off and that was the whole story. He was a stranger. A dangerous one. A rogue wolf who ran with an MC and burned men with cigar tips and won fistfights against four people without breaking a sweat.

I had no claim on him. Zero. Nothing.

The pain in my chest didn’t care about any of that.

I took one step back.

His head turned.

Not toward the door. Not toward me. Just turned slightly to the side, like something had shifted in the air, and then those dark eyes found the gap in the door and found my face standing on the other side of it.

He went completely still.

The woman on top of him kept moving. He didn’t.

He just looked at me.

I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t make my feet do anything useful at all.

Then his mouth opened.

“I told you,” he said, low and even, like the woman on top of him was furniture, like the whole room was just background noise. His eyes didn’t leave mine.

“I told you to stay the fuck away from me kiddo”