The Wolves' Captain And Me

Chapter 6

Chapter 6: Breaking His Own Rule

Two days passed before I saw him again, and in those two days I almost convinced myself I'd gotten away clean.

Almost.

I'd spent Tuesday avoiding the dining hall where I might run into Derek, and Wednesday burying myself in an essay I didn't actually care about, grateful for anything that kept my brain too busy to circle back to a certain apartment three blocks from that dive bar. Jasmine kept sending me updates on the campus gossip mill, most of it about Derek and Bree, none of it, thankfully, about me. I let myself believe that meant I really had walked away clean.

I was walking out of my Thursday morning lecture, half asleep and balancing a coffee I definitely didn't need on top of the two I'd already had, when the hallway in front of me went strangely quiet. That was the first sign something had changed. Ashbrook hallways were never quiet, not with three thousand students crammed between classes, but this particular stretch of hallway had gone so silent I could hear my own footsteps.

Then I saw him.

He wasn't wearing his usual team gear, just a plain gray henley that somehow made him look even more imposing, arms crossed tight enough that the fabric strained slightly at the seams. A girl near the water fountain had her phone half raised, then thought better of it and lowered it fast when his gaze cut briefly in her direction.

Kaiden was leaning against the wall directly outside my classroom door, arms crossed over his chest, wearing the kind of expression that made half the students around us suddenly find urgent reasons to be somewhere else. He wasn't looking at his phone. He wasn't talking to anyone. He was simply standing there, waiting, and every single person in that hallway understood exactly who he was waiting for.

My stomach dropped straight to my shoes.

"You have got to be kidding me," I muttered under my breath.

I considered turning around and walking the other direction, pretending I hadn't seen him, but that plan died the instant his eyes locked onto mine. There was no pretending my way out of this.

I forced myself to walk toward him, chin up, refusing to let him see exactly how badly my hands were shaking around my coffee cup.

"You're blocking the door," I said, aiming for casual and landing somewhere closer to defensive.

"I know." His voice was low, controlled, but there was something simmering underneath it that hadn't been there in his apartment two nights ago. Something sharper. "We need to talk."

"About what?"

"About you sneaking out of my apartment like a thief," he said, and though his tone stayed level, I could hear exactly how much that fact had bothered him. "Nobody does that, Mia."

"That was kind of the point," I said. "One night. That's what we agreed on."

"That's what you agreed on," he corrected, taking a single step closer, close enough that the students still lingering nearby suddenly found their phones extremely interesting. "I never agreed to anything."

My heart slammed against my ribs. "You definitely implied—"

"I implied I don't do repeats," he cut in. "Not that I let people walk away from me before I'm done deciding whether I want them to."

"That's not how any of this works," I said, my voice climbing despite myself. "You don't get a vote in whether I stay or go. Nobody does. Not you, not Derek, nobody."

"I'm not talking about a vote." He took another step closer, close enough now that I had to tilt my head back to hold his gaze. "I'm talking about the fact that I woke up alone, in my own bed, for the first time in longer than I can remember, and it bothered me. That's not something I'm used to feeling. And I don't walk away from things that bother me until I understand them."

"Maybe I'm not something you need to understand," I said. "Maybe I was exactly what I told you I wanted to be that night. Nothing more."

Something flickered behind his eyes, quick and sharp. "You really believe that?"

I didn't answer, because I wasn't sure I did.

The audacity of that statement should have made me furious. Instead, something dangerous curled low in my stomach, something that felt a lot like the same recklessness that had gotten me into this situation in the first place.

"You don't get to decide that for me," I said, forcing steel into my voice even as my pulse betrayed me completely.

"No," he agreed, and the corner of his mouth curved into something that wasn't quite a smile, something far more dangerous than a smile. "But I get to decide what I do next. And I've decided I'm not done with you yet."

Whispers had started rippling through the hallway around us, students pulling out phones, already typing messages that would spread across campus faster than any professor's email. Kaiden Voss, the Alpha, the boy who never looked twice at anyone, standing in a crowded hallway making it painfully, publicly clear that whatever had happened between us was not, in fact, over.

"This is insane," I said, my voice dropping lower, aware now of exactly how many eyes were on us. "You can't just announce something like that in the middle of a hallway."

"Why not?" He tilted his head slightly, studying me with an intensity that made it hard to breathe. "You didn't seem to have a problem with an audience the night you decided to use me to get back at Derek."

Heat flooded my face. "That's not fair."

"Maybe not," he said. "But it's true. You wanted him to know. Congratulations. By tomorrow, the entire team is going to know exactly who I spent that night with, and exactly how badly you ran the second the sun came up."

Panic and something else, something dangerously close to excitement, twisted together in my chest. This was spiraling completely out of my control, and the terrifying part wasn't that Kaiden Voss refused to let me walk away. The terrifying part was how much some reckless, wounded piece of me didn't actually want him to.

Around us, I could see phones angled just enough to catch this whole exchange, could hear a girl behind me whispering into her friend's ear, could already feel the story taking shape before it had even finished happening. By the time I got to my next class, the entire campus was going to know exactly what this was, whatever it was, and there would be no taking any of it back.

"What do you want from me?" I asked quietly, all the fight suddenly draining out of my voice.

Kaiden leaned down slightly, close enough that his next words were meant only for me, low and certain in a way that sent a shiver straight down my spine.

"I want you to stop pretending that night meant nothing," he said. "Because we both know it didn't. And I have a feeling, Mia Calloway, that you're about to find out exactly how far I'm willing to go to prove it."

He straightened, turned, and walked away down the hallway without another word, leaving me standing frozen outside my classroom with a cooling coffee in my hand, an entire hallway of witnesses whispering behind me, and the sudden, sinking realization that whatever I'd started two nights ago in that quiet dive bar was only just beginning.