The Wolves' Captain And Me

Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Bar on Fifth Street

I had never walked into a bar alone in my life. Tonight I didn't care.

The place was small and half-empty, tucked between a laundromat and a closed pharmacy three blocks from campus, the kind of bar where nobody from school ever went because it didn't have a name worth bragging about. That's exactly why I picked it. A flickering neon sign in the window spelled out a word missing half its letters, and the whole building smelled like old wood and spilled beer, nothing like the polished, over-decorated bars closer to campus where half the student body liked to be seen.

I'd walked for almost twenty minutes before I found it, my dress completely wrong for the weather, my arms wrapped around myself the whole way. I didn't care. Every step away from that dorm building felt like putting distance between myself and a version of me who still believed in promises.

I slid onto a stool at the far end of the counter and ordered the first thing on the menu I recognized. The bartender, an older woman with silver streaks in her hair, took one look at my face and didn't ask for ID.

"Rough night?" she asked.

"You could say that."

She set the drink down without another word, which was exactly the mercy I needed.

I sat there running the whole night back in my head, searching for the moment I should have seen it coming. The secret dating that Derek always framed as romantic instead of what it actually was, which was shame. The way he'd stopped introducing me to his friends after the first few months. The way I'd made every excuse for him because the alternative, admitting I'd wasted two years on someone who didn't choose me, felt too heavy to carry.

I thought about all the small warnings I'd talked myself out of. The way he'd flinch whenever we ran into anyone from the team. The way he always picked restaurants three towns over where nobody would recognize us. I used to think it was because he was private. Now I understood it was because he was ashamed, and I had let myself believe that being someone's secret was its own kind of special.

The first drink went down easier than I expected. The second one hit different, loosening something tight behind my ribs that had been wound too tight for far too long. I caught my reflection in the mirror behind the bottles lined up across the back wall, mascara smudged under my eyes, curls falling loose from the style I'd spent an hour perfecting, and I barely recognized the girl staring back at me.

I was three sips into my second drink when the door opened and the temperature in the whole bar seemed to shift.

I didn't look up right away. I heard him before I saw him, boots against the floor, a low voice ordering something from the far end of the bar. When I finally glanced over, my stomach dropped for an entirely different reason than it had an hour ago.

Kaiden Voss.

Everyone on campus knew his face even if they'd never spoken a single word to him. Captain of the Wolves, the school's football team, the boy people called the Alpha without a hint of exaggeration, because that's exactly how he carried himself. Broad shoulders, dark hair pushed back like he hadn't bothered to fix it, a jaw set so hard it looked carved from stone. He had a reputation for being untouchable in every sense of the word. Ruthless on the field. Colder off it. Girls threw themselves at him constantly, and word around campus was he never gave any of them a second night.

Derek worshipped him. Talked about him like a god whenever the team came up. Told me stories about the way Kaiden ran drills, the way he never raised his voice because he never had to, the way freshmen on the team practically tripped over themselves trying to earn a single nod of approval from him. It was almost funny, in the worst possible way, that the one person Derek admired most in the world had just walked into the one place I'd run to escape him.

He wore a plain black jacket, nothing flashy, nothing that screamed campus royalty, and somehow that made him look even more out of place among the cracked vinyl stools and dim overhead lights. Every head in the bar turned when the door opened, the way heads always turned for him, and then slowly turned back to their own conversations once they realized he wasn't here to be watched.

Kaiden's eyes swept the room once, the way someone checks an exit before they commit to staying. Then they landed on me.

I expected him to look away. Guys like him didn't notice girls like me, not really, not outside of a passing glance in a crowded hallway. But he didn't look away. He studied me for one long second, taking in whatever was written all over my face, and then he crossed the room and sat down on the stool beside mine like it was the most natural thing in the world.

"You look like someone who just found out something they didn't want to know," he said. His voice was low, rough at the edges, nothing like the smooth charm Derek always tried to fake.

"You look like someone who doesn't sit next to strangers at bars," I said.

"I don't." He signaled the bartender for another round, one for himself and one to replace my empty glass. "Guess tonight's different."

I should have told him to leave me alone. Every instinct told me that getting anywhere near Kaiden Voss was asking for a different kind of trouble than the one I'd just walked away from. But something about the way he wasn't performing, wasn't smiling that fake charming smile every other guy on this campus used to get what he wanted, made me stay in my seat.

"Rough night," I said finally, echoing what the bartender had asked me an hour before.

"Rough for who? You, or whoever did this to you?"

I looked at him then, really looked, and for the first time all night I felt something other than humiliation. I felt seen. It was such a small thing, a stranger noticing that someone had done this to me rather than assuming I'd simply had a bad day, but it cracked something open in my chest that I hadn't realized was still sealed shut.

"Does it matter?" I asked.

"It might," he said, "depending on who it was."

I laughed, short and humorless. "Why would that matter to you?"

He didn't answer right away. He just watched me with those dark, unreadable eyes, like he was deciding something, weighing whether I was worth the trouble of finding out.

"You go to Ashbrook," he said instead, more statement than question.

"Everyone goes to Ashbrook around here."

"Not everyone sits alone at Murphy's on a Friday night in a dress that expensive." His gaze flicked briefly to the green fabric before returning to my face. "Somebody planned a night for you. Somebody ruined it."

I said nothing, but my silence must have confirmed enough, because something shifted in his expression, some small recalibration I couldn't quite name.

"Because," he said finally, leaning in just enough that I caught the low, warm scent of him, "I have a feeling I already know exactly who it was. And I have an idea that's going to make both of us feel a whole lot better tonight."

My heart slammed against my ribs.

"What idea?" I asked, even though some part of me already knew I wasn't going to like the answer, and an even bigger part of me already knew I wasn't going to say no.