(Max’s POV)
I found the restroom by following the exit signs, locked myself into the first stall that was empty, and stood there for a second just breathing before I trusted myself to move.
The shirt was ruined not torn, just soaked through at the collar, dark and sour-smelling. I ran cold water over it at the sink, scrubbing at it with a wad of paper towel that disintegrated faster than it cleaned anything, until I gave up and just looked at myself in the mirror instead.
I looked exactly as pathetic as I felt. Wet collar. Flushed face. The particular kind of tired that comes from working hard all night to look like nothing bothered you.
Fine, I told the mirror. No complaints. No confrontation. Just wait until he’s ready to go.
I actually believed, for about ten seconds, that I could just slip back out there and disappear into a corner until this night ended.
I didn’t get the chance.
They were waiting in the hallway when I came out the same guy from the dance floor, drink-pourer, flanked by two friends who looked like they’d been hoping for a reason to get involved all night.
No dance floor now. No crowd. No lights except the dim emergency strip along the ceiling. Just a narrow hallway, and them, blocking both ends of it.
"There he is." The first one grinned, easy, like this was just the next part of a joke we were both in on. "Thought you could hide in here all night?"
"I wasn’t hiding." My voice came out steadier than I expected, which didn’t seem to matter at all.
One of them grabbed my wrist before I finished the sentence not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to make the point that he could.
The other laughed, low and delighted, like this was the most entertainment he’d had all week.
"A human. At an Alpha club." He said it like the words themselves were the joke. "Who let you in here?"
"Yeah, seriously." The third one shoved me back against the wall, not gently, and I felt the cool concrete bite into my shoulder blades. "Who invited the stray?"
I didn’t answer. I’d learned that answering just gave them something to push back against.
That was when the one holding my wrist noticed the watch — Damian’s, gift for a graduation I hadn’t had yet, slid onto my wrist that morning because Mom had insisted I own something that looked like I belonged in that house. He turned it over in his fingers, whistling low.
"Would you look at that. Human found himself a rich family." His grin sharpened into something meaner. "That’s cute. Real cute. Dig your way into the Cross fortune, huh? Bet your mom planned that one out real good."
"Gold digger’s kid," the second one said, delighted with himself. "Didn’t peg you for the type, but I guess desperate is desperate."
Something in my chest went hot and tight, but I kept my mouth shut, because I already knew how this ended if I didn’t. Three of them.
One of me. I’d done this math a hundred times over a hundred different hallways in my life, and it never once came out in my favor.
"Touch him again."
The voice cut through the hallway like a blade dropped flat on glass, and every single one of them went still at once.
Lucian stood at the end of the hall, a cigarette burning low between two fingers, expression giving away exactly nothing.
He wasn’t out of breath. He hadn’t come running. He looked, if anything, faintly bored like a man who’d simply been walking somewhere else and happened to notice something in his path.
The one gripping my wrist laughed, though it came out thinner than he probably meant it to. "Relax, Cross. We’re just playing."
Lucian flicked the cigarette away without looking at where it landed.
"I wasn’t talking to you."
The guy’s grin faltered. And then stupidly, or maybe just because he hadn’t fully understood yet what he was standing in front of his hand moved toward me again.
Lucian crossed the distance in two strides and caught his wrist mid-motion.
Nobody said anything for a second. Nobody breathed, either, as far as I could tell.
And then it came not loud, not violent, just a pressure that rolled down the hallway like a drop in temperature, thick enough to feel against my skin even from three feet away.
Not enough to drop anyone to their knees. Just enough that all three of them took an involuntary step back, shoulders curling in, some old animal instinct answering a question none of them had wanted asked.
"We’re good, man." The first one had both hands up now, wrist released, backing away like the floor had gotten hot under his feet. "We’re good. No problem here."
Lucian didn’t respond to that either. He just looked at me one flat pass, unreadable, the same look he’d been giving me since the day I moved in and said two words.
"Let’s go."
Not are you okay. No hand on my shoulder. Nothing at all except an order, delivered the same way he might have told a driver which exit to take.
I followed him out anyway, because it was better than staying.
The car ride home was silent long enough that I started to believe it would stay that way the whole way.
I watched the city lights blur past the window, replaying the hallway in my head, that strange, confusing warmth trying to take root in my chest — he came. He stopped them. Maybe—
"Why didn’t you hit him?"
His voice cut through the quiet, flat, almost accusing. I blinked, caught off guard. "What?"
"The one who grabbed you." Lucian didn’t look over. "Why didn’t you hit him?"
"There were three of them."
"So?"
"So I would’ve lost," I said, and heard, too late, how small it sounded out loud. "People like me don’t win fights against Alphas."
He scoffed an actual, audible scoff, short and cutting, like I’d said something almost embarrassing. "If you can’t protect yourself," he said, eyes still fixed on the road, voice cold enough that it landed harder than any shout could have, "then you don’t deserve to be here, embarrassing the Cross family."
I felt it land somewhere under my ribs, sharper than the shove against the wall, sharper than the drink down my collar.
The warmth I’d been building in the back of my throat for the last five minutes just died.
Whatever thin, stupid hope I’d started constructing out of he stood up for me collapsed at once, replaced by the much older, much more familiar feeling of being reminded exactly where I stood.
I didn’t answer him. There wasn’t an answer that would have mattered.
We didn’t speak again for the rest of the ride.
I went straight to my room when we got home. Changed. Brushed my teeth. Sat on the edge of the bed in the dark for a long time, replaying both versions of that night the one where he’d crossed a hallway in two strides for me, and the one where he’d told me, in the same breath, that I didn’t deserve to exist in his world if I couldn’t defend myself in it.
I turned it over and over, looking for the version that made sense.
Maybe, I thought, he doesn’t know how to be anything except cold. Maybe that’s not cruelty, not really maybe that’s just the only language he has left after however many years of being raised to never need anyone.
Maybe if I stopped expecting warmth and just tried to understand him instead the way he actually worked, not the way I wished he worked something might shift.
It was probably naive. I decided to try anyway.
I’ll try, I told myself, and meant it, even as some tired, older part of me warned that trying with someone like Lucian Cross was usually how people like me ended up disappointed.
The next morning I got to the car five minutes early and had my seatbelt on before he’d even shut his door.
"Good morning," I said.
He didn’t answer. Didn’t look at me. Just started the engine and pulled out of the estate the same way he had yesterday fast, deliberate, like he was daring me to complain about it.
I didn’t complain. I just watched the road and let the silence sit there instead of trying to fill it, which felt, in its own small way, like progress.
He didn’t drop me at the curb today. He drove straight through the gates, past the lot where students usually parked, right up near the main building itself, and cut the engine.
He got out without a word, circled to the back, and hauled his bag out along with a second one heavier, stuffed with gear, hockey skates hanging half out of the unzipped top. He hefted it once, jaw tightening slightly at the weight, and started walking.
I got out on my side and caught up before I’d really decided to.
"Here," I said, reaching for the rugby bag. "I can carry that one."
He stopped walking.
He turned and looked at me really looked, for the first time since the wedding, like he was seeing something he hadn’t expected to find standing there.
It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t grateful. It was just long, and quiet, and harder to read than anything he’d said to me in the car the night before.
He didn’t answer right away.