James’s POV

The place was loud and dark and exactly what he’d been looking for.

He parked two blocks away and walked in alone, no Jack, no pack members, nobody who knew him. The bouncer at the door was a wolf, young, lower rank, and his eyes went wide for half a second when James’s scent registered. James gave him a look that communicated very clearly that this was not a pack business visit and the kid nodded and unclipped the rope without a word.

Inside it was dark and warm and smelled like sweat and alcohol and the particular human-crowd smell that was its own kind of overwhelming. The music was the kind that bypassed your ears and went straight to your chest. James moved through the crowd toward the bar, and people shifted out of his way without knowing why, the way they always did, human instinct picking up on something their brains couldn’t name.

He ordered a drink and leaned against the bar and looked at the room.

It didn’t take long. It never did.

The first two women who made their way over were wolves, pack members from somewhere south by the scent of them, out for the night the same way he was. He shook his head slightly before they reached him and they read it and redirected without drama. He didn’t need the complication of someone who’d know his name by morning.

The third woman was human. Dark hair, good smile, confident in the way of someone who knew the effect she had. She stopped beside him at the bar and ordered without looking at him first, which he appreciated.

"You look like you’re trying to forget something," she said, when her drink arrived.

"Something like that."

She smiled. "Me too."

Her name was Maya. She had two friends with her, both warm and easy and clearly up for a good night, and within an hour they were in a corner booth and the drinks were flowing and hands were moving in the casual, escalating way of people who were all heading in the same direction.

James kissed Maya against the wall near the bathroom hallway. She kissed back well, her hands in his hair, her body pressed against him with zero hesitation.

Nothing happened.

He stood there with a beautiful woman kissing him like she meant it and felt absolutely nothing below the waist, which had never happened to him, not once, in his entire adult life. He pulled back and looked at her, almost expecting the problem to be visible somehow, like something he could identify and fix.

She looked back at him, slightly breathless, slightly confused. "You okay?"

"Fine," he said. "Give me a minute."

He went to the bar and ordered something stronger and stood there and had a very honest conversation with himself that lasted approximately three minutes and produced no solutions.

He went back. He tried again. Maya was willing and present and genuinely attractive and his body responded to all of it with the same flat, total indifference as before, like the circuit had been cut.

He knew whose fault that was.

He thought about grey shirts and crescent moons and the specific warm scent that had taken up permanent residence in the back of his brain, and felt the familiar pull that had been making his life difficult for two weeks, and wanted to put his head through the wall.

He told the girls he was going to get more drinks. He went to the bar. He didn’t go back.

The bartender, a heavyset wolf who’d clearly seen this particular situation before, tilted his head toward a door at the back. "Got a private game running if you want somewhere quieter."

James looked at the door. Looked at the crowd. Thought about going home to his empty office and his desk drawer and the shirt he was pretending he hadn’t stolen.

"Yeah," he said. "Set me up."

The back room had six players and a card table and a selection of drinks that the werewolf co-owner kept specifically for non-human clientele. The kind that actually worked on their system, that got through the accelerated metabolism and delivered something real.

James had them all. He wasn’t proud of it but he also wasn’t in a place where pride was the primary concern.

The poker was good. The drinks were better. By the third hour he had stopped thinking about her every four minutes and moved to every seven or eight, which felt like progress. By the fifth hour the room had a pleasant tilt to it and the cards in his hand were doing something interesting and he stopped keeping track of how often she crossed his mind because the math had gotten slippery.

Someone called a car at some point. He remembered the cold air outside, and one of the warriors who’d apparently been sent to find him, and the familiar smell of pack territory as they came through the gate, and then not much else.

He’d been told the rest in the morning, in fragments, by people who had varying degrees of enjoyment in the telling.