Chapter 1 #2
Dancing was the only thing that turned my brain off in a way that didn’t end with guilt or consequences.
Moving felt like shedding layers, like shaking the week off my skin.
Every sway and shift blurred the stress until all that was left was instinct, heat, and the steady thrum that drowned out the rest of my life.
For a few minutes, I wasn’t the girl double-checking purchase orders. I was just a body in the dark, moving for myself. Fifteen minutes passed. Maybe twenty.
And then it happened. A prickle on the back of my neck. The undeniable feeling of being watched. I turned slowly.
Across the club, through the lasers and strobes and bodies grinding against each other I saw him.
Viking.
Leaning against the railing of the upstairs lounge. Arms crossed. Jaw set. Eyes locked on me with a focus that made the entire world narrow to a single point.
The music muted. The dancers blurred, and for one stretched-out heartbeat…It was just him and me.
My breath caught. His expression didn’t change, still stormy, still harsh but something flickered across his face. Something hot. Something questioning. Something that made my blood feel too warm.
His eyes travelled slowly down my body…then back up…then locked with mine again.
And damn it all, my knees actually weakened. What the hell was wrong with me?
Then, without breaking eye contact, Viking pushed off the railing and started down the stairs, every step looking like a promise, or a threat. Or both.
The club kept spinning, but all I could see was him walking straight toward me. And for the first time in my entire life, I wasn’t the one doing the hunting.
He was.
I swallowed hard. My heartbeat thrashed out of sync with the music, too fast, too loud, too noticeable. Which was stupid. I didn’t get nervous. I didn’t get chased. And I definitely didn’t get undone by a man I’d never spoken to.
Yet there he was, parting the crowd without touching a single person. People sensed him and stepped aside on instinct, like their bodies had more survival awareness than their brains.
Steph appeared at my elbow out of nowhere, breathless. “Holy hell, he’s coming. He’s coming right to…”
“I know,” I snapped, though my voice sounded thinner than I wanted.
“What do we do?” she whispered.
I flicked her a look. “We don’t do anything. We dance.”
But I couldn’t even pretend to move. My body had gone still, tension coiling through every limb. Viking closed in, steps steady, eyes fixed on me like he was tracking a target. His size, his heat, the sheer gravity of him… it pulled at me in a way that felt dangerous.
He stopped in front of me. Close enough that I had to tilt my chin a little to meet his gaze. Close enough that I could smell leather and clean skin and something sharp, like winter air caught on metal.
For a second, he didn’t speak. He just… looked. Like he was studying a puzzle piece he hadn’t expected to find.
“Bryn.” His voice was low, accent sliding rough along the edges. It wasn’t a question. It was a statement. A knowing.
My stomach flipped. “Do we know each other?”
“No.” His gaze darkened. “But we will.”
He is definitely arrogant, too direct, too confident.
And I should have hated it. I should have rolled my eyes, brushed past him, turned my back on this entire moment before it could become anything real.
That’s what I did best. I controlled the temperature of every interaction.
I set the distance, but Viking Dragic stepped one inch closer, and my breath forgot how to behave.
His eyes drifted to my mouth like he was mapping out sins. Then he leaned in, not touching me, just bringing his voice to my ear.
“You shouldn’t be here alone.”
I bristled instantly. “I’m not alone.”
“You are,” he said, like he had already sized up my friends, my habits, my tells, and decided none of it counted. “And this place isn’t safe for you tonight.”
I laughed under my breath. “You don’t even know me.”
“Not yet.” His tone sharpened. “But someone else does.”
That knocked something loose in my chest. I pulled back enough to see his face. “What does that mean?”
He didn’t blink. “There’s a man watching you, it’s not me, or my brother. Someone else.” My pulse stumbled.
I tried to play it off. “People look at me all the time. That’s kind of the point of a club.”
“Not like this.” His jaw clenched. “He’s been tracking you since you walked in.” A chill licked across my skin despite the heat around us.
My voice dropped. “Where?”
Viking’s eyes flicked over my shoulder, subtle and quick. I didn’t dare turn immediately. I forced myself to breathe, to think, to stay grounded instead of spiralling into paranoia.
“Don’t look yet,” he murmured. “If you move too fast, he’ll know.” I stiffened. Every instinct I had was shouting to break free, to step away, to shut this whole thing down. That was my default. But Viking wasn’t touching me. He wasn’t cornering me. He wasn’t flirting, not really.
He was warning me. Why? My voice went quiet. “Why do you care?” For the first time, something flickered in his eyes that wasn’t heat or violence. Something almost… conflicted.
“The minute our eyes touched you became mine,” he said, a little too fast. “And that means I’m not letting him near you.”
My breath caught again, sharper this time, like he’d reached into my chest and squeezed. His words hit with the force of a declaration, not a flirtation. No hesitation. No doubt.
Mine.
Who talked like that? Who meant it like that?
This was too much, too intense, and far too sudden. My pulse spiked, heat crawling up my neck, not entirely from fear and not entirely from attraction. A mix that felt reckless. I didn’t even know his real name.
I didn’t know why he looked at me like he was already planning a war on my behalf. I didn’t know why his voice sounded like steel dragged over stone. I didn’t know why a stranger deciding I was “his” landed in my stomach like something I should run from, yet every instinct in me refused to move.
I only knew one thing. Nothing about tonight made sense anymore, because men didn’t claim me. Men didn’t get close enough to try. Men didn’t look at me like I had flipped some internal switch inside them they couldn’t turn off.
But Viking Dragic looked at me like that now, gaze burning with an ownership he had no right to feel and no reason to declare, and the most unsettling part? A small, treacherous part of me didn’t hate it.
Instead of confronting him about what he just said, or asking him what he meant with it I decided to ignore it for now and instead I finally turned just enough to follow the direction of Viking’s stare, and that’s when I found the man he meant…my blood went cold.
He wasn’t dancing. He wasn’t drinking. He wasn’t leaning against the wall trying to look interesting. He was just standing there.
Still. Focused. Eyes locked on me with a look that made my skin crawl. I’d never seen him before, but something about his face, his posture, his stillness felt wrong.
All wrong. I turned back to Viking.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, hating the tremor in my voice.
Viking exhaled slowly, like he’d expected me to argue instead of ask. “Stay with me,” a simple sentence, but the weight of it changed everything.