Soldier Boy

A week.

Seven whole goddamn days of nothing.

Ben stood on the sidewalk across from Marlowe & Sons with his hands shoved in his jacket pockets, jaw working around a piece of gum that had lost its flavor two hours ago. He'd been out here for forty-five minutes. Walking past the storefront. Walking back. Crossing the street to look at it from the other side like the angle would change something. Crossing back. Standing around like a fucking tourist with nowhere to be.

He didn't have a number. Didn't have an address. Didn't have a way to find her that didn't involve walking back into that club and dealing with the tin-can asshole at the bottom of the stairs again. And even if he did, what was he going to do, send a letter? Ring her on a landline like it was 1978?

It hadn't bothered him before, not having one of those little black screens everyone was glued to. He thought they were fucking stupid. Still did. People walking around staring at their hands like zombies, typing with their thumbs, taking pictures of their food. Pathetic.

But right now, standing on a street corner in Chinatown with no way to reach one specific person on the planet, he was starting to understand the appeal. Not that he'd ever admit it out loud. Not in a million fucking years.

He wasn't here for her. He was just in the neighborhood. Just walking. Getting some air. The apartment stank and Butcher was a miserable prick to be around and a man needed to stretch his legs once in a while. That was it. That was the whole story.

He sure as shit wasn't here because he couldn't stop thinking about her.

Because he wasn't. He was Soldier Boy. He'd fucked movie stars, had models throwing themselves at him for decades, had his pick of any woman in any room since 1944. He didn't get hung up. He didn't get whipped. He didn't circle a goddamn costume shop in Chinatown like some lovesick kid hoping to accidentally bump into a girl from a bar.

And yet.

There he was. Loitering.

Fuck.

His head wasn't right. Hadn't been right since Mindstorm. Since those woods, since he'd pinned that twitchy son of a bitch to the ground and made him talk, and Mindstorm had talked. God, he'd talked. Spilled everything. The words came out of him like vomit, fast and desperate, trying to buy himself a few more seconds of air in his lungs.

Vogelbaum. The sperm sample he'd given in 1980 because some Vought lab coat asked nicely and he didn't think twice about jerking off into a container. Why would he? It was a genetics study. Routine.

Except it wasn't.

They'd taken what was his and built something with it. Something that walked around in a cape with a flag on its back, smiling for cameras, calling himself the greatest hero on the planet. The cheap fucking wannabe who'd stolen his legacy, his name, his country, grown in a petri dish from Soldier Boy's DNA like some kind of lab experiment.

His son.

Ben's jaw tightened until his teeth ached. He spat the gum onto the sidewalk.

He wasn't going to think about it. Not right now. He'd been tortured for ten years and frozen for thirty. He could handle knowing that Vought had used him as a fucking stud horse to breed his own replacement. He could handle it.

He just needed a cigarette. And coffee. That was it.

The Chinese bakery was half a block south. Open twenty-four hours, read the sign, though from the look of the place it had been open since the Eisenhower administration and nobody had updated the decor since. Fluorescent light. Linoleum floor. Glass cases full of pastries he didn't recognize and a few he did. The whole place smelled like sugar, grease, and oolong tea.

Ben went straight for the counter. Smokes first. He found a pack behind the register, the brand wrong but close enough.

"And a coffee. Black."

The woman behind the counter told him the price and he stared at her like she'd just spoken Russian.

"For coffee?"

She repeated the number. Didn't blink.

"Fuck. I used to get a cup of coffee for a fucking dime." He pulled the cigarettes off the counter and shoved them into his jacket pocket. "Just the smokes."

He turned away from the register, already unwrapping the pack, already digging for his lighter, already halfway gone in his own head again.

Then he stopped.

The tables by the window were small, cheap, crammed together the way everything in this part of the city was. Most of them were empty this time of day. One wasn't.

She was sitting there. Right there. Five feet away from him in a bakery in Chinatown like the universe had decided to stop fucking him over for five minutes and actually put something good in his path.

No makeup, no wig, no costume that left just enough to the imagination to make a man lose his goddamn mind. Just her. Ordinary. Unguarded. Sitting at a window table with a book open in front of her and a steaming cup of something that probably cost as much as his rejected coffee, eating a cookie like she had nowhere in the world to be.

Anyone else would have walked right past her and never known. She looked like a different person stripped of all of it. Without the lights, the performance, the persona, she could have been any girl in any bakery in any city.

Ben didn't hesitate. Didn't stop to think about what he was going to say or how it was going to sound or what the fuck he was even doing.

He crossed the distance between them in three strides, pulled out the chair across from her, dropped into it, and leaned back like he'd been sitting there the whole time.

"I've been walking around this fucking neighborhood for an hour like a goddamn idiot because I don't have one of those phones everyone's got." He tapped the cigarette pack against the table twice, a lazy grin pulling at the corner of his mouth. "And here you are. Eating a cookie."

He tilted his head, studying her with an expression that was half amusement and half something he would never, under any circumstances, call relief.

"So either God's finally cutting me a break, or you're just impossible to get away from. Either way, I'm sitting down, sweetheart."

The TV was playing something stupid.

Some reality show where people lived in a house together and screamed at each other over nothing. Ben didn't know what it was called and didn't care. He'd been watching it for two hours with his boots up on the coffee table and a half-eaten bag of chips balanced on his thigh, not because he liked it but because the noise filled the silence and the silence was worse.

Butcher and Hughie were at the kitchen table behind him, talking in low voices like he gave a shit what they were saying. Maps, photos, phone calls, the same song and dance they'd been doing for weeks. Scheming. Planning. Whispering like a couple of schoolgirls passing notes.

They weren't his friends. They were a transaction. A means to an end. Butcher was a useful bastard with a death wish, and Hughie was a nervous kid who flinched every time Ben looked at him too fast. He didn't owe them conversation. He didn't owe them anything except a dead Homelander, and that bill would come due when it came due.

Noir was the last one.

The thought sat in the back of his skull like a splinter, dull but constant. Black Noir. The one who'd organized the whole goddamn thing in Nicaragua, who'd whispered in everyone's ear until the whole team turned on him, who'd stood there and watched while they gassed him and handed him over to the Russians like a piece of cargo.

Ben remembered the fight. Remembered grabbing his shield and slamming Noir's head into the side of that burning Jeep, the crunch of it, the heat of the fire against his arms. He remembered the satisfaction of it and how it hadn't been nearly enough.

Finding him shouldn't be this fucking hard. Noir was Vought property, always had been. Somewhere inside that tower Earving should have been waiting. Instead, he was gone and no one fucking knew where he was. It was Mindstorm all over again.

Killing him would be the hard part. Not because Noir was stronger. He wasn't. But the fucker was fast, he was trained, and he didn't stop. No pain response, no hesitation, no surrender. You had to put him down all the way or he'd keep coming.

Ben could respect that, in the abstract. In practice, he was going to enjoy every second of it.

He shoved a handful of chips into his mouth and stared at the screen. Some woman was crying about a rose.

Then someone knocked on the door.

The room changed. It was instant. Like flipping a switch. Butcher's hand went to his hip where a gun sat tucked under his shirt. Hughie froze mid-sentence, his mouth still half-open. Ben's boots came off the table and hit the floor with a heavy thud. The chip bag slid off his thigh and he didn't catch it.

Nobody knocked on that door. Nobody. The whole point of a safehouse was that nobody fucking knew where it was. Butcher had chosen this place specifically because it was a shithole in a dead building in a forgotten part of the city where no one asked questions because no one was around to ask them.

Butcher looked at Hughie. Hughie looked at Ben. Ben looked at the door. Butcher moved first. He crossed the room slowly, pulling the gun from his waistband and holding it low against his thigh. He positioned himself to the side of the door frame, not in front of it. Hughie stayed at the table, but Ben saw him reach for something under the papers. Smart kid. Sometimes.

Ben stood. Didn't reach for anything. Didn't need to.

Butcher leaned in, checked the peephole, and went still. Something crossed his face. Not fear. Not confusion, exactly. More like a question he didn't have an answer to.

He glanced back at Ben with an expression that sat somewhere between suspicion and amusement, and then he opened the door. Slowly. Gun still low.

She was standing in the hallway.

Not Babydoll. Not the version of her he'd seen on that stage, lit up in amber and smoke, owning every set of eyes in the room. This was something else. Something stripped further down than he'd ever seen.

Ben's chest locked up.

She looked like she'd been crying. Not the pretty kind, not the kind women did in movies where a single tear rolled down a perfect cheek and a man dabbed it away with his thumb. The kind that left marks. Puffy eyes, red nose, the raw look of someone who'd been losing a fight with something they couldn't hit back.

He was across the room before he made the decision to move.

One second he was standing by the couch and the next he was at the door, past Butcher, filling the frame with his shoulders and blocking out the ugly fluorescent light of the hallway behind her. His hand came up and hovered near the side of her face without touching it, fingers tense, like he was holding himself back from something by the thinnest possible thread.

"The fuck happened?"

Low. Flat. Not a question that wanted a complicated answer. His eyes moved over her face, reading it, looking for bruises, cuts, anything that would give him a name and a direction to point himself in.

Butcher stood a few steps back, gun lowered, watching the two of them. "Mate," Butcher started, "how does she know where..."

"Shut up." Ben didn't look at him. Didn't look at anything except her. "Not now."

His voice dropped further. Just for her.

"Talk to me."

He didn't make an excuse this time.

Didn't tell himself it was about Noir. Didn't pretend he needed intel, a lead, a drink, or a reason to be anywhere other than exactly where he was going. He wanted to see her. Full stop. End of discussion. Whatever that meant, whatever box that put him in, he'd deal with it later or not at all.

The clerk at Marlowe & Sons glanced up when the bell chimed and looked right back down at his newspaper without a word. Didn't ask for a name. Didn't reach for the button under the counter. Didn't even flinch. Just a small, practiced nod toward the back of the shop, like letting Soldier Boy through was now just another part of his evening.

The stairwell felt shorter than it used to.

At the bottom, the bouncer was leaning against the wall beside the podium, arms crossed, metal skin nowhere in sight. Just a big man in a black shirt looking bored out of his skull on a slow night. His eyes tracked Ben as he hit the last step.

Neither of them spoke. The guy's jaw tightened a fraction, the kind of look a dog gave another dog when they'd already established who was bigger but still didn't like the arrangement. Ben walked past him without slowing down.

His name was on the list. Nobody said a word.

The floor was packed but quieter tonight. A low hum, glasses clinking, someone laughing in a far booth. The stage was lit but empty, curtains drawn, the broken-halo emblem glowing soft behind the fabric. A girl Ben didn't recognize was tending bar and another was making rounds between tables.

No sign of her on the floor. Not in any of the booths. Not behind the bar. Not talking to the other girls. Good. He knew where she'd be.

He cut through the room, didn't take a seat, didn't acknowledge the few glances he caught from people who were starting to recognize the tall guy in the leather jacket who kept showing up and going straight upstairs.

Ben didn't knock.

He turned the handle and pushed it open like he owned the goddamn building, stepping inside with the same energy he used to walk into Vought boardrooms and Pentagon briefings and anywhere else that had the audacity to have a door between him and where he wanted to be.

Then he stopped.

She was there. On the couch against the far wall of the office, legs tucked underneath her, head resting against the armrest at an angle that was going to make her neck hurt when she woke up. Full face of makeup. One of those wigs she wore sometimes, an outfit that, under literally any other circumstance, would have made the blood rush south so fast he'd have gotten dizzy.

The whole costume. The whole armor. Performance-ready from head to toe.

And she was out cold. Breathing slow and steady, the kind of deep, heavy sleep that only hit when someone had been running on fumes for too long and their body finally pulled rank.

Something shifted behind his ribs. Just a pull, low and quiet, like a hand closing around something it didn't want to let go of. He didn't name it. Wasn't going to.

There was a blanket folded over the back of the couch, some soft thing, dark fabric. He picked it up. Shook it open.

His hands were steady. He'd held weapons, shields, people's throats, with these hands and never once hesitated. But he laid that blanket over her like it was the most important thing he'd done all week. Slow. Deliberate. Pulling it up over her shoulders, careful not to catch it on the edges of her outfit, careful not to shift the cushion under her.

She stirred anyway.

Ben watched her eyes open, heavy and unfocused, still half in whatever dream she'd been having. He was already sitting down before she'd fully surfaced, settling onto the edge of the couch beside her hip like he'd been there the whole time. His hand found her face. The backs of his fingers brushed along her cheekbone, slow, tracing the line of it with a gentleness that would have made Butcher choke on his own tongue if he'd seen it.

"Nap time?" The corner of his mouth twitched. His voice was low, rough, quiet enough that it didn't carry past the two of them. His thumb grazed the edge of her jaw.

He glanced toward the smoked glass wall, the muffled sound of music and conversation drifting up from below. The whole club, alive and running, full of people paying good money to be down there.

"If you want, I can kick everybody out and turn the music off." His grin sharpened, lazy and warm, like he was telling a joke. His eyes said something else entirely. "Say the word."

He saw it from across the room.

Ben was leaning against the far end of the bar with a glass of bourbon he'd barely touched, watching the floor the way he always did when she was down here. Scanning. Old habit. You didn't lead teams for decades without learning to read a room by its edges.

The guy was mid-thirties, maybe forty. Expensive suit, open collar, the kind of watch that screamed money louder than the mouth wearing it. He had that look. The look of a man who'd been told yes his entire life and had come to understand it not as a privilege but as a natural law of the universe.

Ben knew the feeling.

But that guy was standing too close. Leaning in too far. One hand braced against the wall near her head like he was boxing her in and calling it charm.

And she'd already said no.

Ben didn't hear it from where he was. Didn't need to. He could see it. The angle of her shoulders, the set of her jaw, the way her weight shifted just slightly toward the exit side of the conversation. She wasn't scared. She was handling it. She ran this place, she'd handled worse. But the guy wasn't reading any of it, or he was reading all of it and didn't give a shit, and that distinction didn't matter to Ben because both options ended the same way.

He set the bourbon down and started walking. The crowd between them parted without being asked. People moved out of his way on instinct, something about the set of his shoulders or the look on his face or the simple animal recognition that a man moving like that was not to be stood in front of. He stopped close enough that his shadow fell across both of them.

"Hey." He said with that stoic, intense tone. "She's not interested."

The guy turned. Slow. Annoyed. The way someone turned when they'd been interrupted in the middle of something they felt entitled to.

He looked Ben up and down. Took in the leather jacket, the combat boots, the build. Ran whatever mental calculation rich guys ran when they encountered someone bigger than them in a space they considered theirs. The answer he landed on was apparently not the right one.

"Who the fuck are you?"

"The guy telling you to walk away."

The man scoffed. Actually scoffed. A little puff of air through his nose, a little curl of his lip, the kind of dismissal that only came from someone who had never in his life been hit hard enough to reconsider his choices. He turned back toward Babydoll like Ben wasn't even there. Like he was furniture.

"Buddy, I don't know what you think is happening here, but this is a private conversation. Why don't you go back to whatever barstool you crawled off of and let the adults..."

"I'm going to give you five seconds."

The guy turned back. There was a flicker of something now. Not quite fear. Not yet. "Five seconds to what?"

"To walk away before I move you."

"You're going to move me? In here?" A laugh. Short, loud, performative. He looked around like he expected an audience to back him up. "Listen, pal, I don't know who you think you are, but I've got friends in this place that would..."

"Three."

"Oh, fuck off."

"Two."

"Are you seriously..."

"One."

"Get lost, asshole."

Ben grabbed him by the front of his shirt and the belt and lifted him off his feet like he weighed absolutely nothing, because to Ben, he did. For one second the man's face went white, his mouth opening around a sound that never made it out, his expensive shoes dangling six inches off the floor.

Then Ben threw him. The kind of throw that sent a grown man's body through the air like a sack of wet concrete, spinning slightly, arms pinwheeling, the expensive watch catching the light for one brief stupid second before he hit a table fifteen feet away.

The table didn't survive. Neither did the two chairs flanking it. The sound was tremendous, wood splintering, glass shattering, bottles crashing off surfaces, a chain reaction of destruction that rippled outward from the impact point like a stone dropped in still water.

The man landed in the wreckage and didn't get up immediately, groaning, bleeding from somewhere on his forehead, suit torn, dignity in roughly the same condition as the furniture.

The room went dead silent.

Every head turned. Every conversation stopped. The music kept playing but it might as well have been a funeral march. Staff froze behind the bar. Girls near the stage stood motionless. Even the guys in the deep booths, the ones who made a career out of not reacting to anything, were staring.

Ben stood there with his hands still raised, chest rising and falling, adrenaline flooding through him like battery acid. And then it hit him.

Not guilt. Something worse. Awareness. The cold, sudden, sobering awareness of exactly where he was, and whose place this was, and what he had just done in the middle of it. The man bleeding on the floor. The silence. All of it, in her club, on her floor, in front of her people, her staff, her reputation.

His hands dropped to his sides. He turned and looked at Babydoll.

He knew immediately. Before a single word was said. Before anything happened next. He knew he'd fucked up.

He wasn't supposed to be here.

Twenty minutes ago he'd been in the safehouse with Butcher going over the plan one more time. Noir was back inside Vought Tower. Confirmed. Multiple sightings, multiple sources, no question. That meant it was time. Walk in, kill Noir, kill Homelander, walk out. Simple. Clean. The kind of mission he'd done a hundred times before, give or take a cape-wearing knockoff made from his own DNA.

There was no reason to stop here first. No tactical value. No intelligence to gather. No loose end to tie up. He had his suit, he had his shield, he had Butcher juiced up on Temp V and ready to roll. Everything was in place. Everything was handled.

And yet he'd looked at Butcher across that kitchen table and said, "I need an hour."

Butcher had stared at him. That long, flat, knowing stare that Ben wanted to knock off his face on a good day. "An hour."

"Did I stutter?"

"She's got you on a leash, mate."

"Say that again and I'll shove your teeth so far down your throat you'll be chewing with your asshole. One hour."

He'd told himself it was just a goodbye. A quick stop. Five minutes. He'd walk in, say what he had to say, walk out, go kill the two people left on his list and come back in one piece because that's what he did. He was the cockroach that survived the nuclear winter. Unkillable. Unstoppable.

He'd walked through bullets and bombs and forty years of frozen hell and come out the other side still breathing, still standing, still him. There was no version of tonight where he didn't come back.

But something in his gut wouldn't let him leave the city without seeing her first. Something stupid and inconvenient and deeply, deeply unlike him that had taken root somewhere in his chest over the past few weeks and refused to die no matter how many times he tried to smother it.

So he'd come. Just to see her. Just to say goodbye. Just for five goddamn minutes.

That was twenty minutes ago.

Now he was on her couch with his head tipped back against the cushion and two fingers buried inside her, knuckle-deep, curling slow and deliberate while she straddled his lap and palmed his cock through his jeans with a pressure that was making it very fucking hard to think about anything that wasn't right here, right now, in this room.

"Fuck." The word came out low and rough, dragged from somewhere deep in his throat. His hips rolled up into her hand on instinct, chasing the friction, the denim straining over how hard he was. His free hand gripped her hip, thumb digging into the curve of it, holding her in place on top of him like she might try to move and he wasn't going to allow it. "That's it. Right there, sweetheart. Don't stop."

He could feel her. Hot and slick and tight around his fingers, clenching every time he curled them just right, and he knew exactly where just right was because he'd been paying attention. He always paid attention. It was the one area of his life where his ego actually served a purpose, because Soldier Boy did not half-ass anything and he sure as shit didn't half-ass this.

His fingers pumped slow. In and out, dragging against the spot that made her thighs tighten around his hips, his thumb finding her clit and circling it with the kind of lazy, unhurried precision that said he could do this all night and might just decide to.

He wasn't rushing. He had an hour and he planned to use every fucking minute of it.

"You feel that?" His voice was low and thick, barely above a murmur. He pressed deeper, spreading his fingers slightly, stretching her just enough. His eyes were on her face, dark, focused, watching everything, reading every shift and flutter like a language only he spoke. "Soaking my goddamn hand, baby. You missed me that bad?"

The heel of her palm dragged along the length of him through the denim and his jaw clenched, a sharp exhale pushing through his nose. His cock was straining against the zipper, thick and hard enough to ache, and every time she pressed down on it his brain shorted out for half a second before snapping back online. His hips bucked up again. Harder this time. Grinding into her touch.

"Harder." A command, not a request. His grip on her hip tightened, the full, rigid length of him pressing against her through layers of fabric that had no business still being there. "You're gonna tease me through my fucking pants like a teenager? Put your hand on my cock."

His fingers didn't stop. Kept that same slow, maddening rhythm, in and out, curling, his thumb tracing circles over her clit with just enough pressure, keeping her needy.

The apartment smelled like stale weed, cold takeout, and the kind of silence that sat on a man's chest like a cinderblock.

Butcher's voice cut through the fog from across the room. He was leaning against the kitchen counter with Hughie, the two of them hunched over some papers and photos. "...the TNT Twins. We need to find 'em before they catch wind and do a runner. I know a place. The Lounge. The kind of crowd that'd know where people like the Twins end up."

Hughie straightened, already reaching for his jacket. "I'll talk to Annie. See if she's heard anything on her end."

Butcher gave him a look but let it go. Hughie slipped out without another word.

Ben's head lifted. "The Lounge. What's that?"

Butcher barely glanced his way. "Sort of a pub. Underground. Not your concern."

Ben stood up. The bed groaned in relief. "I'm going." He rolled his shoulders, every joint in his body stiff from sitting on garbage furniture for days. "I've been rotting in this shithole smelling my own farts and eating cold pizza like some kind of animal."

"You're supposed to be dead, mate. You walk into a club looking like the world's angriest action figure, someone's gonna clock you."

"Then I won't wear the suit." Ben stepped forward, close enough that Butcher had to tilt his chin up slightly to hold the stare. "I'm going. Or I walk out that door right now and find my own fun. Your call."

Butcher's jaw shifted. He exhaled through his nose like a man swallowing something that tasted like shit.

"Fine. You wear civvies, you keep your head down and you don't start a single goddamn thing."

The storefront didn't look like anything. That was the whole point.

Marlowe & Sons sat wedged between a shuttered noodle joint and a place hawking knockoff handbags, its windows grimy and crammed with theatrical junk: feathered boas, moth-eaten top hats, racks of sequined garbage from decades nobody alive remembered.

Except him, maybe.

A clerk sat behind the counter, a wiry guy with round glasses and the flat expression of a man who had seen absolutely everything and been moved by none of it. He glanced up from a newspaper.

Butcher leaned on the counter. "William Butcher." He paused, glancing at Ben. "And guest."

The clerk's eyes slid to Ben too. Paused. Slid back to Butcher. He checked something beneath the counter and tipped his head toward the back wall. "Fitting Room Three."

They moved through the shop past racks of costumes and dusty mannequins dressed like flappers and vaudeville performers until they reached a narrow hallway with three curtained stalls. Fitting Room Three had a full-length mirror on the back wall.

Butcher pressed something along the frame and the glass clicked, then swung inward, revealing a tiled stairwell that dropped down into warm amber light and the muffled pulse of bass.

"After you, Guv."

"Cute." Ben went first.

The stairwell was narrow and cold, old pipes running along the ceiling overhead, the music thickening with every step. At the bottom, a man built like a concrete barrier stood behind a podium. No smile. No small talk. Just a flat look and an open palm.

"Phones."

"Don't have one." Ben didn't slow down.

The bouncer's face stayed blank, but something behind his eyes ran the math real fast and didn't like the answer. Butcher stepped in, smooth as oil. "He's clean. My word."

A beat. The bouncer pulled his arm back and jerked his chin toward the heavy door behind him.

"Enjoy your evening."

The door swung open, and the Lounge swallowed them whole.

It hit him in layers. Warmth first, dry and close, like stepping into someone's memory. Then the smell: cigarette smoke, aged wood, expensive perfume, and underneath all of it, real bourbon.

Curtains hung over private rooms along the far walls, and above everything, a wall of smoked glass looked down on the floor like a one-way confession booth. It looked like a place that had no business still existing.

Ben liked it immediately. It felt like somewhere he might've actually belonged, once, in a life before the box.

But it wasn't the room that stopped him dead.

It was the stage. A woman was up there, framed in light and cigarette haze, and every man in the place had forgotten he was holding a drink.

Ben's feet stopped moving. His jaw loosened. His brain, for the first time in days, went completely, blissfully silent.

"Who the fuck is that?" Low. Rough. Half to himself.

Butcher glanced toward the stage, then back at Ben, and the bastard actually snickered. "That's the owner. Babydoll." He was already scanning the room, eyes moving from booth to booth, hunting for contacts. "Don't even waste your time, Guv. Too rich for your blood."

Shame burned deep in Ben's gut. Another fucking reason to be angry: being legally dead for 40 years did nothing for his bank account. He went from millionaire to broke in what felt like a goddamn nap.

Butcher adjusted his coat. "Oi. Stay out of trouble. I'm off to find some people." He clapped Ben on the shoulder once and melted into the crowd without looking back.

"Yeah, yeah, fuck off." Ben ignored the bar. Ignored the open booth to his left. Ignored everything that wasn't her.

He moved forward. Slow, unhurried, weaving between packed tables and warm bodies until he was near the front, close enough to feel the music in his ribs.

The crowd around the stage loosened. Men drifted back to their drinks, their booths, their conversations, still buzzing but moving on. Ben stayed where he was. He watched as Babydoll stepped down from the stage to the floor.

He waited, but not long. He was never a patient man and he wasn't about to start now. But he knew how to time an approach. Always had.

He crossed the space between them with the kind of walk that said he had never once in his entire life wondered whether he was welcome somewhere. A grin pulled at the corner of his mouth, slow and deliberate. He stopped closer than a stranger probably had any right to.

"You know, I've seen a lot of beautiful women in my time, sweetheart." He tilted his head, letting his eyes take their time without a shred of apology. "You just made every single one of 'em forgettable." The grin sharpened. "So are you gonna tell me your real name, or do I gotta earn it?"

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