2. On the Rocks

SLATE'S POV

Thursday nights were always the slowest in the business.

I wiped my rag down an already-clean bartop; my reflection glinted back at me from the black lacquer. In the bar’s stillness, our only customer’s dress rasped as she sat down, somewhat tacky copper-colored sequins catching on the barstool’s cracked leather padding. Low golden lamps reflected off the rows of bottles behind me, casting dreamlike liquid highlights over her stylist-orange hair.

“Hi there, sugar,” the she-wolf purred, and dimpled at me with a smile meant for a much younger girl without eyes framed by slightly cracking pancakes of foundation that did nothing to hide the crow’s feet fanning out from her lashes.

If I had to lay a guess I’d put her at a hard-ridden three hundred, three-fifty. Young enough to barely look like a mortal woman entering late middle age; old enough to know what she wanted.

I threw on my practiced bartender’s smile—my shield, smooth and impenetrable—and tucked the rag away. “Hey to you, too. Welcome to Link.”

“Not going to ask where I want to sit?”

Her hazel eyes flicked around the bar knowingly. I knew without even following that sardonic look what she meant: the empty booths lining the walls with their worn upholstery, the faded gold trim everywhere, the sputtering track lighting, the wooden seating arrangements filling up what used to be an open dance floor, back when this place had carried aspirations as a night club.

Owner should’ve known that would never take off in a wolf town. Our kind wanted the night life, we hightailed it to a human city for the evening, then came back home to a peace and quiet where we wouldn’t pick up every last damned stolen whisper and clandestine business meeting from a mile away.

So I only shrugged. “I could pretend.” I let my gaze dip over her—practiced, familiar. “But I think you’re exactly where you want to be.”

She giggled and fluttered her eyelashes up at me. Probably hoping she wouldn’t go home alone tonight—but I was validation paid by the hour and the tip jar. Not a prospect.

“I do like the view here,” she simpered, and the way her cheeks colored and her lips curved told me the rest of the story.

She hadn’t had real attention in a long time. Decades, maybe. Either she’d outlived a human partner, her fated mate had died, or worst of all—he’d broken the mate bond and left her with a hole inside herself she could never fill.

Now she was a cougar on the prowl, and something had sent her out scenting for the hunt on a Thursday night.

Hopefully that something made its way into my wallet.

I studied her, deliberately lingering on her lips, her eyes, her pointedly low-cut dress. Her blush deepened, and I intentionally held my gaze on her mouth just a few moments longer. Just for the reaction. And just like that her lips parted, her breaths coming a little faster, making her chest heave.

I could practically feel the extra bills slipping into my pocket.

I let the silence build a few moments longer, then— “Let me guess,” I said, and leaned across the bar toward her, resting my weight on my forearm. “Cosmopolitan, double on the triple sec, extra sugar on the rim.”

She fluttered a hand to her chest, her eyes widening. “How did you know?”

“I could smell the bad day on you.” And smell the gin on her breath; she’d oiled up with a little liquid courage before even leaving the house.

She cocked her head with a flirtatious smile. “I must smell terrible,” she said, and I took my cue to lean closer.

“What I’m smelling is pretty sweet.”

She had to know I wasn’t truly interested. She was as much wolf as I was, her nose sharp enough to pick up on a man’s pheromones when he’s locked on to a female’s scent with nothing on his mind but rutting. Even with moonsbell always masking my scent, it wouldn’t be hard to smell past it that I just wasn’t physically responding. I could feel her wolf probing at mine curiously, but Xin kept up an impenetrable wall of indifference that protected both our minds.

But she bit her lip and lowered her lashes anyway, running her fingertip coyly along the length of the bar. “Then you should probably serve me.”

I just inclined my head and turned to swing down the semi-decent vodka from the middle shelf.

You’re a liar and a tease, Xin said inside my head.

I want the tips, I replied, and offered the woman another easy, practiced smile as I slid a clean martini glass onto the bar.

Would she smile that way for you if she knew who you really are? Xin asked.

Doesn’t matter who I really am, I answered. This is business.

Her name was Shauna, widowed some sixty years, fond of younger men to forget the ache of her lost mate for just one night but more than happy to make an exception for an older bartender who was liberal with the vodka. She went through a total of seven Cosmos, and tipped me twenty in cash with each one. I let her. It was nearly ten by the time she left, sashaying out with a wink and only the slightest sway to her stride. She’d be sober by the time she reached her car. Our metabolisms didn’t play with alcohol. I’d never seen a wolf drunk for longer than fifteen minutes, and never seen a hangover in my life.

As the door swung shut, I folded the crisp twenties and tucked them into the back pocket of my jeans. Behind me, Mike drifted from the shadows near the storeroom door where he’d been lurking, watching, his entirely human senses forgetting that both Shauna and I had been aware of him the entire time.

“Not a bad haul for a dead night, Slate.”

I shrugged. “She wanted to be drunk. I let her.”

Mike grunted and came forward to heft his thick elbows and solid weight against the bar, leaning hard. “Might as well close up early.” He stared bleakly at the empty bar, the glass door, the snowflakes visible through it, falling to already obliterate Shauna’s footsteps. “Doubt we’ll see anymore customers tonight, and it costs more to keep the lights on.”

I kept my amusement to myself. Humans. Always worried about those short-term pennies, but then they couldn’t afford to think in terms of millennia or generations of accumulated wealth.

Maybe that was why I liked working at this bar.

It had been passed down through humans for centuries, long before Clearstone became a wolf town, but still persisted in the way that only humans can persist: engraving bits of themselves in every bit of gilt edging and aged wood stain, every casket kept on tap, every tarnished candelabra—until every clinking glass and every fragment of intimate laughter shared under low lamplight was a memory.

I probably should have left here decades ago. Joined another pack, or struck out as a lone wolf. Maybe even blended into the human world. Anywhere where I wouldn’t have to hide my scent, mute my presence, disappear under an assumed name.

But something about Clearstone held me, and whispered home.

I’d just reached for my rag again when the bell over the entrance jingled.

The door swung open on the next customer—letting in a rush of cool, snow-scented air, a shimmer of silver moonlight, and a surly bundle of gangly limbs and black leather.