3. Shaken, Not Stirred

SLATE'S POV

“I’d rethink that,” I murmured, and set the rag back down..

With a mutter, Mike hefted himself around the bar and planted himself in the new patron’s path. He opened his mouth for a second, then balked, blinking several times when he had to tilt his head up to meet the patron’s eyes.

Mike wasn’t a small man.

This one was just one tall, lean package.

Glaring up at the man, Mike contorted his face into a glower. “Buddy. We’re closing. Bars up and down the street’ll stay open until 2AM.”

The tall man cut him a haggard look, pale gray eyes glinting with something unreadable. “Don’t close yet. Please. I’ll pay double.”

Mike scoffed. “I’m not taking a drunk’s word for tha—”

His voice died; his tongue stilled as the man withdrew a card from inside his black leather jacket. In the low light, all I could make out was the gleam of onyx plastic, gold embossed letters, the stamp of sixteen golden numbers.

Interesting.

Mike stammered, swallowed, stared at the card. Whatever he read made his ruddy skin turn pale.

“I…I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t realize. Please, come in.” He took a step back and swept one arm out. “The bar’s this way, unless you’d prefer a private booth?”

The card disappeared back into the jacket. The man passed in a fluid, prowling lope. Even from across the room, something about him spoke of power so easily self-assured that he didn’t even think of how he wielded it.

Not just money.

Something inborn. Innate.

“Bar’s fine.”

Curiouser and curiouser.

Mike practically scurried ahead of the man just so he could duck in close to me and whisper in my ear. “Humor him. He’s big money.”

To a wolf, that whisper might as well have been a scream.

But the man didn’t react at all as Mike gave me a warning look, then disappeared into the back.

The man levered himself onto the same barstool Shauna had taken, bowing forward until his black leather jacket, half-buttoned black silk shirt, and ripped black jeans made him look like a crouching raven: all broad shoulders, narrow hips, long legs. Rockstar gaunt, I’d call it—where his height made him look slim but there was no missing the tight sculpture of muscle against his t-shirt or honed into the wrists disappearing into his jacket cuffs. Strong in an understated way.

And from the way he looked at me from under the unruly tousle of black hair and the low set of wild, sharp brows…

Very, very not happy.

This one will want shots, I thought, and slipped my hand under the bar for a shot glass in advance. “Must’ve been some name on that card.”

He didn’t answer. He only looked at me with his eyes dark with expectation, his full, pretty pink mouth setting into a thin line. In the back of my head, Xin pricked his ears up alertly.

What? I asked.

Not sure yet, my wolf said. But there’s…something.

Looked like the man wasn’t rising to the bait, so I shrugged and moved on. “What’s your poison?”

Still silence. Measuring, contemplative. He tilted his head, considering, and I let my nostrils flare briefly to catch his scent.

It stung.

I could make out wolf, but nothing else. He’d already been drinking somewhere. Enough rotgut that I couldn’t make out much of his scent past the gasoline odor of cheap spirits harsh enough to strip paint.

Finally, he spoke. He had a voice like raw cane sugar and barbed wire. “Whiskey,” he said. Again that subtle sense of casual power—the feeling that he expected to be obeyed, and wouldn’t brook opposition. “Anything that burns going down. Four fingers. No ice.”

I surreptitiously slipped my fingers away from the shot glass and felt out a tumbler from the stock under the bar.

As I pulled down a bottle of top shelf bourbon—the imprint of that black card still raising silent questions—I said, “That’s a lot of whiskey.”

“I don’t wanna leave here sober,” he growled. “Fuck it. Make it five fingers.”

I slung the tumbler onto the bar in a soft clink of glass, then thumbed the cap off the bourbon and flipped the bottle into a measured pour count. “I’m not any prettier through whiskey goggles, darlin’.”

Nothing.

I glanced up. His eyes cut like silver daggers, and locked on that flow of golden liquid like it was the thread of life. I might as well not even be here. I was just the tool. The vehicle that brought alcohol.

So while I measured my pour counts, I let myself look.

Rangy build hiding solid muscle. Large, aesthetic hands ridged with new scars and snaking veins. Pale skin that spoke of a love for moonlit nights and days spent sleeping off the rush of moonlust. Wasted rockstar fashion, from the deliberately mussed tangle of hair to the way even when intently focused, the weight of his thick black eyelashes dragged his lids down for a lazy, disaffected look.

He was like pretty cut its teeth on handsome, and couldn’t decide which it wanted to be. Strong, angular features refined by elegant delicacy and shadowed by chic hollows that seemed to carry secret nights and gasping breaths within their every darkness.

Just my type.

And probably someone I shouldn’t go anywhere near.

I counted out the last second of trickling gold, capped the bourbon with a professional flourish, and spun the tumbler across the bar. It slid to a halt exactly in front of him. He barely waited a half-second before long fingers wrapped around it and he threw his head back in a single deep, heavy gulp that emptied the tumbler and made his long throat bob with the swallow.

I blinked.

He thudded the tumbler down with a raspy gasp, chest rising and falling hard, and swiped his free hand across the damp red gleam of his mouth.

“Again,” he demanded huskily.

I arched a brow, and poured another five fingers.

And then again.

And again.

By the sixth, the bottle was empty and he was drinking slower, in deep sips instead of tossing back the whole tumbler at once. I stashed the empty bottle under the bar and studied him.

“You want to talk about it?”

He didn’t meet my eyes. “No.”

“Want to have a cry, then?”

“Hell no,” he snarled, each word rusty with the burn of liquor.

I said nothing. I only caught the little basket of individually wrapped sour cream crackers at the end of the bar and slid it over between us.

He eyed it like it might bite him. “What’s that for?”

“Carbs. Slows down the absorption rate so you don’t get drunk so quickly, and this drunk lasts a little longer.”

His upper lip curled. He pointedly and slowly pushed the basket away. Looked like a cat about to knock all your damned shit on the floor, really.

I half-smiled. “Fair enough,” I said, and leaned both elbows on the bar. The way his mouth moved was fascinating, the play of his fingers like a man playing music with every idle gesture, and I had nothing else to occupy my attention tonight. “Girl troubles?”

“No,” he bit off, and took another swig of whiskey.

“Boy troubles?” I countered.

His gaze snapped to me, finally. Something flashed, something that made those silver depths into broken mirrors, before he clenched his teeth. “Are all bartenders this noisy?”

“We’re renowned for being good listeners.”

“Digging and listening aren’t the same thing.”

“Touche.” I inclined my head. “I’ll mind my own.”

He just gave me another haggard look, then drained his glass and thumped it back down on the bar. “Again.”

As His Majesty commanded, then.

I had to break out a fresh bottle. He went through half of this one, too, enough to lay a human out flat, but his eyes barely fogged while over more than an hour, his again grew slightly more slurred. He swayed on the stool, but kept his seat. Now and then Mike peeked surreptitiously out from the back, then scurried away like a mouse.

You should probably cut him off, Xin said.

He’ll metabolize it in minutes.

“I recognize that accent,” the man blurted.

I glanced up at him. After saying nothing but again for over an hour, actual words fell into the bar’s quiet intimacy like breaking crystal. He peeled one long finger away from the tumbler and pointed at me with both the finger and the last dregs of his whiskey.

“All banjos and shit,” he proclaimed.

I smiled thinly and picked up Shauna’s martini glass from the sink; with my rag, I swiped her lipstick off the rim. “Darlin’, I’ve never played a banjo in my life.”

“But the accent. That’s…thash…it’s Mississippi or Alabama or something.”

Not a bad ear, for someone who’d likely never left the PNW in his life.

“Louisiana,” I corrected. “The Atchafalaya Basin, to be specific.”

“That. That. I knew it was different from regular old southern. It’s…it’s…what’s the word?”

“Cajun. The word you want is ‘Cajun.’” I sighed and shook my head. “And you are very, very drunk.”

“Damn right I am. Damn right.” He growled it like it was a bloody victory, beating his lupine metabolism into submission with enough whiskey to fuel a jet engine. His lips just barely twitched upward at the corners. “I like you, Cajun.”

And then he promptly toppled off the barstool.