Chapter 6
Chapter
Six
Reece needed to blow off steam.
It had been a few days since Nico’s little housewarming party, and he’d been running double patrols every day, looking for more interlopers or more signs of magic on pack land, but there had been nothing.
While running through the woods normally cleared his head, doing it for over six hours every day was starting to make him feel paranoid.
Well, more paranoid—some of his pack mates would say. It wasn’t Reece’s fault that he was always on high alert. That came from a life hard lived.
Rumors were swirling around the pack about why they might have had increased patrols, and the people who weren’t talking about that wouldn’t shut up about the drama of Nico and his little witch and their little love nest.
The pack functioned on gossip. Reece understood that, but it didn’t mean he wanted to sit around and chit-chat.
Which brought him to the Brass Tap.
It was a trendy bar on neutral territory.
There were witches, there were weres, there were even humans who all came to drink and have fun.
It wasn’t super fancy, but no one started shit.
Several years ago it had been little more than a hole in the wall that always made Reece a little worried he would get tetanus or some other unpleasant disease if he stuck around too long.
Then the original owner had died, and his daughter had inherited the place, and she had a knack for business.
What had once been the grunge of neglect was now the clean grunge of aesthetic.
The exposed boards on the walls didn’t have rusty nails poking out of them.
One of the neon signs behind the bar flickered, but that was a brand decision for the cider that was being advertised.
She’d added an axe-throwing arena in the back of the place, updated the music selection to play things other than country from the nineteen-seventies, and fixed the booths—no longer patent leather that was bursting and taped over with poorly matching duct tape.
He’d been disappointed at first when the renovation happened, sure the place would become unbearable, but Reece had to admit it was nice to drink out of glasses that were always clean and hear songs he recognized over the speakers.
He took a seat at the bar and ordered a beer, just as the hair on the back of his neck prickled.
He turned his head to the left and saw dark curls in one of the booths.
It took a moment for him to make out the features of her face, but—Reece’s wolf growled in recognition, and there was something else under there.
Satisfaction. Annoyance. Hope.
His wolf needed to fucking get it together.
Delainey was off limits.
Of course she was at this fucking bar. That was just his luck these days. As far as he knew, she wasn’t a regular—he came here every couple of weeks and had never run into her before. But it was neutral territory, and she had just as much right to be there as he did.
“Is there something wrong with your beer?” the bartender asked.
Reece glared up at her. Dana, a wolf from the Iron Runner pack, though he didn’t hold that against her, tapped her temple in warning.
She was a compact woman with muscular arms covered in colorful ink and close-cropped hair dyed platinum, wearing a black tank top with the Brass Tap logo across the chest.
His eyes must have been glowing. He squeezed them shut and forced himself to calm down a beat.
“Just a bit of stress,” he said.
“Well, you’re in the right place to get rid of that,” said Dana. She flipped a bar towel over her shoulder and moved down the rail to the next customer.
Reece sipped his beer and refused to look back over at Delainey.
He’d already seen enough. She was dressed up in a way he’d never seen before, at least from the waist up—a sparkly red top, lips shining with lipstick, eyes looking bigger with whatever makeup she was wearing.
Her hair was held back by a large band that made her face stand out even more and let her curls halo from the back of her head.
Gold hoops caught the bar light each time she turned her head, and the red top had a wide neckline that sat just off her shoulders.
She was imprinted on his mind. It was pissing him off.
He should just leave, he knew. There were other neutral bars in town.
Hell, there were werewolf bars he could go to that would guarantee he wouldn’t run into a witch. But the Brass Tap was his joint. She didn’t get to come in here and make him leave. Besides, he still had half a beer left, and he wasn’t going to waste his money by abandoning it.
Several minutes later, with his beer down to the dregs, he felt her move.
Reece kept his eyes forward, but his wolf strained under his skin to sense her as she got closer and closer and closer.
She slid onto a stool at the bar, two seats down from him, but no one was sitting between them, and even over all the myriad smells in the bar he could make out her scent—floral, roses maybe, with a hint of fire beneath it.
She crossed one leg over the other; her heeled boot hooking on the stool’s footrest, and rested both forearms on the edge of the bar.
Delainey waved down Dana and ordered a shot. Some instinct had Reece ordering the same.
“Put it on my tab,” he found himself saying.
What the hell was he doing? They were supposed to be ignoring each other. As far as he was concerned, Delainey didn’t have to exist outside of being Elise’s coven sister and an annoyance.
“I can pay for my own damn drink,” Delainey shot back. She turned on her stool to face him fully, one eyebrow arched, her blue nails drumming once against the bar top.
Dana looked between the two of them, her hand hovering above the screen that would assign the drink to one of their tabs.
“Let me get this,” Reece insisted, because now it was a fight and he had to win.
Delainey just shrugged. “Make it top shelf,” she told Dana. She leaned one elbow on the bar and tilted her chin up, the overhead track lighting catching the shimmer on her cheekbones.
That little witch.
Reece had to suppress a smile. Dana raised an eyebrow at him and he nodded as she grabbed a nicer bottle of whiskey than he would normally order at a place like this and poured out their shots.
He took his time sipping the smoky liquid and appreciated the burn as it slid down his throat. He tried not to think of Delainey’s fire as the whiskey singed him, but with her sitting right there and these drinks on his tab, he couldn’t do anything but that.
A bell rang, and cheers erupted from a cluster of people in the back of the bar.
Through the wide archway that separated the main bar from the throwing lanes, Reece could see the glow of yellow bulbs strung above three side-by-side targets, each one a cross-section of raw timber bolted to a plywood backing.
“That’s your cue,” Dana told Delainey.
She sipped the rest of her whiskey, flicked her fingers in a lazy salute, and slid off the stool toward the back of the bar.
“What’s her cue?” Reece asked Dana.
“You know that girl’s trouble, right?” Dana warned him. She braced both palms flat on the bar and leaned toward him. “Maybe you didn’t realize she’s a witch?”
“I know she’s a witch,” Reece ground out.
I’m just a fucking idiot, he said to himself.
“Didn’t your pack already get into trouble with some witches a while back?” Dana asked, looking down at his whiskey.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” Reece said.
“What’s your pack saying about that?”
“They don’t tell us anything. We’ve got the big quarterly meeting coming up—I swear Dawson wishes he was running a Fortune 500 company and not a werewolf pack.”
That startled a laugh out of Reece, and from what he knew of the Iron Runner alpha, he had to agree.
“I’m not doing anything stupid with her,” he said. He drained the last finger of whiskey and set the glass down with a firm tap. “So just tell me what she’s doing.”
“Axes,” said Dana. “And it’s your funeral. It’s not my job to save stupid wolves from themselves.”
Reece stuck his tongue out at her and left a twenty for a tip. He would come back around later and close his tab, but right now he wanted to see this.
Delainey had already drawn a round. She stood with her feet shoulder-width apart in a lane marked off by low plywood walls; five hatchets lined up on a narrow wooden shelf to her right.
She heaved an axe over her head and threw it at the target like she was a Viking of old.
Her whole body uncoiled with the throw—shoulders, torso, hips—and the axe spun once in the air before burying itself in the timber with a deep, satisfying thunk that Reece felt in his sternum.
It didn’t hit the bullseye, but it was close, and the spectators around her let up a cheer.
Reece hung back in the shadows and watched, and tried not to find it incredibly fucking hot to watch a woman wield an axe like she was born to throw them.
He needed to stay back and just watch. Doing anything else was absolute, utter fucking madness and exactly the kind of trouble Dana had warned him against.
But Reece felt like getting into a little bit of trouble.
When Delainey paused in her throwing to go retrieve her axes at the signal from the axe-throwing minder—whatever he was supposed to be called, he looked barely old enough to drive, with pimples on his face and a worried expression at so many people sipping alcohol and throwing weapons—she came back with her axes and set them on a small bench where Reece was already waiting.
He had his arms folded across his chest and his shoulder propped against the lane divider, taking up enough space that she had to step around him to reach the shelf.
“What?” Delainey asked.
“Care to make this interesting?” Reece challenged.
“You shouldn’t be here, Reece,” she said. She set two hatchets down on the shelf with a clatter and turned to face him, one hand still gripping the handle of a third.
He shrugged. “I was here first.”