Nineteen
The compliance notices glare up at me from the desk, the black print blurring after hours of contractor sites, bylaw pages, and one useless rabbit hole about emergency extensions that may as well have ended in lol, good luck.
I lean back in Dad’s old chair, the frame groaning under my weight. Through the office door, the bar sits dark and silent. Delilah, Ulf, and Birgitta left after closing.
I stayed, trying to chase solutions that don’t exist.
My eyes burn. The desk lamp casts everything in gold, making the numbers seem even more daunting.
$75,000+.
Thirteen days.
Suspension of permit.
Reza’s text from this afternoon still glows on my phone: Azizam, even with favors I don’t think I can make this timeline work. Sorry.
The Wolves deal was supposed to be the thing that kept this place breathing. Three months in, and all I’ve got to show for it is a stack of corporate emails, a postponed holiday schedule, and numbers that don’t move in the right direction no matter how many times I run them.
A clang cuts through the silence.
Wood bangs against a metal frame, sounding thunderous in the dead of night. My pulse thrums in my ears.
I forgot to lock the front.
I find Dad’s old Louisville Slugger behind the office door and grip the bat with both hands. With my elbows raised, I step into the doorway.
Gabriel stands in the middle of my bar, snow melting off his shoulders onto my hardwood. His parka hangs open over a rumpled hoodie and joggers. No hat. No gloves. Hair plastered dark against his skull, his hands hanging loose at his sides.
It’s been a week since the blizzard. A week since I told him we’d be strangers by morning, and he looked at me across the bar and said, yeah, and meant it, and left. Which is what I asked for. Which is what made sense.
I’ve used that silence to confirm it was the right call, and I have. Mostly.
“We’re closed.” My voice reverberates in the empty space. I lower the bat by two inches.
Gabriel turns in my direction, looking at the wall behind me instead of at me. At the framed jerseys. The old photos.
“I know.” He doesn’t move closer, but he doesn’t leave either. Just stands there dripping on my floor. He looks like hell.
“Okay… then what are you doing here?” I ask, leaning the bat against the wall as I move behind the bar.
Crossing my arms, my gaze sweeps over him, and I watch his jaw work.
The cold rolls off him, his parka soaked through at the shoulders and collar. Snowmelt taps onto my floor in slow, patient clicks.
“Did you walk here?”
Silence.
“You planning on answering anything tonight, or are we doing haunted Victorian child all the way through?”
A breath leaves him. Might’ve been a laugh.
“I walked.”
“Great. Now, what are you doing here?”
His nostrils flare. I can see him deciding whether to shut down or keep going.
Lowering his voice, he says, “A draft release was waiting for me when I got home. I was supposed to sign.”
“And you didn’t?”
His head shake is almost-imperceptible; I’d have missed it if I blinked.
“For fuck’s sake.” I point the bar towel at him like it’s a weapon. “What do you want, Castellano? I don’t have the time or energy to try to decode you right now.”
He smells even more wrong up close. Snow and sweat and the mineral edge of cold skin. Gabriel’s eyes linger closed for half a second. Open again.
He drags a hand over the back of his neck, stopping at the base of his skull. “I shouldn’t have come here.”
“Correct.”
“But there’s nowhere else to go.”
I snort. “Oh, spare me. You’ve got a penthouse. A team.” A fat bank account that wouldn’t blink twice at the cost of the compliance order.
Lowering his arms, he spreads his fingers, that little helpless gesture I’ve only ever seen on slow?motion replay when a bad call goes against him.
“Look, we agreed we’d be strangers.” I tip my chin to him. “So, what changed?”
His eyes dart between mine as if searching for answers.
Then, very quietly, he says, “I ran out of places to hide inside it.”
Places to hide. Right.
I almost laugh. Catch it before it escapes. “Very poetic.”
“That’s not—” He stops. Starts again. “I didn’t come here for absolution.”
“No?” I keep my voice even. “Then what did you come here for?”
“I don’t know.”
“Bull. Shit. You walked here. In December. Through an actual snowstorm. In joggers.”
He looks at the floor. At his own boots. At the small, dark pool collecting under him.
“I couldn’t be alone with myself anymore. Not with what I keep—” The last word catches in his throat, and he pauses, gnawing on his inner cheek. When he speaks, his voice is dangerously quiet. “What I haven’t stopped.”
My heart starts a slow, ugly pound. “What haven’t you stopped, Gabriel?”
His mouth opens. Closes.
“There’s no version of this that doesn’t make me sound worse.”
I fold my arms. “You’re assuming that part is still in your control, so say it,” I press, stepping into his space. “Whatever’s going on, just spit it out.”
He stares at me like I’m asking him to cut his own throat.
“Once I say it, that’s it. There’d be no going back. You already hate me for the past. I don’t want to give you a reason to hate me for tomorrow.”
“Congratulations.” I spread my arms wide. “You discovered consequences.”
He flinches like I’ve slapped him. Good.
I let out a harsh breath, my patience officially tapped out.
“I don’t have time for this. I have a bar to save from people like you.” Pushing past him, I clip his shoulder to get to the supply closet. I drag the mop bucket out between us and drop its handle, letting it drop to the wood with a resounding crack.
“People like me?”
“Rich boys who think the world owes them forgiveness.” I whirl on him, my pulse hammering against my ribs, jamming my index finger hard against the center of his chest. It’s like hitting a wall of solid rock, which only pisses me off more.
“Who show up when they need to put a spin on things. Just like Calgary.”
“Don’t.” His face pales. “Don’t compare this to Calgary.”
“Why the hell not?” I push him. Both palms against his chest, putting my back into it. “It’s the exact same pattern, isn’t it? Take what you want, disappear when it gets messy.”
Gabriel takes the hit, keeping his eyes locked dead on mine. He absorbs the anger like he thinks he deserves it, watching me with this raw, open expression that only makes me angrier.
“You want to know what pisses me off most?” Another shove, harder this time, hitting solid muscle that doesn’t yield an inch. “I actually started to believe you might’ve changed. That night in the storm, when you—” I cut myself off with a mirthless chuckle.
“When I what?” His eyes flash.
“When you acted like you gave a shit.” My voice cracks on the words. “When you acted like I mattered.”
“You do matter.”
“Then say it. The actual reason.”
He laughs once. Short. Humorless.
“I’m here because you don’t buy it,” he says.
I frown. “Buy what?”
“The act.” His hand lifts in a short, disgusted sweep toward his own chest. “Any of it.”
My spine goes rigid, but he keeps going before I can cut him off.
“Everywhere else, I know exactly what people see when they look at me. I built it. I know every angle of it.”
His eyes come back to mine. Direct now. A little wrecked.
“You’ve never once looked at me like that guy was real.”
A beat.
“This bar was the only place I could think of where I couldn’t keep pretending.”
Something inside my chest gives a tiny, traitorous shift.
I glance at the office door, where the compliance notice waits with its now thirteen?day deadline. At him, with his busted knuckles and missing signature.
We’re both standing in the wreckage of things we’re supposed to be saving.
I am so tired.
Not of him, exactly. Of the armor. Of holding the line so hard my teeth ache. Of carrying the grudge like a weapon and pretending it doesn’t weigh anything.
Of standing here with all this heat under my skin and nowhere safe to put it.
“I told myself to stay away from you,” he says. “That was the one rule I had left. The only one.” His mouth twists. “I’ve broken everything else.”
The room feels too small all of a sudden. Him in front of me, wrecked and honest in a way I never asked for. Me standing here actually hearing it, which is somehow the bigger problem. If I stay in this feeling one more second, it’s going to split me open somewhere ugly.
I refuse.
My hands are in his hoodie before I finish the thought.
I grab fistfuls of the damp fabric over his chest and yank him down—not gently or because this means anything good.
To stop whatever’s going on in my chest before it cracks open into something worse.
“This doesn’t fix anything,” I say, the words husky against his mouth.
“I know.”
“I still hate you.”
“I know,” he says again, and there’s something wrecked in it. Relief, maybe. Like hate is easier for him to hold than hope.
The last thread of my sense snaps. I pull him down.
The kiss is a collision. Brutal. Punishing. His mouth hits mine hard enough to bruise, and I taste stale whiskey and the metallic edge of split skin. He goes still for half a second—shock, maybe, or restraint—and then he kisses me back with the same vicious force.
I should knee him in the groin and throw him out into the snow.
Instead, I kiss him back. Just as violent. Just as angry. My teeth catch his bottom lip and he groans—pain or pleasure, I don’t care which.
This isn’t forgiveness. It’s mutual destruction.
Gabriel’s hands come up slow at first, like he’s giving me one last chance to shove him off, and when I don’t, they settle at my waist with a gripping possession that pools hot low in my core.
He backs me against the wall by the mechanical wolf, the impact knocking the air from my lungs.
His fingers slide up the nape of my neck to fist in my hair.
He yanks my head back, deepening the angle of the kiss, and I let him, crave it even, because the sharp sting only makes everything hotter, heavier, more desperate.
My palms shove under his parka, then his hoodie, finding heat and damp skin.
He makes a rough sound against my mouth when my nails rake across his ribs.
The sound shoots straight through me and only makes me angrier—at him, at myself, at the fact that this feels anything like relief, like finally letting go after years of pretending I didn’t want to claw him apart and pull him closer all at once.
Gabriel’s hand spans my waist, possessive and sure, and the other slides higher, pushing under the hem of my sweater with impatient fingers. The slide of his calluses sparks heat low in my belly. I arch into it, just slightly, and hate myself for that, too.
His thumb brushes the underside of my bra, and then his hand slips fully underneath, squeezing my breast with a greedy grip that drags a helpless moan from my throat. He pinches my nipple between his fingers, rolling it just hard enough to send a sharp, electric jolt straight down my spine.
Everything in me locks up. Cruel memories cut through this moment, making me bite his lip mid-kiss.
Calgary.
The smirk in his voice on that recording. The casual, ugly way he changed one private moment into fake currency.
Not us.
Not me.
A story he got to wear.
My stomach drops clean through the floor.
This is how it starts, my brain says.
The exact same mistake in a different room.
The exact same boy.
I shove him hard.
He stumbles back a step, catching himself on the edge of the bar. His mouth is swollen. His eyes are dark and dazed and open just wide enough for me to hate that part too—that he didn’t see it coming.
“Get out.”
He blinks once, like his body is still catching up to where mine already is.
“Ivy—”
“Get the fuck out.” I yank my shirt down before crossing my arms over my chest, trying to erase the last five minutes. Trying to pretend my heart isn’t hammering against my ribs. “Now.”
He stares at me. I watch the exact second it clicks for him—the shift in his eyes when the confusion clears and what’s left is hollowed-out exhaustion.
Swiping a hand across his mouth, Gabriel turns toward the door.
At the threshold, he hesitates. His shoulders tense like he might turn around, might try to say something.
But he doesn’t.
The door closes behind him with a soft click, leaving me alone with the mechanical wolf and the sound of my own ragged breathing.
I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the cold floor, knees drawn up to my chest. My lips still tingle from his mouth. My skin still burns where he touched me.
Outside, the wind howls through the village, carrying the sound of his footsteps away into the snow.
I allow myself exactly one minute on the floor.
Then, I force myself to stand. My legs are shaky, but I ignore them, walking stiffly to the mop bucket.
I fill it with water and pine cleaner before wiping the snowmelt off hardwood with punishing strokes.
I mop until my arms ache and the smell of chemicals burns the stale whiskey out of the air.
I put the bar back together because it’s the only thing I know how to fix.
When the hardwood is clean enough to eat off, I walk back into the office and sit in Dad’s chair. I pull the compliance notices back to the center of the desk.
The numbers haven’t changed. $75,000+. Thirteen days. Suspension of permit.
I press two fingers against my mouth until the tingling stops.
It takes longer than sixty seconds.