5. Declan
Declan
The landlord’s letter is still on the bar, right where I left it. I’ve been staring at the damn thing for an hour, as if my attention alone can make the number next to the words rent increase shrink.
It hasn’t.
The paper is crisp and official, a piece of someone else’s world dropped onto my scarred oak bar top.
Clipped to the back is the buyout offer from some hospitality group with a name like a tax firm and a logo that promises ten-dollar light beers.
They want to gut this place and turn it into another soulless box for kids with their parents’ money.
They want to erase it. Erase me.
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. The bar is always too quiet in the mornings. No jukebox, no arguments over sports, no sound but the hum of the coolers. It smells like lemon disinfectant and the faint, sour ghost of last night’s spilled drinks.
And underneath it all, it smells like him. The scent is everywhere—clinging to the upholstery of the stool beside me, on me. I dragged myself out of a bed that was still warm on his side, the sheets tangled and smelling of sex and a panic so sharp it felt like it was in the back of my own throat.
He’s gone. The Henley I’d left on the chair upstairs is gone with him.
My gaze drops to my own forearm. Just below the cuff of my sleeve, there’s a dark crescent of teeth marks, the skin around it bruised and swollen. He must have done it last night, right at the end, when he was coming apart under me. I barely registered it then.
Now, it throbs. A low, steady pulse that echoes a deep, possessive satisfaction in my gut. It’s a stupid, animal part of my brain that sees the mark and thinks, Good. Mine.
I trace the indentation with my thumb, and the feeling only gets stronger. It’s the worst possible thought to have about a kid I just terrified into running out of my apartment before the sun was even up.
“No,” I mutter, the word swallowed by the silence. It doesn’t change a thing.
I put my teeth in his throat.
He’d said one night, no strings attached. He’d looked me right in the eye, cool and cutting, daring me to misunderstand. I did worse. I understood him perfectly, and when it came down to it, I let some feral part of me take over anyway.
That bite is permanent.
So is the memory of how he looked right after—dazed and soft for one single, brutal second, before the fear slammed back into his eyes. I should have been better. Instead, I made him run.
The front door groans open. I don’t turn around, but the soft clack of boots on the floorboards is familiar.
“Planning on setting that paper on fire with your mind,” Tessa says, “or is this just a new hobby?”
“Morning.”
“That bad, huh?”
I finally look up. Tessa’s got her dark hair shoved into a messy knot, wearing her usual black jeans and a Byrne’s shirt. Her expression is flat enough to scare someone into tipping well. She takes one look at my face, then her eyes drop to my arm.
She stops walking.
I brace for the question, the lecture. Maybe a right hook. She’s known me long enough to know I don’t make messes like this.
But she just walks behind the bar, grabs the coffee pot, and pours a mug for herself without a word. She leans against the counter, takes a long sip, and then looks at my forearm again.
“So that’s a claiming bite,” she says. It’s not a question.
“No shit.”
“Right.” She gives me a look over the rim of her mug. “You want to tell me why you smell like you got mated and then slept for about ten minutes?”
“Didn’t sleep.”
“Yeah, I can tell. You look like a haunted coat rack.”
A rough sound that’s almost a laugh gets stuck in my throat.
Tessa settles onto a stool across from me and pulls the letter closer. Her coffee steams in the quiet. The only sound is the hum of the fridge compressor kicking on.
She reads. Her face doesn’t change much, just goes still. The dry amusement she usually has drains right out of her eyes, and my gut clenches.
“Jesus,” she says quietly.
“Yeah.”
“This is the new rate?”
“Starts in three months.”
She taps the clipped offer. “And this is the buyout.”
“End of the month to decide.”
Tessa leans back, staring at the page. “They’re trying to scare you into selling.”
“They don’t have to try that hard.”
Her eyes snap to mine. “Don’t.”
“I’m being realistic, Tess.”
“You’re being dramatic in a very boring way.”
I scrub both hands over my face. “The numbers aren’t dramatic.”
“No, the numbers are shit. You deciding it’s over before we’ve even had our coffee is the dramatic part.”
I look past her at the booths, at the cracked leather and the little dents in the tables from years of sweating glasses. The back booth still has a napkin jammed under one leg to keep it from wobbling. One of Benji’s, probably, covered in those weird little doodles of his.
This place is built out of second chances.
Mine. The cracked vinyl on the booth seats, the dent in the wall by the pool table, the layers of varnish on the bar top—it’s all scar tissue.
My first bar went down so fast I barely knew what hit me.
One day I had my name over the door, the next I was selling the coolers for parts and dodging my dad’s calls because I couldn’t stomach the quiet disappointment in his voice.
Byrne’s was supposed to be different. It is different.
But it’s not paid for, and it’s not safe.
The back door slams open, rattling in its frame.
“Morning,” Diego calls out. He sounds about a hundred times more cheerful than the day deserves. “Got the produce. Also, they sent two crates of limes by mistake. I think they’re trying to tell us to make more margaritas.”
He comes out of the kitchen with a box in his arms, his Byrne’s t-shirt straining across his shoulders. He’s got that easy grin he wears, the one that says he’s never had a problem he couldn’t out-lift. Then he sees Tessa’s face. Then mine. His smile fades when his eyes catch on the letter.
“Oh,” he says.
“Just put it down,” Tessa tells him.
Diego sets the box on a table like it’s fragile. “Is everything… okay?”
“No,” I say.
He drifts closer anyway. Diego’s never been good at respecting the perimeter of a bad mood. He reads the letter over Tessa’s shoulder, his brow furrowing.
“That’s fucked up.”
“Eloquent,” Tessa says.
He looks at me, his gaze full of a sympathy that makes my skin crawl. Then his eyes drop to my arm. His whole face changes.
“Is that—”
“Diego,” Tessa says, a clear warning in her voice.
“Sorry, I just—” He rubs a hand over his jaw, looking between the letter and my arm. “Okay, so the landlord’s trying to kill the bar, and you bit Shay. Boss, what the hell is happening?”
A rough, ugly sound escapes my throat. It might be a laugh.
Tessa just pinches the bridge of her nose.
Diego seems to take the lack of yelling as an invitation to continue. “Not that it’s a bad thing,” he adds quickly. “The biting. Good for you. It’s about time. We all figured you were weird about him.”
“We did not,” I say, the words flat and dead.
Tessa slowly turns her head to look at me.
Diego just blinks. “We did, though. My cousin who does dishes asked me about it last week.”
“Your cousin needs to focus on the pre-rinse cycle,” Tessa says.
I look away from both of them, toward the big front windows. The neon Byrne’s sign is dark. Outside, the morning is moving on. A delivery truck rumbles past. A couple of students walk by, heads bent over their phones. Normal.
He could be out there. Walking to class, trying to figure out how to cover the mark on his neck. Trying to forget he spent the night with an alpha who lost control. The thought is a physical weight in my chest.
“I didn’t mean to,” I hear myself say.
The bar goes quiet. Even the coolers seem to stop humming.
Tessa sets her mug down with a soft click. “Declan.”
“He told me one night,” I say, the words rough in my throat. “I agreed. Then I went and bit him.”
Diego makes a small, aborted sound. Tessa shoots him a look that could strip paint, and he goes silent.
“So he ran,” I finish, staring at the scarred wood of the bar.
Her expression shifts into something that looks too much like pity, and I have to look away. I’d rather she yell at me.
“Did you hurt him?” she asks.
“No.” The word is sharp, defensive. Then the anger drains out, leaving me hollow. “He wanted it. All of it. But the bite… that wasn’t the plan.”
“What was the plan, then?” Tessa’s voice is quiet, but it cuts right through me. “The one where you pour every piece of yourself into this bar so you never have to risk a goddamn thing? The one where you work yourself to death so you can’t be disappointed when it’s all you have?”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?” She leans forward, her hands flat on the bar. “You built this place to be safe. Well, the world came for it anyway. And now this kid walks in here, someone you actually want, and you’re acting like he’s just one more thing you’re about to lose.”
Diego shifts his weight. “She’s not wrong, boss.”
“Don’t use him as an excuse,” Tessa says, her eyes locked on mine. “Don’t you dare act like this is the universe punishing you for finally looking up from the damn receipts.”
My jaw aches. She says it so simply, like she’s telling me we’re out of lemons, and it hits with the force of a physical blow because it’s true.
“I don’t know how to fix it,” I admit. “Any of it.”
“You start with the problem that’s right in front of you.”
As if on cue, the front door opens.
The bell overhead gives a single, sharp jangle that goes straight down my spine. My head snaps up. My entire body tenses.
It’s Shay.
He’s standing just inside the doorway, holding a black binder against his chest. His curls are perfect, his expression is a careful, neutral mask, and he’s wearing my Henley.
It hangs loose on his frame, the sleeves shoved up to his elbows. The collar is wide enough that I can see the dark, angry red of the claiming bite on his neck. My mark.
For a long, silent moment, the air leaves my lungs. He looks furious. He looks beautiful. He looks like he belongs in my shirt.