CHAPTER SEVEN
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VICTORIA
“Tori! Grab the ladder, this shelf’s a war crime.”
The woman shouting my name was up on a beer crate with one arm stretched over her head, reaching for a top shelf she was never going to reach. Buzzed head, bar rag hanging out of her back pocket. The whole room smelled like last night’s beer and this morning’s bleach.
Before Bex, only Corinne and my grandmother had called me Tori. One of them was dead. Hearing it in that bar should have hurt more than it did.
“There’s no ladder,” I said.
“There’s a ladder. It lives behind the ice machine, because Karim hides it there and thinks that’s a secret.” She came down off the crate and landed like the floor owed her money. “Bex. I run this bar, which makes me the only part of this building that works.”
I was still in Marcus’s shirt, under my jacket, sleeves rolled twice at the wrist. I had had every chance to take it off since before the sun came up and I had taken none of them, and I was not going to stand in an empty bar at nine fifteen in the morning and think about why.
“What’s even up there,” I said.
“Nothing anybody’s ordered since the day I got hired. That’s what makes it a war crime.”
Bex found the ladder. I held it. She came down with three bottles of something orange under one arm.
“Coffee,” she said. “You take it how?”
“Black.”
“Thank God. Our milk’s older than my tattoo.” She poured two mugs off a pot that had been sitting long enough to smell like a diner at closing. “You sleep? Don’t answer, you didn’t.”
“I slept.”
“You didn’t, and I’m not being a jerk about it. I can smell it. Everybody in this building can smell it, it’s rude, and shifters can’t help it any more than you can help having a face. Your scent’s loud right now. It settles.”
She said it the way another woman would have told me my collar was flipped up.
“Bathroom’s through the arch. Hot water takes a minute and then it takes all of it,” she said. “Anybody’s toothpaste is your toothpaste. There’s a hoodie behind the register that belongs to nobody.”
On a stool beneath it was a clean canvas tote. Corinne had sent my spare depot kit with one of the club’s regular drivers: plain shirts, socks, work trousers, my blank forms and document sleeves. Bex had put a new toothbrush on top. Nothing had come out of my apartment.
Marcus’s prepaid phone lay beside the tote, with Corinne, the Forge, and all three men already in the contacts. He had brought it before dawn, while Adrian showed me the inner room. He had left the screen unlocked.
“I’ve got a—”
“You’ve got somebody’s shirt.” She did not look up from the rack. “That’s a whole different sentence and I’m not gonna say it twice.”
I drank the coffee. It was terrible and it was black and it was the first thing that morning that was exactly what I had been told it would be.
Then she pushed a wet rag across the bar at me and pointed with her chin at the rail.
“That’s sticky from about eleven last night. Go down it once and then we’ll do glasses.”
That was the whole thing. No soft voice, no head tilt, no careful pause before my name. Nobody in this building had handed me a job before. They had handed me plates, and answers to questions I had not asked, and a bed.
The rag was cold and heavy and my hands had something to do with themselves. For the length of one bar rail I was an employee of nothing, an inconvenience to nobody, a woman with a mess in front of her and a rag in her hand.
“Why are you being decent to me,” I said. It did not come out as a question.
Bex thought about that for exactly as long as it took her to drink coffee.
“Nobody here’s gonna be nice to you. I’m not nice. I’m just not a dick, which around here reads the same.” She set the mug down on the drip mat. “You’ve got a shift to get through. So do I. That’s the whole arrangement.”
“I don’t work here.”
“Neither do I, technically. I’ve got a jar of tips, a lynx problem, and no contract.
” She started racking glasses two at a time, fast, without looking down at her hands.
“And they’ll tell you this is a club. It’s a pack, whatever anybody’s told you, and a pack’s got one alpha, and he decides things at four in the morning and lets the rest of us know on Sunday. ”
“Which one’s the alpha.”
“Yeah, you know which one.” One syllable of a laugh, with nothing mean in it anywhere.
I put the rag down.
“I want to ask you a real one.”
“Before noon I’ll answer anything. After noon I’m a liar.”
“Am I allowed to leave?”
Bex set the last two glasses up on the rack and turned around and looked at me straight on. She had not done that since the ladder.
“That’s not mine to answer, and I’d be doing you dirt if I guessed at it.” She wiped both hands down her jeans. “Go ask the one who’ll give you a straight yes or a straight no. That’s Marcus. Adrian’ll give you an order and Luca’ll give you a sandwich.”
“And you?”
“I’ll give you a rail to wipe and I won’t ask you one single thing about last night.” She hooked a crate up onto her hip. “Which is about the nicest thing anybody in here is capable of, so take the win.”
“Can you leave whenever you want?”
“Coat, door, bus. Nobody says a word to me about it and nobody ever has.” She held the crate there and looked at me a second longer than the question needed. “I’m not saying that to be cute. You’re standing in my bar doing math, and I’d rather you were doing it with the real numbers.”
On her way past she squeezed my shoulder once and took her hand back without stopping.
I had come off the mattress at four this morning at the sound of a door and I had not been able to breathe for a count of ten, and I did not flinch at Bex’s hand, and my body knew the difference before I had one word to put on it.
?
The long table ran under the high windows at the end of the shop floor, and it was laid for men who eat in shifts — a pan still hot, a stack of plates, bread torn instead of cut.
Luca was at the far side with his sleeves shoved above the elbow, forearms burned from wrist to elbow, working through a plate like the plate had said something.
The chair at the near end had been turned around.
Not pulled out. Turned — swung and set back down at an angle, so that whoever sat in it had the door in view and the wall behind their shoulders.
Nobody was looking at it. Luca did not look at it. He tore bread and reached for the pan.
I sat down in it.
Something under my ribs came loose and dropped, and my shoulders went down an inch, and all of that happened while my head was still working out what the chair was for.
“Coffee’s on the plate side. Eat first.”
That was all he said, and then he went on eating.
So I ate.
“There’s more in the pan. There’s always more in the pan, because nobody in this building eats like a person.” He pushed it an inch my way with two fingers and did not look up. “Bread’s a day old and it’s honest about it.”
“I’m fine.”
“You said that last night and then you cleared the plate.”
“Is he going to talk to me at some point?”
I did not say which one. I did not have to, and I heard the fork stop before I heard anything else.
“Yeah.”
“When.”
“When he’s got something he can stand behind saying.” He started in on the pan itself. “Don’t hold your breath, and don’t take it personal. It’s the same for all of us and it always has been.”
The light over the table was flat and gray and did nothing for the room, but it did something to his arms every time he reached across it, the shift of muscle under ruined skin, and I looked at that until he caught me at it, and I did not look away first.
“Slower, trouble,” he said. “It’s not a race and nobody’s taking it off you.”
He is the size of the animal he turns into and there is no hiding it. He went after the salt and the whole table moved half an inch. I thought about a bear the way people think about weather, which is to say without any opinion about whether it likes them.
And I wanted to be nearer to him than the table allowed. I did not know whether I could leave this building, and my body had picked this morning to have a preference. I ate the bread.
“Where’s Marcus,” I said.
“Yard.”
He did not ask why. That was its own kind of answer.
The yard was wet brick and diesel and that flat gray light with no shadows anywhere in it, the kind of morning that tells nobody what time it is. Two patched men had a carburetor in pieces on a milk crate by the roll door, and behind them a throttle came up twice and died.
I did not look at Adrian. I knew where he was standing anyway, down to the foot, the way a person knows where a wolf is in a small room.
He was looking at me. I did not check and I did not have to — it came across the wet brick and settled at the base of my skull, and my hands went into my jacket pockets.
Marcus came off the fence without a sound. That is a panther thing and not a manners thing, and the difference matters.
“You’re up early for somebody who didn’t sleep,” he said. “Or you’re up late. I can’t tell yet which one I’m talking to.”
“Who’s got the key to the gate?”
“There’s no key. It bolts from the inside, and you’re standing on the—”
“That isn’t an answer to what I asked,” I said.
“It’s the only one there is. I can make it prettier for you. It won’t get any truer.”
He drew the bolt himself, one hand, no ceremony. He did not ask me whether I wanted it drawn and he did not tell me what it meant that it was, and the gate swung a foot on its own weight and stopped there, standing open on Rosewood Street.
Nobody moved. Not the men with the carburetor. Not the one by the roll door.
“I’ll keep behind you. You can hate me the whole way.”
“No.”
“Okay.” Three gold rings caught the flat light as he leaned back against the fence and folded his arms. “You’ve got about four blocks in you before you turn around. I’d bet money.”
“Don’t.”
“Too late. I said it where you could hear it, so now it’s real and now you have to prove me wrong.” Something moved at the corner of his mouth and then decided not to. “Go on. It’s eight steps to the street. You choose the direction.”