CHAPTER TWELVE
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VICTORIA
“Everybody. This is Victoria. She’s mine tonight, so behave.”
Bex said it from up on the bar rail with a bottle in each hand, and forty faces came around at once. My own name went out across that room and landed on all of them at the same time. Over by the pool table a man lifted his glass to me like we had known each other for years.
I put my forearms down on the rail because the rail was cold and my hands were not.
It was the first crowd I had stood inside since Tuesday.
The Sable Room at ten past one on a Saturday has its own weather.
Beer gone warm in the rubber mats, cigarette smoke drifting back in off the propped rear door, and under all of it the hot brake dust of the bikes cooling out in the yard.
The jukebox was two songs from closing and somebody kept feeding it.
The rear door was wedged with a folding chair. Cold came along the floor in a flat sheet, and when I bent to the cooler I could see my breath going out over the bottles.
I went down into the cooler and the cold came up both forearms, and my body handed me something else — a hand spanning my ribs from behind, the exact weight of it. Two seconds gone. I came up with the wrong bottle.
“Two fingers,” Bex said. “Not four. What are you, a bartender or a charity?”
“You told me to fill it till it looked right.”
“It looked right two seconds ago. Now it looks like a proposal.”
“How am I supposed to know when it looks right?”
“Thumb on the neck, two beats, tip it up. You’ll feel it before you see it.” She took the bottle out of my hand and did it once, slow, so I could watch. “There. That’s a pour. What you did is how a bar goes under.”
She had been teaching me the well pours since ten. Bad whiskey, mostly, poured for men who did not care, and she swore at me steadily and cheerfully the whole time, and I had not thought about the long table or the number Adrian said back to me for whole minutes together.
Adrian was at the far table with his back three-quarters to me and he had not looked over once, and I knew where he was the whole time anyway. I poured past the line twice because of it.
“Whatever you’re watching, watch the glass instead,” Bex said.
“I’m not watching anything.”
“Uh huh. That’s twice you’ve gone past the line, and it isn’t the bottle’s fault.”
“It’s a bad line.”
“It’s a great line. I drew it myself.” Bex took the bottle, poured, set it down. “That’s a pour. Yours is a donation.”
“You’re enjoying—”
“I’m having the best night of my week.”
I got it right on the third one.
A patched member with a burned thumb leaned in and ordered a Harbor Sling.
“Tall glass,” he said. “Bottom shelf, behind the sour mix.”
I got down on my knees and hunted the bottom shelf for it.
Bex reached over me and set a beer in front of him. “There’s no such drink,” she said. “He does that to everybody.”
He grinned at me with most of his own teeth and did not apologize.
“How long have you been letting him do that?” I said.
“Since the day I got hired. It’s a rite.” Bex thumbed the tap handle back. “Last month he sent a prospect to the store for it and the kid came home with a bag of limes and no dignity left.”
“Somebody could tell—”
“Somebody does tell them,” she said. “Nobody believes her.”
A man at the far end wanted well bourbon and told me his name twice and forgot mine both times.
“Two fingers,” he said. “Like she said.”
“You were listening.”
“Everybody in here’s listening, sweetheart. It’s the only show on tonight.”
“Don’t call her that,” Bex said, not looking up.
“What do I call her, then?”
“Victoria. She’s got a name. You heard it off the rail same as the rest of them.”
That was ten minutes of the best time I had had in five days, and I want that on the record, because of what came after it.
Somebody put a hand low on my back to get past me behind the rail and I went rigid all the way down. It was a man reaching for a towel. My body had already decided whose hand it was, and it had not asked me anything. That happens to me now.
Then the front door opened and stayed open.
Rennick came in alone. Bald, heavy, a nose flattened more than once, and the nail gun riding on a strap across his chest the way another man carries a camera.
He had left the compressor out on the sidewalk.
The hose came in through the propped door behind him and lay across the floor in a long yellow line, and out at the curb the truck that brought him sat running with somebody in the seat who did not get out.
Two men stood up off their stools. Across the room Adrian lifted two fingers off the table without looking, and they sat back down.
Rennick did not go to Adrian. That is what I keep coming back to. He walked out onto the floor where the tables thin, and he stood there in front of forty people and said it to the room.
“Victoria Russo.”
Nothing happened. A woman near the jukebox laughed, one syllable, the way people laugh at a thing they have not understood yet.
“Who?” a man said behind her.
“Bex’s girl. The one behind the bar.”
“That’s a Russo?” somebody else said, and it was not a nice voice, and it was not an unkind one either. It was the voice of a man doing arithmetic.
The song ran out and the next one did not start, and the machine sat there lit up and quiet.
“I’ve got no business with anybody in this room,” he said, comfortable, taking all the time he wanted. “Not with the Riders, not tonight. I came in to say one thing and then I’m gone and every one of you goes back to his drink.”
“Then say it outside,” a man near the pool table said.
“Let him talk,” said somebody else, and I have not forgiven whoever that was.
“I only came to introduce her properly,” Rennick said. “The girl on the bar did it wrong.”
He put both hands flat on the long table by the door. The one with the short leg. The one somebody shimmed years ago with a beer mat folded into quarters, so that it rocks under any weight.
He said it again, and this time he finished it.
“Victoria Russo. Your Warden. Right there behind the bar, pouring drinks.”
The room turned before I had the sentence.
Forty people shifted their weight at one time and that is a sound, it is a real sound, and it went through me at the knees before any part of my head caught up.
Bex’s chin came up beside me. She told me later the whole scent of the place went over at once, like a truck taking a corner.
It cost the man who sent him nothing. No money, no men, no risk. Ten words in a bar full of shifters on a Saturday, and by morning every dangerous thing in this city would have them.
Adrian had been on the far side of that room since midnight and had not once come nearer to me than ten feet. He crossed it now. He did not hurry and he did not speak until he was standing close enough to smell.
The sore place under my sternum had counted every one of those ten feet. It let go when he crossed that floor, and I would have had him cross it sooner.
When he did speak he was quieter than the room. Not a growl and not a shout. Lower and slower than every other voice in the building, so that people leaned in to catch it, which is why all of them heard it.
“Say her name again and I’ll make you eat the table you’re leaning on.”
Rennick smiled at him with his weight still down on the wood.
“You’re going to want to—”
It went physical inside four seconds. Adrian hit him with the right hand, once, and I heard the sound it made over the whole room, and I saw the skin go on his knuckles. I wanted that and I got it, and I am not sorry.
Rennick came off the table sideways. The shim skated out of the leg and the whole thing went down with him, glasses and mats and the beer mat spinning away flat across the floor.
He was not finished. That is the thing nobody tells you about men like that. He came up onto one knee with his hand on the strap and the gun swinging around, and a nail went into the floorboards a foot from Bex’s cooler, and Bex kept her hand on the bottle she was holding.
“Hose,” Luca said.
He crossed behind Rennick without hurrying, the way a bear crosses a road, and he took the gun off the strap with one hand and cut the yellow line with the other. The air went out of it in a long falling note, and the thing died in Luca’s hands like a snake.
Marcus was already at the door. Three gold rings on the frame, his body between the two women nearest it and the rest of it, and he never raised his voice once.
They put Rennick out on his feet. Nobody carried him. He went with blood coming off his chin onto his shirt, and he was smiling around it, because he had done the whole of what he came for before the first punch landed.
Marcus photographed the gun, the broken hose, and Rennick’s bleeding face. “Your truck has two cameras pointed into this room,” he told him. “Your boss wanted a story about animals. Take him one about a human who brought a weapon into a crowded bar.”
He kept the street door between the enforcer and the women inside. Adrian let him do it. Not mercy. Forty witnesses, and Crane waiting to spend every one of them.
He stopped in the doorway with the cold coming in past him.
“Nine more days and every dog in this city has heard it.”
Then the door, and the truck coming off the curb hard on the throttle, and the hose still lying across the floor with nothing on the end of it.
“Shut the door,” somebody said.
“Leave it,” Bex said. “I want the air.”
Adrian did not shift and the wolf did not come out of him. It came up under the skin of his face and looked at the room out of his eyes, and the room saw it.
Seventeen men wear that cut and most were in there, and not one of them had ever watched their alpha do that for a witch who was not pack. I saw two of them look at each other over their glasses. Then away. Neither of them said a word, and I have thought about that look more than about the punch.
Nobody in that room would have called it a claim. Every one of them knew that was what it was.