“Is that all?” he asks, his tone flat. He knows better.
I don't answer. I just keep walking. He lets his hand drop. “Don’t start a fire you can’t put out,” he murmurs, right before he peels off, leaving me to walk the last few feet alone. The warning hangs in the air between us, a debt I already owe.
The bar is sticky with heat and spilled drinks. The air smells of sweat and whiskey. She notices me when I’m almost there. It’s not a turn of her head, just a flick of her eyes in the mirror behind the bar. It lands like a punch.
“Didn’t expect to see royalty gracing our humble establishment,” I say, leaning an elbow on the counter. My voice is a low, teasing drawl, a weapon I use to keep her at a distance, to pull her in close. “Lose your way, princess?”
“Never,” she says, her voice flat and bored as she turns her head. It’s a slow, deliberate movement. She takes in my cut, my worn jeans, the grime under my nails. “But don’t worry. I can slum it for a night.”
I let out a short laugh, moving a step closer. “Shame. I shaved and everything.”
Her mouth twitches. Almost a smile. It’s a flicker of the girl from before, and my gut clenches with a phantom ache. She kills it fast, her expression smoothing back into a mask of cool indifference. “You missed a spot.”
“Still looking close enough to notice, huh?” The words are out before I can stop them, more revealing than I intended.
Kyle appears with a beer I didn’t order and sets it in front of me. The kid’s eager, too damn much like Declan when we were his age. All nerves and big dreams. Makes me want to keep him far from every kind of ruin I’ve learned to live with. He glances between me and Darla before wisely backing away. I slide the water he brought earlier toward her. She leaves it where it lands.
“Frankie dragged me here,” she says, her eyes already moving past me, dismissing me. “Save your ego the trouble.”
“Frankie has taste,” I say.
“She has loyalty,” she corrects, and the word lands soft and heavy between us.
That’s when a guy I don’t recognize drifts in. His breath is thick with cheap rye. He plants a hand on the bar too close to Darla’s wrist. “Didn’t know Frankie had friends this gorgeous,” he says.
Darla turns her head as if she might be bored to death. “Didn’t know Willowridge let strays off the leash.”
The guy smirks, leaning in further. “I can show you a good time.”
I’m moving before I think, wedging between them with a grin sharp enough to cut. The guy’s breath reeks of rye and sweat, the kind that makes your skin crawl. The heat of her body through the thin fabric of her tank top is a jolt against my arm.
“Back off,” I tell him, my smile still in place. “Not your pond.”
He shifts his weight in that twitchy pre-fight tremble. A second shadow leans in on his far side. Nash. No sound, no threat. Just a hand closing on the back of the guy’s collar. “Walk away,” Nash says, so soft the words barely exist. The guy goes.
Darla lets out a breath. Controlled. As if she refuses to let me hear her pulse. “I had it,” she says without looking up.
“Didn’t say you didn’t,” I answer. “Didn’t like watching it.”
Her eyes find mine. They are not kind. “You don’t get to care.”
There it is. The steel under the silk. She learned how to weaponise pain, and damn if it doesn’t cut clean. The words hit like a fist to the solar plexus, knocking all the air out of me. I push a laugh through my teeth like it doesn’t matter.
“Noted.”
Frankie materializes on Darla’s other side with two shot glasses and a feral grin. “You good?”
“Peachy,” Darla says.
Frankie clocks me, points at my chest. “Behave.”
I lift my hands. “Always.”
“Liar,” she says, smiling, and melts back into the crowd.
Now it’s just us again. Music thick as humidity. Darla rocks the untouched shot back and forth between her palms. “You still think you’re the funniest guy in the room,” she murmurs.
I smirk. “Usually am.”
