She stares at me for a moment. "Danny literally talks about you like you're a saint."
"Danny has never called me a saint in his life."
"He called you the best hire he'd made in a decade. Last week. To a table of customers who weren't even talking about you."
I'm going to have to buy Danny a very good bottle of something at some point and I'm going to have to find a way to not make it weird.
"I'm not glamorous," I tell her. "I'm just consistent. There's a difference."
"Sure."
"Now let's keep moving or we're here until seven and I have opinions about seven AM."
Jamie reappears from the floor section with an order on his notepad. Priya goes to handle the end of the bar. The game on the screen reaches something that the room reacts to with collective volume, and I'm already moving—glass in hand, ice cracked, the sequence running smooth and automatic while the noise of the evening washes through and around me.
My scent is present and working: the honey and vanilla a constant underneath the bar's ambient overlay of spirits and crowd, the lime zest threading in when someone orders something that requires the full concentration of a complicated build. My own signature, doing what it does. Entirely mine, entirely unbothered by the room's collective Alpha energy, which the perfume's effect has apparently left something of itself in even now.
Finn comes back to the bar once more, toward the end of the second hour. Different drink this time—he asks for the recipe on the Clover Sling, specifically, which tells me someone mentioned it, which tells me the word has gotten around the masquerade crowd faster than I'd tracked.
Cole's recipe. In my clutch. In an apartment drawer now.
I can make this from memory.
I build it: Irish whiskey base, the green Chartreuse measured carefully because it overpowers when it dominates, the fresh lime juice bright and cutting, the sparkling water float over the back of a spoon to keep the layers. It comes out the gold-green of the original, the same quality of light in the glass.
Finn takes it, looks at it.
"You were at the event last night," he says. Not a question.
I keep my expression entirely level. "The Clover Sling is Cole's recipe. He shared it."
Finn looks at the drink. Then at me. The bourbon-and-citrus scent of him carries a note of something sharper now—notaggression, more like a recalibration, the scent version of a man updating a theory.
He doesn't push it. He takes the glass and goes.
He knows.
Or he suspects. Which amounts to the same thing with a man who reads rooms the way that one clearly does.
Fine. He can suspect. He doesn't have enough information to do anything with it, and I'm behind a bar in a ponytail in a green shirt and I look nothing like last night's version of this situation, so.
I turn to the next order.
The rain is still coming down outside. The game on the screen is reaching its final period. The bar is loud and warm and smells like an entire holiday's worth of spirits and celebration, and I am in it and of it in the way I've always been in bars—at home in a way I'm at home nowhere else, the work absorbing the things I can't think about directly and giving me the clean, forward momentum of purpose.
Let's try to survive this shift.
CHAPTER 12
Never An Unproblematic Night
~MILA~
3 AM in a bar on St. Patrick's Day is its own specific ecosystem.
By this hour, seventy-five percent of the crowd has reached one of three states: aggressively celebratory, incoherently philosophical, or passed the threshold where decision-making is a theoretical concept. The remaining twenty-five percent are the ones holding their liquor, still lucid, still loud, which is often the more dangerous category because they have enough coordination left to act on whatever is currently running through their heads.
The game ended an hour ago—a win, judging by the way the Alpha-heavy section in the back erupted when the final buzzer went, the sound of it cresting over every other noise in the building before settling into the satisfied roar of men who have the outcome they wanted and are now celebrating with the full conviction of people who personally contributed to it from their barstools.
