CHAPTER ONE
KIERAN
The whiskey is good. The company is the problem.
"You're sulking," Declan says, leaning against the bar beside me. "It's a whole vibe. Very tragic. Women love it."
"I'm not sulking."
"You've been holding that glass for ten minutes without drinking. That's either sulking or you've finally lost it."
I drink, mostly to shut him up. Behind the bar, the bottles glow under low amber light, and the back wall of Club Crimson hums with the kind of crowd that only shows up for Hot Mountain Nights. Once a year the doors open to vetted newcomers. Tourists who read one spicy book and decided they wanted to see the deep end. Curious locals. People dipping a toe in water they have no business standing near.
My brothers run this place. I just bleed for it on the build, hauled the timber, set the beams, sanded every inch of that bar top with my own hands two summers back. That's the only reason I agreed to come. One whiskey. A nod at the regulars. Then back up the mountain to my workshop and my dog and the silence I actually like.
"Bishop says you haven't scened since the spring before last," Declan says, casual, watching the room instead of me. My other brother. The blunt one.
"Bishop talks too much."
"Bishop's worried. There's a difference between taking a break and going feral, brother. You've gone feral."
A year and three months. Not that I'm counting. The last time I trusted somebody with that part of me, she took the control I handed over and sharpened it into something she could turn around and cut me with. Lied to my face about her limits to manufacture a reason to be wounded. Used the trust like leverage. Vanessa understood exactly what she was doing, and that's what still sits wrong in my chest. It wasn't a mistake. It was a strategy.
So I built furniture instead. Cleaner work. Wood does what you tell it or it doesn't, and either way it never pretends.
"I'm having my whiskey," I tell him. "Then I'm gone."
"Sure you are."
The door opens.
I don't know why I look. The door's opened forty times tonight. But I look, and then I'm looking, and the whiskey stays where it is.
Red dress. Fitted close enough that it qualifies as an opinion. Brown skin warm under the lights, dark curls pushed back off one shoulder, gold at her ears. She stops three steps inside and scans the room, slow, taking inventory.
Her eyes move across the bar. Land on me.
She doesn't look away.
Most people do. They feel the weight of being seen by somebody who isn't going to blink first and they find the floor real interesting. She holds it. One eyebrow goes up half an inch, faint, almost bored, and something in my spine pulls tight that hasn't pulled tight in over a year.
"Oh," Declan says quietly. "There it is."
"Shut up."
"That's the most alive your face has looked since Thanksgiving."
She starts toward the bar. Not toward me, exactly. Toward the open stretch of it that happens to be next to the empty stool on my left. Confident in her hips, unhurried, a woman who learned a long time ago that the room waits for her and not the reverse.
She reaches the bar. Doesn't sit. Catches the bartender's eye and orders something I can't hear over the music, then turns her head a few degrees and finds me again like she's confirming I'm still paying attention.
I am. We both know I am.
Here's the part I should be smart about. Summer crowd. New face. She's got vacation written all over her, here a few weeks and gone before the leaves turn, and the smartest move I own is to finish my drink and let her be somebody else's good idea.
I pull out the empty stool next to mine.
"Sit."
