BONE DEEP

The bar didn't have a name anymore. The sign had blown down in a storm three years ago and nobody had bothered to replace it, which suited Wren Calloway just fine. Nameless things were easier to leave… 

She was wiping down the counter when the door opened, which was not unusual. Last call was technically midnight, and it was eleven forty-six. What was unusual was the smell: pine resin and cold stone and something older underneath, like the forest right before it decides it doesn't like you.

Oh… 

High-rank. 

Very high-rank.

Wren kept wiping the counter. Behind her, the jukebox wheezed through the final bars of a Loretta Lynn song nobody had asked for.

Three of them. She counted by sound. 

The weight of their boots, the shift in air pressure that always happened when dominant wolves entered a room… 

Most people wouldn't notice it, but Wren had been noticing it her whole life, cataloguing things she wasn't supposed to be able to catalogue, filing them quietly under don't mention this to anyone. Her own wolf, small and cautious as it always presented, pressed itself flat against her ribcage and went still.

Smart animal, huh. 

"We're closing," she said, without turning around.

"Sign says midnight."

The voice came from directly behind her. Too close for someone who'd walked in six seconds ago, which meant he'd moved fast and quiet across a room, which meant he was practiced at being dangerous. Wren had grown up in a pack. She knew the difference between a wolf who was big and one who had actually learned how to use it.

She turned around.

She'd have been embarrassed about what her face did in that first second, except there was nobody watching her closely enough to report back.

Oh, he was tall. Not absurdly so, but enough that she had to angle her chin up, which she resented on principle. Dark hair, a little rough, like he hadn't thought about it. A jaw that looked like it had opinions. And eyes the particular shade of grey that wasn't soft at all; more like shale, like something that would cut you if you fell the wrong way.

Then it hit her.

Not attraction. She wanted to be very clear about that, even in the privacy of her own skull. It wasn't attraction: it was more like recognition. Like a key turning in a lock she hadn't known existed. 

Her wolf came off the floor of her chest and pressed forward, suddenly alive, suddenly electric, straining toward him the way a compass strains toward north. And Wren shoved it back down with the practiced ease of someone who'd been doing exactly that for twenty-four years.

Not now. Not ever.

"Sign says midnight," she ended up agreeing. "What do you want?"

"Whiskey. Neat." He sat down at the bar like he owned it. Like he owned everything in a six-mile radius and was simply tolerating its existence.

She poured it. She was not going to make this weird.

"You're not from Harlow Pack," he said.

"Observant." She set the glass down. "That'll be eight dollars."

One of the men behind him: big, scarred across one eyebrow, a wolf who looked like he'd been in every fight and won most of them, made a low sound. Not quite a growl. A suggestion. Wren looked at him. Then she looked back at the man at the bar.

"Tell your friend to relax," she said. "I'm just a bartender."

"Are you."

It wasn’t a question. It was the tone of someone sitting on information they were enjoying not sharing. Wren had three older brothers. She recognized it immediately and found it just as irritating now as she had at age eight.

"You want to tell me your name," she said, "or are we doing the mysterious stranger bit all night? Because I've got a mop to push."

Something moved in his face. Almost amusement. 

Almost. 

"Declan Mór. Blackridge Pack."

Blackridge.

She kept her expression level through years of practice. Blackridge was north. Fifty miles of hard wilderness north, which meant these wolves were deep out of their territory. Blackridge was also the largest pack in the state, which made Declan Mór, if that's who he actually was, the most powerful alpha in four hundred miles.

Sitting in her nameless bar. Drinking her well whiskey. Eight dollars.

"Long drive," she said.

"Worth it." His eyes hadn't moved off her face. "You're Wren Calloway."

"I'm the bartender."

"Does your alpha know you're working a public bar? No pack escort, no sentinel…"

"My alpha doesn't track my whereabouts." She kept her voice light. Easy. The voice she used when she needed someone to think they hadn't gotten to her. "I'm low-rank. Not a lot of people paying close attention to what I do." She spread her hands. "See? Just a bartender."

Declan picked up his glass. Took a slow drink. Set it back down with the deliberate precision of someone who thought before every move.

"That's interesting," he said. "Because you don't smell low-rank."

The bar went quiet. Even the jukebox seemed to hold its breath.

Wren's wolf surged inside her chest. Not with fear, but with something hot and furious and old, some instinct that had no name she'd ever been given. 

She pressed it back down, smooth, automatic, the same way she swallowed everything that tried to climb out of her.

"I've been assessed twice," she said carefully. "Omega-adjacent, both times. So whatever you think you're picking up, you're wrong."

"I'm not wrong."

"Alphas never are, in their own heads. Must be a nice place to live." She picked up his empty glass and put it in the sink. "Last call. Another round, or are we done?"

He stood. Unhurried. Unfolded from the barstool like the night was his and he was simply choosing to end it.

"Your alpha's name is Garrett Cole," he said. "Sixteen years running Harlow Pack. You've been in his pack your whole life. Your whole life, Wren. And he's never given you a mate prospect. Never let you run with the senior wolves. Never once put you in a room with any outside alpha." 

He tilted his head, and the grey eyes were serious now, careful and deliberate in a way that made the back of her neck prickle. 

"Does that sound like how you handle an omega-adjacent wolf?"

She didn't answer.

"Or does it sound," he said, quieter, "like what you do when you're hiding what someone is?"

The lights above the bar flickered. Just once.

Neither of them looked up.

"Get out," Wren said. Her voice was perfectly even. She was proud of that.

Declan reached into his jacket and set a card on the bar. Plain white. A phone number in handwriting that was blunt and slightly impatient, like the man himself.

"When it gets hard to hold it down," he said, "and it will.  Very soon. Call that number."

He left. His wolves followed, quiet as smoke, and the door swung shut and the jukebox clicked back to life and Wren stood there with her hands flat on the bar and her heart going too fast and her wolf throwing itself against her ribs like it had somewhere urgent to be, like it had always had somewhere urgent to be and had only just remembered.

She picked up the card.

She almost put it in the trash. She could feel herself almost doing it.

She put it in her pocket instead, then pulled up her sleeve to wash her hands. And stopped.

The inside of her right wrist. The hand that had been closest to him, the hand that had set down his glass and been maybe six inches from his fingers.

A mark, pale and symmetrical, like something surfacing from underneath the skin. Like a bruise that had been there for years and was only now deciding to show itself.

It hadn't been there this morning.

Wren pulled her sleeve down. Picked up the mop. The bar wasn't going to close itself.

She was fine.

She was absolutely, completely fine, and she was going to keep saying that until it was true, same as she'd been doing since she was seventeen years old and first started noticing all the things she wasn't supposed to be able to do.

Outside, an engine turned over and pulled away into the dark.

Her wolf watched it go with both eyes open.

Author’s note: Hope you are enjoying Bone Deep. This is a serialized novel, so come back every week for more chapters!