[Ava]
The town comes at me in fragments: a smear of neon over cracked concrete, a throatful of exhaust, the distant snarl of engines swarming like hornets around a hive. If I blink, the highway is gone and the ridge-line of black pines eats the sky. If I breathe, there's rain in the air and oil in my mouth, and the ghost of a city I've sworn not to name scrapes its nails down the back of my mind. I left that place, left the hospital corridors and the hallways of pity, left the whispers of "poor thing" and "late bloomer" and "maybe she's just human," as if that were the worst sin a wolf like me could carry.
Even boyfriend broke up with me because of this. I was heartbroken and longed for a hug, a warmth that could carry the pain away. But Morgan never gave me that in these three years. His reasons? He can't fuck a woman who is not wolf as he was about to become the next alpha of his pack. His advise? I should find a man who can lick my pussy without any demand or become a virgin nun for the rest of my life.
I packed what I could into a duffel and burned what I couldn't in a sink that coughed smoke like a prayer. I came here because there was nowhere else to go, because my father's old friend said there'd be a spare room and work if I wanted it, and because every myth I refused to believe kept finding my name.
The house sits behind the biker bar like a secret that doesn't know how to keep itself. Brown siding, buckled porch, a wind-chime made of bent forks and bullet casings that sings a dead tune when the night stirs. I stand on the stoop with the duffel cutting into my shoulder and watch the bar breathe: sign flickering, door thudding open and shut, laughter edged like knives. My knuckles hover over the door before I catch myself and knock anyway, three taps to wake the past and whatever else lives here.
The door swings wide. Harlan fills the frame like a mountain of denim and scars. "You got taller," he says, as if that's the kind of miracle I was supposed to bring with me.
"I got tired," I answer, and the words are truer than I mean them to be.
He squints, takes in the duffel, the scuffed boots, the way I'm holding myself like my bones might splinter if I lower my guard. He steps aside. "Come on, kid. Rules are easy: don't open strange doors, don't open with your mouth what you can close with your hands, and if the bar gets loud, you sleep through it."
"I don't sleep," I tell him, slipping past. "Not much."
"Then you'll fit right in."
The room is small, clean in the way of men who live with grease under their fingernails and try to hold the dirt at the threshold. White walls, a narrow bed, a dresser older than both of us, a window that stares at the back alley where bikes queue up like wolves at a watering hole. Harlan points at the folded sheets, the crooked lamp, the bathroom across the hall. Then he looks at me longer than is comfortable. "You sure about this?"
"You're the one who made the offer."
"I made it to your father," he says, and the name is a weight he doesn't throw. "He trusted me. I'm trying to show I deserved it."
"So am I."
He nods once, slow, like we've brokered a treaty with the air. "The boys'll be around tonight. You hear the rumbling, don't scare. They smell fear the way we smell fresh asphalt."
"They?" I ask. It's a test, and we both know it.
"My three sons," he says, shrug turning into a warning. "And other things, when the moon has an opinion."
"Doesn't it always?" I murmur, and his mouth goes thoughtful in the way of men parsing a secret.
The first breath of the bar hits me before the sun is fully dead, a wave of sound and heat and the metallic chime of laughter that means trouble found a chair and ordered a drink. I should stay in my room, unwrap my sheets, fold my clothes like a good girl trying to pin time to a grid. But I've spent too long sitting quietly while the night talks about me. I move toward the back stairs that feed into the bar's shadowed hallway, pause at the handrail, palm fitting the groove worn by a hundred hands that didn't know what to hold.
My pulse trips. My body is a map with blank places. I am twenty and the stories say that by now I should run under a different sky, hear the pack like a heartbeat across miles. My bones should have softened and reknit to music only the moon understands. But on the nights when the blood goes loud and the world tilts silver, nothing happens. I didn't transform.
Downstairs, the bar is a long, burnished wound. Lights low. Ceiling fan turning like a lazy blade. Men at tables trading lies and cash. Women who've made friends with danger. On the far wall, a mural of wolves painted in ash and midnight looks over everything with the expression of judges who've already sworn you guilty.
I skirt the tables, keeping to shadows until Harlan catches sight of me and jerks his chin, 'kitchen door, crate of limes, find your hands something to do.' I slide into the back and the smell shifts to citrus and steam, to steel trays and the sweet iron-sour of meat. The knife fits my hand. The motion, quick-precise, calms me. I am good with blades that cut fruit and skin that has not learned to be other than it is.
"New girl," someone says, and the word folds into my spine like a challenge. I turn and find the doorway framed by leather and black t-shirt and a mouth that's learned to smirk its way out of fights. He's ink and wildfire, hair a dark snarl, eyes like cigarette embers smoked down to the filter, and something wild leashed under his skin. He takes me in with a look that's not gentle and not cruel, just true. "You Harlan's charity?"
"I'm his problem," I say evenly. "And I'm working."
He grins, slow and wicked. "Name?"
"Ava."
"Rhett," he says, rolling it like a wheel over gravel, and offers a forearm instead of a hand. When I don't take it, not because I'm afraid but because I'm not, his grin turns thoughtful. "Sharp," he says, as if cataloguing a knife.
"Bleeds," I reply, and go back to the limes.
He leaves laughter behind him. The door swings, the noise swells, the taste of engine fumes threads the steam. I breathe slow and focus on the tangy spritz dotting my wrist, the way the knife kisses the rind and refuses to slip. Work is a prayer that doesn't ask permission. I stack quarters in neat crescents, line them in bowls, carry them to the window and pass the bowls through.
The first bowl goes to Rhett. The second stops short, a hand catching the rim, long fingers, pale scars, a signet ring that's more oath than ornament. The man attached to the hand is clean lines and colder air, suit jacket shouldered under a biker cut as if he can't decide which world fits better, eyes like winter dusk and a mouth set in the first draft of a refusal. He does not look at me so much as through me, not cruelly but clinically, measuring angles I don't know how to offer.
"Thank you," he says, voice sanded down to precise edges. "They have you in the back on your first night?"
"They have me where I asked to be," I answer.