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“Why not?”
“I faint when I see blood,” Circe said with a laugh.
I blinked at her before I burst out laughing, my stress finding a way to bleed out of me. I laughed and laughed, and Circe looked bashful as she laughed along with me.
“I thought you were going to give me some complicated, magical answer to that question. That was so… normal,” I finally said.
Circe chuckled. “We’re not so different, you and I, Danna. It’s just another world, but it’s not as scary as you think.”
I shook my head, the laughter slowly fading again. I wasn’t sure if I believed that. It was normal for Circe, but I’d just learned about it, and it was terrifying. Not only because there were creatures out there that I’d never heard of, creatures that sounded scary—demons? Vampires?—but because my daughter, the tiny human I’d created and dedicated myself to raise, was going through something I had no idea how to help her with. I was her mother, but I couldn’t protect her against this. I couldn’t save her from a world I didn’t know existed and creatures I didn’t understand. Wasn’t that my first—and possibly my only—role? To look after my child was everything, and I felt small and helpless.
“It’s going to be okay, Danna,” Circe said, as if she knew what I was thinking.
Hell, maybe she knew exactly what I was thinking. Maybe that was how she’d always been there for me.
“You can’t know that,” I said, but looking at Circe and her determined expression, her steely gray eyes… maybe she could know that.
5
WESLEY
“Alpha,” Cullen said, stepping up to replace the bartender I’d told to leave when I’d arrived.
My bartenders were all shifters, but Cullen was one of my inner circle shifters, someone I could trust. He worked at my club as a general manager, and when I was up here, he took care of me, too. “The usual?”
“Yeah,” I said, and the wolf shifter poured me a bourbon.
I took the tumbler from him and sipped the liquid.
“Anything to report?” I asked.
Cullen leaned on the bar. His thick black hair was curly as it grew out, and his dark eyes flickered across the floor.
“Nothing serious. We had a fight break out earlier, but the bouncers broke it up before there were any serious injuries.”
“Good,” I said.
“The dancers are doing a good job keeping the clientele coming through the doors,” I said. I glanced up at a dancer in a cage not too far from me, moving sensually to the beat of the music.
“It was a good idea,” Cullen said.
I snorted. “It wasyouridea.”
“That’s why it’s good,” Cullen said with a grin and straightened, flattening his hands on the bar. His hairy hands and fingers gave away that he was a shifter who lived in animal form a lot more than he lived in human form. Everything else about him looked human, so I kept him on as my general manager, but that didn’t mean I was happy with the way he lived his life.
I wouldn’t get rid of him just for that, but if this continued, I had to take him out for a run and figure out what the fuck his deal was, running in wolf form more than he walked on two legs. It could be risky because we lived in such close proximity to so many humans.
Gone were the days when we let our animals out all the time. It was a different time, a different world, and we had to live civilized lives among the humans if we wanted to get anywhere.
The world wasn’t about bloody wars and brutal fights for territory anymore. Civilization was a thin veneer, a mask that we all wore to do business, but it meant that we all had to keep ourselves in check and the ugly side of life only happened behind closed doors, or keep living underground. Metaphorically, of course.
Cullen was a great manager. It would be a shame to lose him just because he couldn’t keep his wolf on a leash.
I glanced over the railing that curbed the upstairs VIP section at the dancing crowd below. The bodies swayed to the music, pulsing like a heart to the beat. They were drunk or high down there, or both. I didn’t care, as long as they didn’t fuck shit up in my club. I allowed a lot, but violence wasn’t part of it. The sad part was that humans couldn’t always handle their alcohol or their drugs, and then shit hit the fan, but my bouncers were all shifters, too. Everyone working for me was, so that I could keep my handle on the club.
It was why I’d been running clubs for nearly eighty years and counting. It was all about doing business the right way—giving the masses what they wanted, but remembering that they were just big children and needed to be put in timeout once in a while.
As I watched the crowds below, I spotted a member of my inner circle appear through a door. Rune glanced around, looking for me. When he looked up and our eyes locked, he flashed a grin and headed toward the stairs.
