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In a moment, he was upstairs with me.
He clapped his hand into Cullen’s, who offered him a beer.
“What’s up?” I asked.
Rune rarely joined me on the floor. He liked partying with the patrons down below or hitting the town with his twin brother, Zen, when there wasn’t anything for them to do here until they were called.
“You have a visitor,” Rune said, sipping his beer and looking out over the crowd with me.
I frowned. “I don’t have an appointment.”
“No, but she’s serious about seeing you. Fae. She says it’s urgent, she won’t go away and make an appointment no matter what we tell her.”
“You can’t get Fred to get rid of her?”
Rune looked skeptical. “She’s a bit more powerful than Fred.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
The fae could be so difficult sometimes, sticking to the rules because they were rules, not because it was the right thing, or bending them when it worked better that way. I wasn’t a fan of them—they’d run the foster systems I’d been thrown in… and then gotten out of again. I’d run from them for a long time, doing what I could so that I wouldn’t be put back there, and with fae magic on their side, it had been hard. I hadn’t been willing to be a part of the system just because my piece of shit dad hadn’t been a worthy male.
They hadn’t been able to help with the stupid curse, either.
It had turned out, at my birth, my mom had promised me to a dark fae in exchange for power. But my mother couldn’t do it when the time came. She’d loved me so much; she’d refused to give me up.
The dark fae had retaliated, killing her and putting a curse on me that meant I would hurt those that I loved. Or those that I loved would be punished in some other way. I didn’t fully understand how the curse worked, since nobody had ever been able to get to the root of it.
My dad had split when he’d realized I was cursed. Not his doing and not his problem.
Fuck him.
The fae and I weren’t on good terms, either—nothing they’d done had actually helped me, even though they weren’t dark fae, and I didn’t like them.
This was my town, and I ran it the way I liked to. I didn’t want fae to have a say in anything I did.
“I’ll see her in a minute,” I said and threw back my bourbon, putting my glass down so Cullen could refill it. “Where is she?”
“She’s in the back office area. Zen is with her.”
“That can’t be good,” I said.
Rune chuckled. “He volunteered.”
“I bet he did,” I said with a laugh, and I picked up my fresh glass of bourbon, leading the way down the stairs.
Rune followed me, and Cullen found the bartender to take his position at the bar again after we’d had our chat.
I stepped through the back door, and we walked down the hallway to my office. The thud of the club’s music was nothing more than the bass line vibrating through everything, keeping the same beat all the bodies out there did.
When we stepped through another door, the music in the club gave way completely to Zen’s godawful metal bullshit.
“Turn that down!” I shouted.
Zen jumped up from where he balanced his chair on its back legs and turned down the stereo.
“Sorry, Alpha,” he said with a grin that suggested he wasn’t sorry at all. “I was just playing our guest a song.” He gestured to the woman sitting on the couch against the wall, looking less than impressed.
If she hadn’t been fae, Zen would have been a lot closer to her, trying to get into her pants, no doubt. She was powerful, though, and Zen wasn’t stupid.
