Page 15 of Bound to the Wolf
“Put it on my tab,” he found himself saying.
What the hell was he doing? They were supposed to be ignoring each other. As far as he was concerned, Delainey didn’t have to exist outside of being Elise’s coven sister and an annoyance.
“I can pay for my own damn drink,” Delainey shot back. She turned on her stool to face him fully, one eyebrow arched, her blue nails drumming once against the bar top.
Dana looked between the two of them, her hand hovering above the screen that would assign the drink to one of their tabs.
“Let me get this,” Reece insisted, because now it was a fight and he had to win.
Delainey just shrugged. “Make it top shelf,” she told Dana. She leaned one elbow on the bar and tilted her chin up, the overhead track lighting catching the shimmer on her cheekbones.
That little witch.
Reece had to suppress a smile. Dana raised an eyebrow at him and he nodded as she grabbed a nicer bottle of whiskey than he would normally order at a place like this and poured out their shots.
He took his time sipping the smoky liquid and appreciated the burn as it slid down his throat. He tried not to think of Delainey’s fire as the whiskey singed him, but with her sittingright there and these drinks on his tab, he couldn’t do anything but that.
A bell rang, and cheers erupted from a cluster of people in the back of the bar. Through the wide archway that separated the main bar from the throwing lanes, Reece could see the glow of yellow bulbs strung above three side-by-side targets, each one a cross-section of raw timber bolted to a plywood backing.
“That’s your cue,” Dana told Delainey.
She sipped the rest of her whiskey, flicked her fingers in a lazy salute, and slid off the stool toward the back of the bar.
“What’s her cue?” Reece asked Dana.
“You know that girl’s trouble, right?” Dana warned him. She braced both palms flat on the bar and leaned toward him. “Maybe you didn’t realize she’s a witch?”
“I know she’s a witch,” Reece ground out.
I’m just a fucking idiot,he said to himself.
“Didn’t your pack already get into trouble with some witches a while back?” Dana asked, looking down at his whiskey.
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” Reece said.
“What’s your pack saying about that?”
“They don’t tell us anything. We’ve got the big quarterly meeting coming up—I swear Dawson wishes he was running a Fortune 500 company and not a werewolf pack.”
That startled a laugh out of Reece, and from what he knew of the Iron Runner alpha, he had to agree.
“I’m not doing anything stupid with her,” he said. He drained the last finger of whiskey and set the glass down with a firm tap. “So just tell me what she’s doing.”
“Axes,” said Dana. “And it’s your funeral. It’s not my job to save stupid wolves from themselves.”
Reece stuck his tongue out at her and left a twenty for a tip. He would come back around later and close his tab, but right now he wanted to see this.
Delainey had already drawn a round. She stood with her feet shoulder-width apart in a lane marked off by low plywood walls; five hatchets lined up on a narrow wooden shelf to her right.
She heaved an axe over her head and threw it at the target like she was a Viking of old. Her whole body uncoiled with the throw—shoulders, torso, hips—and the axe spun once in the air before burying itself in the timber with a deep, satisfying thunk that Reece felt in his sternum. It didn’t hit the bullseye, but it was close, and the spectators around her let up a cheer.
Reece hung back in the shadows and watched, and tried not to find it incredibly fucking hot to watch a woman wield an axe like she was born to throw them. He needed to stay back and just watch. Doing anything else was absolute, utter fucking madness and exactly the kind of trouble Dana had warned him against.
But Reece felt like getting into a little bit of trouble.
When Delainey paused in her throwing to go retrieve her axes at the signal from the axe-throwing minder—whatever he was supposed to be called, he looked barely old enough to drive, with pimples on his face and a worried expression at so many people sipping alcohol and throwing weapons—she came back with her axes and set them on a small bench where Reece was already waiting.
He had his arms folded across his chest and his shoulder propped against the lane divider, taking up enough space that she had to step around him to reach the shelf.
