Reckless Safety

Santi

I hated it here.

I hated the lights, I hated the music, and I hated the way the fake leather of my tip belt stuck to my hip every time I bent down to grab a bottle from the well, even though the weight of the night’s cash was the only reason I tolerated any of this.

The bass traveled up through the floorboards into the soles of my boots, settling somewhere behind my sternum where it rolled against every breath I took.

Neon strobes flared through the thick stage fog, illuminating the exposed brick walls in pulses. Condensation dripped down the mirrored back bar and pooled around sticky liquor bottles while the music rattled the rocks glasses on the rail.

Threadbare on Magnolia was the loudest bar in downtown Orlando on Friday nights, a single sweating organism for the six hours between open and last call.

I was stuck inside its mouth, pouring whiskey for tips and counting down to last call.

The crowd was packed shoulder to shoulder under the colored strobes, glitter on their cheekbones and sweat tracking down the lines of their necks, the room a soup of every pheromone they were throwing off.

Beta heat, alpha musk, regular human funk, the cheap floral perfume that the female omega bachelorette in the corner had bathed in before she came in. It hit the back of my throat with every inhale, sour and crowded, and my stomach turned every time I breathed too deeply.

The DJ was a Miami transplant trying to break out of the club circuit. She was spinning all techno tonight and earning the cut Marco, the Threadbare manager, had paid her for the door pull.

The DJ pushed the tempo, and the bass became a physical assault against my eardrums. Regular alphas, betas, and omegas rode the techno like a wave since their human limitations gave them a buffer to call a crowded room fun and mean it. The primordial blood running through my veins offered no such mercy. The bear beneath my ribs was suffocating in the sour pheromones of a hundred strangers, and the earplugs I wore only solved one of those problems.

The cash was the only reason I tolerated any of this. The cash, and Tyler.

He’d been the one to walk me into Threadbare with his arm across my shoulders the week after Maison Auclair, the restaurant where I’d been working, let me go.

The same week, a heat blew through my suppressants in the middle of a brunch service and ended my pastry apprenticeship three weeks shy of the certificate.

Tyler had pulled me out of the walk-in cooler that night before anyone clocked the fur. He’d driven me home with the windows down and had vouched for me to Marco when no other manager in town would’ve looked at me twice.

Eight months later, I was still pouring whiskey for tips instead of folding laminated dough in a Miami kitchen. Tyler was still the reason my rent was paid, and he was still the only person alive who knew what I really was. I owed him for that.

I dragged my attention back to the well.

Ten minutes left of my service, and then I’d clock out, drive the twenty-three minutes home through the late traffic, lock every lock on my door, and ride out the next four days alone in the dark with two bottles of suppressants and a bag of frozen peas pressed to the back of my neck.

My heat was coming. The early omen deep in my bones had expanded into a choking weight and thinned every breath I took. My skin prickled with awareness of the white lace of my shirt every time I moved my arms, the open weave dragging against my nipples.

I’d picked the outfit because Friday tips ran higher when I dressed for them. The lace shirt sat loose across my shoulders and tight across my chest. My jeans slung low on my hips, and my heeled boots added three inches of height, making alphas reach for their wallets a beat faster.

A few stubborn waves had already worked free at my temples, and the silver glitter on my cheekbones was starting to smear. Bear omegas were biologically wired to mate aggressively through the summer, secure a pregnancy for the fall, and deliver cubs in the spring. I was fighting thousands of years of evolution, and my body punished me for denying it.

Every brush of the mesh against my skin was a stark reminder that this cycle was going to be worse than the last. You didn’t white-knuckle these heats with a hot bath, a heating pad, and a fucking bag of frozen peas. No matter how much I wanted to.

The herbal blend Abuela Rosa had taught me to brew was already losing the fight, and the suppressant I’d taken at six was barely holding the line. If I wasn’t behind my deadbolt by midnight, everyone in the bar was going to learn what I really was.

Tyler was at the other end of the bar tonight, slammed under the bachelorette party that had taken his stools at nine. The omega in the cheap perfume was leading the charge. We hadn’t exchanged more than two words since I clocked in. That was on purpose. He read me too well, and the heat coming on early was a conversation I wasn’t having with him until I was on the other side of it.

Tyler hadn’t touched me in two months. The last time he tried, my body tensed up so much that I ended up sleeping on the couch with the bedroom door closed, telling him through the door that the suppressants were doing something weird, that I’d figure it out. He’d believed me.

I shoved the thought of Tyler down and adjusted the custom-molded earplugs jammed into my ears. They finally brought the room’s volume down to a tolerable hum. I grabbed a rag from the sanitizer bucket and started wiping down the sticky spill mat, letting the repetitive motion pull my focus away from the impending heat. As I raised my gaze, the heavy scent of cedar and musk rolled over the bar a beat before a large hand planted firmly on the wet wood in front of me.

He was tall, broad through the shoulders, taking up space without trying. Black hair shaved close on the sides. A jaw that pulled my attention and an expensive Henley with the sleeves pushed up to his elbows.

His eyes were already on me and stayed there. Dark, hooded, set under bulky brows that should have read as bored and instead read as hungry. Not the glassy stare drunk men gave me at last call. He was cataloging me. The lace across my chest, the glitter on my cheekbones, the curl that had worked free at my temple.

“Tequila,” he said, leaning into the bar so I’d hear him over the techno. “Reposado. Whatever’s good.”

“Coming up,” I told him, and turned for the back shelf.

The space between my shoulder blades went warm the moment I gave him my back, and the fine hair at the base of my neck lifted before I made myself ignore it.

I pulled the Don Julio off the back shelf because if a man was going to look at me like that, I was going to make him pay top-shelf prices for the privilege. I poured the shot clean, no spillage. Then I leaned across the bar to hand it to him, the lace of my shirt riding up over the dip of my hip above my jeans.

I held the shot out between two fingers and tilted my head.

“Here, papi.”

His nostrils flared, and his pupils blew wide, gold bleeding into the dark. The cedar undertone in his scent dropped into a register that meant canines were close to the surface. He was a shifter, specifically a werewolf alpha by the musk and leather note underneath the cedar, which meant his second form had four legs and a coat. The same primordial line as me, only his animal walked on paws and mine walked on claws.

His hand closed around the shot glass, and the free one wrapped around my forearm before I pulled back. He wasn’t hurting me, but his touch was saturated with an alpha command designed to pull me down and make me surrender to him. He leaned across the bar and put his mouth a breath away from my ear.

“I’m not going to sell you out.” The words ran lower than the music, a rumble underneath the bass, and he didn’t have to speak up for me to catch every syllable. Primordial hearing worked both ways, and he knew exactly how loud he needed to be. “You smell like you’re going to be on your knees by midnight, sweetheart. With or without me.”

He scented along the side of my throat, dragging the oxygen over my skin into his lungs and keeping it there. Slick gathered between my thighs, soaking through the thin cotton of my underwear, and the back of my neck went hot and damp under my hair.

My nipples drew tight against the lace, the open weave doing nothing to hide it, and his eyes dropped to the dark points of them showing through the white. My hips tilted forward against the bar of their own accord, the seam of my jeans pressing into me right where the heat was the worst, and I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep my mouth shut.

Even though he wasn’t a bear, he’d do. Primordial answered primordial. A human alpha lacked the power to touch what was rising in me.

His grip stayed loose around my wrist because it didn’t need to be anything else. The treacherous creature beneath my skin was already on its back, offering my throat to a stranger while my rational mind screamed that I was going to ruin everything. Every omega instinct that years of suppressants hadn’t killed was pushing me to present for him right there across the bar top.

I almost did it, but the cuff of his Henley rode up where he held the shot glass, and along the inside of his forearm, in the soft skin where his pulse beat, six small black numbers spelled out a registration code.

Bureau of Genetic Oversight. A registered primordial.

Shit.

Six digits meant he’d been logged into the federal database. The Bureau kept the registry under a public health story, but everyone knew what it really was — a list, ready for the next time the government needed bodies to throw at a war. A registered alpha walking out of my bar with me on his arm was a bounty the Bureau would pay for.

I yanked my arm back, harder than I needed to. The shot in his other hand sloshed against the side of the glass, and I pulled out one earplug, unhurried, working it free between my fingers. Tyler was watching from the other end of the bar. I caught the flash of his red shirt in my periphery and the way he was holding a beer he’d stopped pouring. Betraying him wasn’t an option, so I gave the werewolf my biggest, most useless customer service smile.

“Sorry, papi. Earplugs. Didn’t catch a word you said.”

He sat back on the stool and studied me for a moment. His face went where every registered alpha’s face went when they realized you’d decided to be stupid in front of them on purpose.

“Too bad.” He clicked his tongue. “You know what the going rate is for someone like you, sweetheart. Try not to find out the hard way.”

He threw the shot and set the glass down on the bar with enough force that the bottom rang against the wood. The bear whined high in my chest, the sound caught behind my teeth so it wouldn’t escape into the room.

The fifty he pulled out of his wallet landed on the bar without another look, and he turned into the crowd.

He was tall enough that the back of his head was easy to track over the dancers until the bodies closed around him and he was gone.

I stayed where I was, hand flat on the bar and the fifty under my fingers, a stone settling in my chest that I’d be turning over for years.

My pulse hadn’t slowed, and the cedar in the space where his hand had been was still in my lungs. I thoroughly hated that I was built entirely for breeding, that my body was demanding I spread my legs and submit to an alpha just because the seasons were turning. My body didn’t care that my mouth had lied. He had offered, and I had wanted, and my mouth had lied because lying was what I’d been raised on.

Abuela Rosa had told me on her deathbed, holding my hand with those knotted fingers.

Secrets keep you alive, mijo. Remember that. They will come for you the moment you forget.

She’d been right. The day I forgot what she taught me was the day they’d come for me the way they came for my parents.

I dropped the empty shot glass into the bus tub and wiped down the bar where his hand had been, and I pretended my pulse wasn’t still hammering in the spot where his thumb had rested against my skin.

Tyler hadn’t stopped watching me, and I knew without looking that he’d seen all of it. Nine minutes. Nine more minutes was all I had to make it.