Page 2 of Delivered to My Fury

Ceci’s jaw dropped so far I thought it might fall off. But then her eyes lit up. “Oh no. You accidentally bumped someone with your trick elbow.”

“My trick…oh right.” I turned around slowly, a little nervous to see what thatcrackhad resulted in. The victim held a napkin stained with red over his nose. I’d never gotten violent before, no matter how someone behaved. He really had caught me on the wrong day. “Oh my goodness, are you hurt? I have an old injury that acts up sometimes and makes my elbow jerk.”

His eyes held suspicion, but he shook his head. “Accidents happen.”

“So”—I flexed my arm a little—“you were saying? Before my arm was naughty?”

He pushed back his chair and stood up, backing away, his beer belly straining his belt’s integrity. “Not a thing. You ladies have a nice evening.”

“We’ll do that. You had better get some ice on that nose.” I turned away without waiting for an answer, picking up a chicken wing. “Did we get some ranch for these?”

We ate in silence for a few minutes, the pub customers suspiciously quiet too, then the conversations picked back up. I suspected some of them were about us. Finally, I wiped my fingers on a napkin and sat back. “I hate men. The people who pulled my grant were all men, too. I’m so sick of males being in charge of my life. Let’s swear off icky boys, now.”

Ceci flushed. “Umm…did I mention I’ve met someone?”

Chapter Two

Zyon

There was a lot to be said for working for ourselves. My friends and I had met working on a construction site a decade ago, but none of us saw that as our future. We left our groups to avoid being forced to do things that did not suit us, to live a way enforced by others.

My horde was all about arranged matings. Nobody was allowed to wait and see if there was a fated mate out there somewhere. In fact, before my first birthday, my parents had signed a contract with another horde for me to mate with their daughter when we reached our majority. We did meet…and while I was willing to at least get to know one another before saying yes or no, Belinda was not.

She had found her fated and was frantic to mate with him, but her family was having none of it. The only way she could be free was if I called it off.

So I did.

And while working on a building job site was not our dream job, it paid the bills and enabled us to save up for the down payment on our home and the startup of our brewery. We had a good life, the three of us, since throwing our lots in together.

I sat down in front of a test flight of some of our new products. They ran the gamut from a stout verging on German Schwarzbier to a pale lager that reminded me of summer fields of grain, and I sipped each one, seeking the notes that would make them a step above any others in the region. Our area was blessed with many microbreweries and other small professional brewers like us. They all had their own styles and flavors, and we’d sampled their products on more than one occasion.

I felt like we did well, but we’d been trying for a long time to brew a signature beer. Something that anyone who tasted would recognize right away. I’d had my hopes up for the black beer. It really wasn’t common on this continent, and no matter how well we executed it, not enough people actually bought it or even tried it without skepticism to make it a good choice. A shame because it was my favorite.

But I thought we might be close with the lager. It had a smoothness that we’d gotten numerous compliments on and even one TikToker had sung our praises, leading to some good sales. The visitors to the tasting room almost never left without making a purchase.

Heading into the office, I grabbed my tablet and brought up some of the spreadsheets to see the precise numbers that might help me to make decisions. We considered ourselves artisans, so technically we wanted to make things that we liked and gave us pleasure. But we also incurred a fair number of bills every month and having gone rogue, none of us had access to any pack funds or inheritance from our families.

We had to earn our living, and if we wanted it to be via the brewery and not working for someone else, our decision had to be fiscally sound.

I grabbed a bottle of sparkling water from the office mini fridge. Not that I wouldn’t have enjoyed a beer, and it took a whole lot to get me even a little drunk, but when I was working on numbers, I made it a policy to avoid anything with alcohol. I wasn’t the best bookkeeper, not a math fan, so I needed all my faculties about me to work with numbers. As we tried to devise our signature brew, something that might be a wider release, we needed to see precisely what we were selling and in what numbers. Mabel our bookkeeper did all this hard work for us so we could simply open this program and understand all about our business success and failure from a financial viewpoint.

It should be so easy…

But as I found the page with the data on which of our products sold more, when, how, and the profit margin on each, the numbers swam before my eyes. Rows and columns, positives and negatives…

How did anyone make sense of them?

We’d been working on this project for some time, looking to make a leap, and it didn’t feel like we were getting anywhere by just trying things and tasting them ourselves then getting feedback from visitors. The skills I brought to the business were about making the beverages, but if we wanted to grow, we needed to learn more.

Sure, they might say something was good when they sampled it, but what mattered for our bottom line was what they took home with them. What they bought again and again. Closing my eyes, I shut out the screen for a long moment, taking deep breaths and letting them out slowly. Maybe I didn’t learn calculus or deep-space algebra or whatever the heck it was that made someone a mathematician. Mabel had shown me how to read these, and it wasn’t her fault that my brain began playing the theme fromJeopardyas soon as she started pointing at things on the spreadsheet.

She said it was basic math. Addition, subtraction, a little multiplication and division. Nothing past fifth grade. Why would she lie?

She wouldn’t.

I took a few more breaths, in and out, and opened my eyes. This time, the numbers stayed in place. Selecting one of our best-loved lagers, I clicked on it and did my best to study the new sheet that came up. It was not nearly as overwhelming because it was only one kind. I grabbed a legal pad from the desk drawer and prepared to make notes. Just the basics. How much did we sell last year in dollars and cases? The year before? What was the net profit?

Okay. I could understand that. Now to try another one…on the page, written by my own hand, the whole thing looked manageable.

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