Page 35 of Wolf Cursed
My jaw fell open.
Idrissa waited until he swayed once and then planted her boot against his chest and shoved. Hard.
Vinny went flying backward, his head slamming into the bar with a crack that was probably his skull.
I gripped the table, shocked.
Vinny slid down a little farther and then stopped moving completely, his chin sagging as he passed out.
My shock turned to horror.
I hopped out of the booth and rushed over to where Vinny sat slouched on the floor. His back was to the bar, and his head had lolled forward. I grabbed his face, propping it up with my hand to find his eyes were closed. I fumbled for a pulse and found it, sagging in relief.
“Holy shit.” I looked up at where Idrissa now stood behind me with her arms crossed. “You knocked him out.”
She shrugged. “He was damaging Bo’s property. And he’s been warned.”
“But you… What if he…” I trailed off, unable to form the words as worry took over. I felt gingerly against the back of his head, my fingers coming away with sticky blood. Panic spiked, and my breath caught.
I stared down at the blood on my hands.
“He’s bleeding,” I said, my voice cracking.
Looking past the blood, I caught sight of the wolf emblem printed on Vinny’s jacket. The howl it was making in the illustration echoed inside my head. The room tilted, and everything drifted a little. Suddenly, the fighting felt far away. Or maybe it was me who’d drifted. I was no longer here. This wasn’t really happening. No blood. No barfights. I was safe. Dad was alive.
I—
“Ash!”
I looked up and leaned away just in time to avoid a serving tray flying through the air. It crashed into the bar right where I’d just been crouched and clattered to the ground at my feet.
I looked down at it, chest heaving, then up again. At the far end of the bar, the fight had stopped. That meant the tray hadn’t been an accident. There was no collateral damage. Someone had done it on purpose.
My eyes landed on an angry face glaring at me, and I pushed to my feet.
A guy around my age stood watching me, arms folded. I’d seen him earlier at the table with the poker game. His brown hair hung past his ears, and his muscular arms flexed as he pumped his fists open and closed, open and closed. His expression hardened, and just like with Vinny and Idrissa, he didn’t back down at the sight of me.
As I faced him, my grief and fear and all of the turmoil of the last few days collided. Something inside me snapped, and I forgot to be afraid of what he could do to me or concerned that his muscles were bigger than my kneecaps. He’d tried to hurt me. On purpose. And I was done cowering to the assholes in this town. In any town.
“You threw that tray at me on purpose,” I said, anger replacing the fear that had paralyzed me before.
“So what?” he challenged. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said, and the words were so repetitive and irritating by now that I rolled my eyes.
“You’re right about that. This place seems to have one rule: only assholes allowed. You fit right in.”
He snarled and took a step toward me. I planted my feet, ready for a fight. If he swung, I wasn’t going to walk away. It took a special kind of asshole to hit a female, but this guy seemed special in all the wrong ways, so I wasn’t expecting anything but the worst.
Apparently, his friends expected it too because the others who’d been at the table with him finally took notice and crowded in closer behind him. Fantastic. He had a full baseball team’s worth of support in his bullying.
“Whoa.” Isaac stepped between us, his palm hovering just above the guy’s chest. “Silas. What the fuck.”
It wasn’t a question or a request. Isaac’s voice held steel now, a tone I didn’t even know he was capable of. But the happy-go-lucky Isaac was gone. This version of him wasn’t one I recognized.
“Isaac, get the fuck out of my way,” Silas growled.
“Not happening. Take a walk.”
Idrissa stepped up beside me, her arms folded as she regarded Silas with a cool, murderous gaze. “Listen to my brother, Silas. Get some air. Before someone chokes it from your lungs.”
