Page 74 of Her Wolf

Fuck, had he ever been wrong. “You wanna head back inside?” Lars handed back the bottle and turned for the door.

Dean caught him just above his elbow. “Actually…”

Lars turned back, frowning. It was weird, trying to suss someone out when they were wearing a mask. All he had to go on was the guy’s eyes.

Those hazel eyes shifted. “I, uh…I wanted to know if, maybe—”

The kitchen’s back door flew open, and Dean cut off as a woman in a hair net stormed past them with a garbage bag. She took them in with a hesitant smile, tossed the garbage in a nearby dumpster, and headed back inside as she slapped her hands together.

“Hey, over here,” Lars said. It was his dick doing the talking, of course, not him. He had Cora and Finn and…well, Bailey too, waiting for him inside the hotel, but he’d always been a slave to his curiosity. It had gotten him into the worst messes of his life—but, at the same time, had been responsible for some of the best times of his life too.

A blessing and a curse.

Lars led Dean around the corner. Here, a wall soared up behind them and, a few paces away, the wire link fence surrounding the hotel’s grounds. Weeds and grass fought valiantly for the space between the flagstones. The closest windows were those on the first floor—and each of them dark and desolate in the deepening twilight.

Fuck, maybe this place was haunted.

“You were saying?” Lars asked, as soon as they both came to a stop.

Dean looked away, toying absently with his bottle of soda water. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out the gift box again.

“Do you think I should give this to the capo, or is there like a gift table or something?”

Lars’s mind reeled for a moment before he could figure out what the guy was asking.

“Oh,” he said. “I…I don’t think there’s a table.”

“You know the capo, right? The one whose birthday it is?”

“Yeah,” Lars answered without thinking. “I mean, everyone does,” he correctly lamely.

“I don’t,” Dean said through a laugh. “But I’ve heard some pretty fucked up shit.”

“Yeah?” Lars grinned. “Like what?”

“Hold up,” Dean said, rummaging in his pockets again. He took out a joint, but it was poorly rolled and looked like it had only barely survived Nam and a tour through Iraq.

“It’s cool,” Lars said, touching his fingertips to Dean’s hand and pushing the joint away. “I got another.”

“More of that shit we smoked earlier?” Dean asked, sounding in awe.

“Yeah,” Lars said, voice muffled around the joint. “Cartel weed rocks.” He lit it, took a long drag, and handed it to Dean, the cherry pointing back to himself.

Dean took it, their fingers fumbling around the small joint, and drew another one of his impressive lung fulls.

“So, I heard she offed El Guapo,” Dean said, voice tight as he held in the smoke.

Lars hit the joint, and gave a nod. “She sure did.”

Dean watched him for a second, and then blew out a huge cloud of smoke. “Wait…you were there?”

“Fuck yes,” Lars said, still nodding. “It was brutal.”

“What did she…I mean, I heard she carved out his eyes.”

Lars laughed. And then couldn’t stop. He tried handing the joint back to Dean, but they fumbled the pass and the joint dropped between the flagstones.

They both bent to pick it up, and knocked their heads together. Which sent both of them into a fit of laughter that had Lars leaning a hand against the wall so he wouldn’t collapse. Dean had his head back, body flush with the stained concrete as their laughter tapered down.

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