The erratic buzzing of my phone forced my eyes to open, although, I could have slept for days had my slumber gone undisturbed.

“Turn it off,” Hunter grunted.

I lifted my body and pushed my disheveled, long hair out of my face. Blinking, I strained my eyes to see against the flood of light pouring in from an opening in the curtains. I turned my head and laughed when I saw Hunter’s muscular butt poking through his satin sheets.

Smacking the hard mound of flesh, I swiveled out of bed and finally checked my phone. A long list of missed calls from Sawyer showed up on my screen. Then, I saw his text.

“What the fuck, man? You were supposed to be here two hours ago to go over the finances.”

“Oh, shit,” I hissed. “I knew I shouldn’t have stayed over. What time is it?”

Hunter grunted a random number.

I grabbed my clothes and threw them on. Running to give Hunter a kiss goodbye, I frantically eyed the time. It was already ten thirty in the morning. I was completely behind schedule.

Hunter lazily turned over and reached for my ass. “You’re leaving me already?”

I buttoned my shirt and frantically texted my brother to tell him that I was on my way. “I’ll come over after I’m done closing up,” I said.

Hunter slowly unveiled the bed sheets covering his immaculate body. “Suit yourself.”

Groaning, I bent forward and kissed the top of his morning wood. “Tonight,” I whispered.

* * *

There he is! The man of the fuckin’ hour.” Sawyer shut the door behind me and began clapping to an invisible audience.

“Chill out, Sawyer. I’m here, aren’t I?” The air inside of our bar was stale and warm. I walked past my brother and checked the thermostat. Somebody had turned it off. I clicked it back on and turned around.

“Why is this thing turned off?” I asked.

“Somebody left it on after they closed up yesterday,” he said.

Shit. Okay, so I forgot about the air. The bar was tight on money, but one night wasn’t going to kill us. “It was on for like eight hours,” I argued.

Pushing a set of envelopes into my hand, Sawyer sat at the bar. “Go ahead. Open it.”

I dug into the contents of the envelopes and found myself staring at the numbers from the energy bills. Somehow, we had nearly doubled our output in one year. Calmly, I folded the envelopes back up and put them back in the drawer where they belonged.

“This isn’t my fault,” I said.

Sawyer’s eyes had a fire burning in them. Even still, he was my brother, and as much as he wanted to reprimand me, he wouldn’t allow himself to go on forever. “Doesn’t matter. Theo has already started looking at new locations.”

There was an instant sadness that penetrated the core of my very being. I loved everything about the bar. We had good neighbors and a tight-knit community who knew us all by name. That type of closeness didn’t exist anywhere else in the city. Not to mention, finding a new location would be a total pain in the ass.

“A new spot?” I asked.

Sawyer nodded and scratched the side of his head. “I guess so. All I know is that I’m fucking beat.”

“Let’s go over the finances like we wanted to. There has to be a way out of this,” I said.

I tried everything that I could to get him to perk up, but Sawyer wasn’t going to budge. I thought about Austin and Marcus. Theo would help them out as best he could, but that would only go so far.

“I’ll get us out of this,” I said, lost in thought.

My brother’s voice was groggy and soft. Without a purpose, an alpha didn’t have much to cling onto. “You said that last week,” he said.

“I’ll ask my boyfriend, Hunter, for help,” I said.

“The guy you’ve been seeing? He’s your boyfriend now?” Sawyer looked down at the floor in thought.

“Remember when you met Marcus, and I gave you shit about it? I hope you know that you’re doing the same thing,” I said.

Sawyer looked back at me, but he wasn’t pissed. No, there was a level of concern in his facial expression. “I’m just looking out for you,” he said, pointing at the choker wrapped tightly around my neck. “Look at what you’ve been wearing. And that ring too? It’s like you’re married to the guy already.”

Suddenly, something fierce forced me against my heels. “Don’t fuck with me, brother. This is my life, not yours.”

Sawyer took another few steps, but he stopped himself from getting any closer. Either he could see the fury in my eyes, or he didn’t want to end up hurting me. Either way, he backed off, and I had to feel a little grateful for it.

“Whatever,” he muttered.

In an attempt to keep my emotions in check, I sucked in a deep breath and closed my eyes for a few seconds. After I exhaled, I tried to find my inner Zen. News flash: it wasn’t coming.

“I don’t care what you think. I love him, Sawyer,” I said.

Sawyer shook his head and grinned as if he knew something that I didn’t. “You know that he came in here the other day?”

I laughed, but something didn’t feel right. “What are you talking about? He didn’t know where I worked until yesterday,” I said.

Lifting his butt off of the stool, he walked to the sidewall and turned off the air conditioning unit. “He was in here asking about the protests outside. You think that’s a coincidence?”

At first, I couldn’t process the information. The thought of Hunter coming into this bar didn’t make much sense in the first place, but Sawyer was driving into an idea that I absolutely didn’t want to confront.

“You’re lying,” I said. Even if he wasn’t lying, there had to be a simple explanation. “Hunter must’ve stumbled in here randomly.”

Sawyer stood in front of me with his arms crossed. His face turned smug faster than I could blink. He was about as happy as a king after winning a small battle. “What does he do? You know, for work.”

“Real…” My voice naturally trailed off. Real estate. I knew what he did, but I couldn’t say the words. “None of your fucking business,” I said.

Sawyer turned around and gathered the finance sheets. Before he grabbed his bag to leave, he pointed his finger at my nose. “I don’t have anything else to say, except maybe that you need to get your shit together. The reality is that we’re going to lose this bar. That means no stream of income for Austin. Does that make you happy? Your own nephew is going to have to struggle because you got played.”

That’s when something snapped. I felt my arm wind back, and before I knew it, my fist was barreling toward my brother’s jaw. It didn’t matter—he had always been a more agile fighter than me. He dodged my punch and let my knuckles crack against the wall.

“Fuck!” I screamed. I fell to the floor, writhing in pain. I howled and placed my knuckles against my teeth, sucking on the already bruising areas.

Sawyer leaned above me and gritted his teeth. “Get your shit together,” he warned.

Tears haphazardly fell from my eyes, but it wasn’t because of the physical pain. What scared me the most was how natural the punch felt. To me, my actions painted an ominous picture. I was willing to do anything for Hunter. Daddy. What-the-fuck-ever. But what were my limits?

After a brief moment, Sawyer reached down and lent me his hand. “Up,” he murmured.

I wiped the tears from my eyes and pursed my lips closed, feeling ashamed of myself. “I’m going to leave,” I said.

I just about turned around before I felt his hand brush against my shoulder. “Don’t go,” he said. I stopped myself from moving. “If you really think you can help, we can go over the finances.”

The truth was that I didn’t know anything. The more I stayed in this city, the more I realized that it was incapable of being figured out. However, there was one thing I could always do. “I can try.”

I started with the expenses. On paper, there was a lot we could do there. First, we had to cut down on the batches. Second, we had to sacrifice cutting out the first-rate bottles. People in New York wanted a can of beer, and a shot of something harder. They wanted a good deal and a cigarette.

But as I added the list up, I could see that the changes didn’t solve our problem with the rent. “It’s no use. We’re not going to be able to cut it,” Sawyer said.

“Hold up. There’s something off here,” I said.

I searched through the numbers one more time to make sense of what I was seeing. Sawyer looked over my shoulder and groaned. “We owe more than we thought, don’t we?”

I shook my head and actually felt a smile take shape across my face. Pointing, I showed Sawyer what I was looking at. “It says right here that the next three months have been paid for,” I said.

“Hand that over.” I watched Sawyer’s eyes dart across the numbers.

“You must have paid it months ago on accident,” I said.

Sawyer creased his eyes and set the sheet down. “It wasn’t me,” he said.

As we stood in the empty bar, we tried to make sense of the predicament we had found ourselves in. “Should we tell Theo?” I asked.

Sawyer shook his head and sat back down on the barstool. “Sure. We’ll tell him, but it still doesn’t fix the zoning issues. We still need to remodel the bar,” he said.

“So what do we do?” I asked him.

Sawyer looked back at me and tossed his hands into the air. “We stay open,” he said. “But we need to stay sharp. Someone is helping us out for no apparent reason. I want to know why.”

But as I exited the building, I had a pretty good idea who was helping us out, and why they were doing it too. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my phone and called my man, Hunter for an explanation.