“I’ll pay you whatever you want.”

He followed me as I upturned the stools onto the bar-top so the cleaning crew could do their job once we locked up. Behind the counter, JJ dried the tumbler glasses, glancing between us and eyeing the Wolfman appreciatively. He arched a perfect brow with a smirk. His smirks could mean a number of things. This one could have said either “Don’t let that fine ass out of your sight” or “Danger, don’t touch that.” I needed to get better at reading JJ’s hidden messages.

“Look. It’s not about money.” After I hefted the third stool upside down onto the bar, a giant hand wrapped entirely around my forearm.

“Please.”

Turning to him, my ponytail swished over my shoulder. I looked where he held me until he dropped my arm.

“Sorry,” he grumbled. “I’m just… I need help.”

Okay, maybe he wasn’t beyond begging. In the intensity of his eyes flaring hazel-gold then cool brown, I could see he definitely had some kind of supernatural twitch. It bothered me, I admit it. But rules were rules.

I propped a hand on my hip and stared out at the street, still buzzing with nightlife. We closed the Cauldron at midnight, but other bars and clubs on Magazine Street stayed open much longer. Biting my lip, I swiveled back to him. “Have you talked to your people?”

“My people?”

“Yeah, your werewolf club. Lycans. Your familia.”

His expression blanked. “I have none.”

“None?”

“No one.”

“No one?”

“Am I making myself unclear somehow?” His scowl deepened, and his voice dropped a few decibels into a super growly range. I didn’t point out his dark mood swing was exactly why Jules enforced her no-werewolves rule.

I chewed on my bottom lip and debated. He had that preternatural stillness I’d seen vampires get when they were hyperaware of every move of every living thing in the room. It made me uneasy. I was about to tell him one more time that I couldn’t help him and he should seek out his own kind when the dude in the corner who’d had one too many of our Blood Orange Old Fashioneds stumbled into him from behind.

Wolfman had him by the throat and pinned to a tabletop with wicked-fast speed. The warning rumble building inside the werewolf’s chest raised the little hairs on my arms. Then I realized it wasn’t a warning. He was squeezing the life out of the drunk guy.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa.” I eased closer with slow movements, wrapping my hand around his forearm. A well-muscled and nicely veined forearm, I might add.

JJ leaped over the bar and strode toward us, coming way too fast. The werewolf’s growl deepened, but his eyes remained on the dude he was choking. I shook my head at JJ. He stopped midstride, keeping his distance but his eyes on the threat.

“Easy…easy,” I crooned to the dangerous man about to commit murder in our bar.

I maneuvered my body between him and the tabletop and put both my palms on his chest. I sucked in a breath at the furious vibration of his body. He was hot. And I don’t mean just fine-ass-hell hot. I mean volcano-rumbling-with-lava hot. Hissing between my teeth, I pumped a gentle surge of magic into him, like I would to move an object telekinetically. The pulse didn’t budge him, but it jarred his death stare from the drunk to me.

“Mateo,” I whispered gently. “Let him go. You don’t want to hurt him.”

With a flash of his fire-gold eyes and a sudden jolt, he jerked away and released the guy. Spinning around, he planted his hands against the wall behind him and sucked in great gulps of air, his head hanging low, his dark hair covering his face.

In the few seconds I made physical contact, I’d sensed a number of things. The hardest to swallow was the overwhelming wave of painful desperation ripping through the core of this man. I didn’t have the gift of reading emotions like my sister Clara, but there was no doubt this man was hurting. Badly. And what kind of witch was I to turn my back on him? When I might be the only one who could help him?

“JJ,” I said calmly, nodding toward the drunk guy. “Go help this guy into an Uber and get him home.”

“Whuz that ’bout?” slurred the drunk, rubbing his neck and trying to stand. He obviously didn’t realize he almost died a second ago.

“Are you sure I should leave you here?” asked JJ, fisting his hands, reminding me why he doubled as a bouncer.

“Yeah.” I stared at Mateo’s wide back as he heaved air in and out of his lungs, his six-and-a-half-foot frame bowed with what I could only describe as anguish. Regret. “We’re good now.”

JJ stalled for a few seconds while he got drunky on his wobbly feet and shuffled him out the door. Violet had taken off early so that left me and JJ to close up, so I was now alone with the werewolf. I should’ve been scared as hell, but strangely, I wasn’t. Though he acted on his violent impulses, it all stemmed from a deep-seated pain. Exhaling a sigh, I knew what I had to do.

“Mateo?”

Slowly, he rolled his muscular shoulders back, the only sign he heard me. He shoved off the wall and cleared his throat before turning to face me, his arms loose at his sides, his eyes downcast.

“I’m sorry. That was…unacceptable.”

“Yeah,” I agreed in a soft voice. “That was a serious lapse in control.”

He nodded, finally lifting his gaze off the floor. Semi-calm brown eyes met mine. Though I expected to see the rage still riding him, I found sadness. It reflected what I’d sensed when I touched him.

“Does this happen often?” I asked with a sympathetic lilt.

“This never happens. That has never happened before. I need…help.” It seemed to pain him to admit how badly.

Something pinched in my chest. “Right.”

I offered a soft smile, but he didn’t return it, agony still tight in the set of his mouth and eyes. If I did this, it would likely get my ass chewed out, but I didn’t care. A memory of Mom popped into my head.

“A good witch sees the truth, absorbs its goodness, and honors her gift.”

“But how do I honor it?” I asked her.

She cupped my chin and gave me her all-knowing Mom smile. “By sharing it with those in need.”

I stared at the werewolf, my mind made up. “Okay. Come with me.”

I wound through the tables and behind the bar toward the exit to the alley. I didn’t need to look to see if he was following. I could feel him. This wolf carried a heavy aura. No, not heavy exactly. Potent was more accurate. Whatever it was that made him what he was, it felt like a lick of flame at my back. I led him through the now empty and darkened kitchen, past the storage room to the alley entrance. I unclipped the keys dangling from the short chain that stretched across my belt-loops and opened the door.

Holding it open, I gestured for him to walk through. He did, his hands now in his front jeans pockets. Figuring he was trying to look less threatening, I snickered and locked the door behind us. He couldn’t look harmless if he tried. Not after that display of crazy in the bar and not since there was an electric charge simmering around his body like a lightning rod that had just been zapped twenty times.

“Is something funny?” he asked. Scowly face was back.

“Yep.”

“Care to share?”

He fell in step beside me as we followed the alleyway that separated the Cauldron from our corner shop next door, Mystic Maybelle’s. Our house was a short walk down the side street crisscrossing the intersection. The night was still hot but less humid as we crept into late October. Let me clarify. It felt less like swimming in soup and more like bathing in dogs’ breath. Any day now, we’d have our first cool front that would slowly shift the tide toward cooler weather, but that please-come-before-we-melt-in-Mordor moment hadn’t happened yet.

“Hmm. Let’s see.” The sidewalk buzzed with a few late-night partiers, the streetlights giving off a sense of security. A false one for anybody who rubbed the anxiety-riddled guy next to me wrong. His shifty gaze roamed the pedestrians talking and laughing among friends. “I had a rather shitty night at work, then a werewolf pops in right at closing time, claims he’s got a hex put on him—”

“I do.”

“Begs me to help him, but I politely tell him no, so then he nearly strangles one of our regulars to death.”

“I wouldn’t have killed him.”

“Are you sure about that?” I wasn’t being snarky. I was asking him seriously.

Silence. He looked away, his dark locks blocking my view of his eyes. Shame, that. When I stopped in front of the wrought-iron gate that opened to the walkway to our front door, he then finally faced me. Measuring me from head to toe, his gaze snagged on my chest. I wasn’t sure if he was staring at my perky boobs or my T-shirt with a black cat holding an arm bone that read I found this humerus.

I thought he might actually crack a smile, but then he looked at me like I was crazy—not an unusual occurrence—and did that shivery thing he’d done back in the bar, as if shaking off a bad dream. Not exactly the look a girl wanted when a hot guy checked out her goods.

“Are you okay?”

He clamped his mouth shut, his jaw tightening with a hard grind before he said, “You don’t understand what not being able to change is doing to me.”

I thought about him bending that guy over the table and choking him with one hand. “I think I have an idea.”

“I need to release the wolf.”

That agonizing expression was back. That pleading look. Though I didn’t tell him, he didn’t have to convince me of anything else. It was clear to me he wasn’t lying or exaggerating. He needed my help, and I planned to follow my instincts first. Not Jules’s rules.

With a stiff nod, I opened the gate and led a werewolf up the porch and into our house. I must be out of my damn mind.

As expected, soft music played from the back of the house where Jules was doing her nightly wind-down routine. He followed me down the entrance hall, past a small den and an arch leading to the left toward the large living room and our open kitchen. We continued down the hall toward the music. It appeared only Jules was in the main house.