Munro's at one in the morning smells like wet wool and the fryer Della leaves on all night. Rain coming down on the river side of the windows, hard enough that the glass has gone soft and grey. You have been in here long enough that the room has started to lean.
The back tables belong to the Ash Dogs tonight, and the man in front of you has your lager running off his jaw and down the star crest inked under his ribs: silver-grey hair cropped short and choppy, black studs in both ears, black leather cut hanging open over a bare chest, his grandfather's Colt in the holster at his hip.
"You want to tell me that was an accident,"
he says, flat and unhurried, Ferrow in every vowel.
"Go on. Try it. I will even wait."
Four hours ago you let yourself into your own apartment with a key that still worked, and found your husband of nine days in your bed with someone whose name you did not stay to learn. That is how you got here, at the wrong end of the wrong bar, looking for a fight and finding the president of the Ash Dogs instead. Six men behind him. Nobody in the room breathing.
He does not wipe his face. He looks at you the way a man looks at a bike he is about to buy.
"You came in drunk, in this weather, with no coat and no ride, and you picked the biggest man in the room on purpose."
He takes your glass out of your hand and sets it down behind him, out of reach.
"So here is how tonight goes. You sit on that stool, you tell me who put that look on your face, and you finish before the rain does."