Ambrose showed up the first day I was back at work, giving me an almost shy smile as he came to sit at the bar.

“Hey, Maddie,” he started to say.

“He’s popular tonight since he’s been out for a while,” Shawna warned him.  “You can’t monopolize him.”

“I know.”  He looked a little wistful, though.  “How are you, though?”  His eyes focused on me intently, like he was listening to anything I might tell him verbally or non-verbally.

“Good,” I said after some consideration.  That was actually true, to my surprise.  Physically, I was feeling a lot better since the surgery and recovery, and otherwise…I had a friend who understood me, another friend who needed my support, and I had a plan for how to deal with my problem.  I’d just ignored it for decades because it was too big of a hassle to figure out how to face all three of them alone, when I wasn’t as capable in fights as I used to be, but now I had a goal for my life – being able to let Ambrose back into it.  I hadn’t really had a goal in life in such a long time, just sort of floating along with whatever job piqued my interest.  But now I had a goal, and a plan for how to get there.  It was kind of a nice feeling.

Ambrose looked a bit disappointed when I didn’t elaborate, but it was hard to explain all of that here, in the club.

“You’re, uh, doing fine after your break?”  He asked, doing his best to be tactful.  Maybe he realized I hadn’t informed Shawna or any of the patrons what the break was for, but at least he was trying to not reveal more information than I’d want him to.

“It was good,” I agreed.  “A little slow at first, but now things are better.”  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Shawna give me a weird look, because that sentence didn’t make much sense for someone who went on a vacation, but at least Ambrose knew what I meant and brightened up a bit.

“I’m glad,” he smiled much more brightly.  “And, um, your, uh, project?  How’s that going?”

“Making progress.”

“Good.”  He looked really happy, actually.  Like he was pretty thrilled with how this fairly simple conversation was going.

I had to tend to some other patrons for a bit, but when I got a chance to come back to him with some sparkling water, it was my turn to have a question for him.

“What do you do, by the way?”  I asked.  “You obviously know what I do, and I know you work in that building, but what do you do there?”

He looked delighted that I’d asked.  “I use my dreams!  Well, you know – I used to dream a lot.  So…I turned them into books.  I write,” he clarified.  “Fiction.  I have for, um, a while.”  He glanced around a bit.  “Under a couple different pseudonyms.”

Aka when he felt it was time for a particular persona to “die,” he just created a new pseudonym and started over again.  Kind of clever.  Also, I was impressed he was turning his daydreaming into something like this.

“Anyone I’d be familiar with?”

“Maybe?”  He blushed just a tad.  “I try to change up my style some, try something new – sometimes even try new genres.”

Okay, that genuinely was impressive.

“You’ll have to share some of your works with me sometime, so I can review them,” I informed him.

Ambrose nodded eagerly, then waited as I had to serve some other patrons for a bit.  The next lull in the crowd, he was ready with a question for me.

“Do you have hobbies?  I saw a punching bag in your room, you like boxing?”

It might be a bit ironic that I just befriended someone with a boxing gym.  “I like keeping in shape,” I responded.  “And keeping up my skills.”  I wasn’t about to explain further in this context, but Ambrose understood.  “I watch some TV, but most of it’s boring.  And sometimes I burn things.”

Ambrose tilted his head to one side, trying to translate.  “Like…what?  Stuff in the fireplace?  I don’t remember a fireplace.”

I grinned and winked at him.  “You’ll have to figure it out.”

Thankfully, he seemed more intrigued than bothered by this puzzle.  “I don’t think you’d go out and commit arson,” he murmured.  “Woodburning?  Uh, welding?”

“Close, on one of those,” I allowed.

He kept guessing, but didn’t get anywhere close to the truth the rest of the night.  When we had to shoo him out for closing, he promised he’d come up with some more ideas when I saw him next and he was convinced he’d get the right one.

I wasn’t so convinced.  Who heard of building little dioramas just to watch them burn?  I really doubted hobby shops advertised anything like that.

But this became a new thing for Ambrose, constantly trying to figure out what I meant.  Every time he came, he had a handful of new guesses, and seemed stumped every time I smiled, amused, and shook my head.

It was fun to watch him try to come up with guesses and get confused over and over, but honestly, I just liked getting to learn a bit more about him now.

For one thing, I learned that Ambrose was actually a pretty good dancer, on the occasions he got dragged out to the dance floor by other patrons.  I also learned that he had a rock garden at his place, which I assumed meant something along the lines of what his father had.

And it didn’t take me long at all to learn that he was definitely crushing on me.

He waited for about a week after I returned to work before trying to flirt by greeting me with “you look nice tonight, but I bet you’d look even nicer at my place.”

I considered that, along with his slightly pink face, which was kind of cute.  He’d already asked to kiss me and now was trying to flirt and actually not so bad at it, yet he looked all flustered like this was his first time ever trying to flirt.  I knew that wasn’t true, because he’d admitted he’d dated several times, but still, it was cute.

“Oh?”  I responded, a little cheekily.  “Only if the lights were off.”

Ambrose’s cheeks turned a shade darker pink.  “What if I’m scared of the dark?”

I chuckled a bit.  Ambrose was not scared of the dark.  He used to like running around the house in the dark and complained about turning on the lights if I caught him trying to sneak a midnight snack out of the fridge.  “Then I guess you’ll have to find someone to protect you.”

“I know someone who could be a good bodyguard,” he offered, his eyes fixed on me.

“Do you?  Then maybe you should ask them to protect you from the dark.  Or to just turn on the lights.”

He shook his head firmly.  “Not if you don’t want them on.”  Then he stopped, looking a bit dismayed that he’d dropped the flirty flow.  “Oops.”

I gave him a grin and handed him a new drink.  For a moment he looked disappointed, but then he paused, noticing that the napkin I’d given him with the drink was black.

Shawna interrupted us, needing me for a group order that came in, but I noticed that when he finished his drink, Ambrose pocketed the napkin, looking pretty happy about it.

Honestly…I hadn’t thought of him as a potential partner until he suggested it, but I found the idea a bit appealing.  He was nice looking, and I knew he was someone I got along well with and cared deeply about.  It’d be easy to spend every day with him for years, and flirting with him was kind of fun, so maybe this wouldn’t be a bad idea, after all.  Besides, while I had originally known him as a kid, he hadn’t been a kid in several decades, and I hadn’t been his bodyguard in decades, either.  As far as that went, a potential relationship between us would be on equal grounds.

I had to turn my attention away from Ambrose and back to the matter of the gang members, though, as the time to deal with the shifter finally arrived.  I’d confirmed his location and schedule and Alessia was lending me her car – which she didn’t drive so I honestly wasn’t sure why she even had one – so I could head out to the nearby town and deal with him.

I only hoped he’d be reasonable about this.  I didn’t care to kill people if I didn’t have to, but I wasn’t going to hesitate to permanently end any threats to Ambrose – or Troy – if it was necessary.

I drove out to the town the shifter was in, parking several blocks away from his house.  Then I hid, waiting until dark, before creeping closer – very careful to avoid anyone seeing me from a neighbor house – and waited until I saw him head out to take his trash to the curb, right on time.

He left his house unlocked when he did, so I slipped inside without him noticing, then waited around the corner for him to return.

He came in, kicked the door shut, and started for the recliner in front of the TV, then stopped and sniffed the air, like maybe he smelled something.  I wasn’t wearing cologne – intentionally – but it was possible he’d picked up a whiff of my shampoo or something.

Without waiting for him to start investigating, I leaped from the shadows, fangs extended, intending to sink them into any available skin I could find.  Since I jumped him from behind, the easiest place was his neck.  He had enough time to jab me in the ribs with his elbow and hit my face with the heel of his palm before he started to go limp.

I let him fall, a little unceremoniously, into his recliner, then stepped back as he glared at me.

“It’s been a while, Bob.”  I crossed my arms as I looked at him, trying to display nothing.  Neither hatred or annoyance for how much bother he and his friends had given me most my life, nor friendliness or kindness.  He wasn’t likely to agree to a truce if he thought I was weak or easily roused into anger, so I needed to take on a different persona, something that made sure he realized I was still very much a threat to him.

“Screw you,” he managed to get out.  “What’d you do to me?”

“Temporary paralysis.  You’re stuck for a few minutes, so I guess that means you have time to listen to me.”  I folded my fingers together and cracked them, giving him my best approximation of a dangerous smile.  “So sit for a minute, and listen.

“I contracted with your boss to help the gang with a fight.  I didn’t join the gang, and I had very specific requirements when I contracted – and your boss, he broke them.  Blatantly.”  I shrugged coolly.  “So I corrected the violation of the terms of our agreement.”

He looked at me with open rage.  “You betrayed us!  All of us!”

“Dude,” I told him with an eyeroll, “it’s been more than 35 years.  Let it go already.  I did.  Your boss broke the rules, I just repaid him for doing so.  Then you all go and decide to make it personal.  I put up with it for a while, gave you guys reminders not to mess with me, but no, you couldn’t take a hint.  It was annoying, though, and frankly, you weren’t worth my time to kill.  So I ignored you.  For a while.”

I smiled at him again, tilting my head to one side as I smiled with my fangs out, running my tongue over them while I looked at him.

Predictably, he gulped.

“Thing is, I recently…settled an old dispute.  Older even than the one with you and yours.”  Well, in a way.  Alessia and I actually didn’t have an argument with each other, but whatever.  “And it made me think.  You know what?  It’s kind of nice not to have the annoyance of some pests following you around, barking at your heels.  I’d rather just have it done with, you know?”

I set one hand on my waist, drawing his attention to the fact that I had both a knife and a gun there – that he could see.  I actually carried a few more weapons, because weapons were my friends after my injuries.  Before, I was more into direct hand-to-hand combat, though I could use weapons to my advantage if I wanted to, but now I relied on them a little more, since I’d rather avoid getting too close to some opponents if I could help it.

“So,” I drew out the word, giving him another deliberately creepy smile, “I decided to drop by and give you a visit.  See if we can’t…smooth things out a bit.”  I waited for just a second while he processed that.  “And end this one way or another.”

He definitely got the hint then.  He was aware that I was offering him two options and one of them was really bad for him.

But rather than looking relieved that there was a way out of this mess – well, mess for him – he started to look pissed off.  “You’d just paralyze someone and then kill them without giving them a chance?  Where’s the sense of fairness in that?”

I shrugged.  “Where’s the sense of fairness in chasing after someone for decades because they dared to handle a situation where their terms had been blatantly violated?  Look, I don’t care if you’re mad at me for killing your old boss or even putting the gang on the defensive instead of the offensive like they’d planned.  The point is, it’s been decades.  You’ve moved on to another life.  Holding a grudge about something like that, for that long?  It’s dumb,” I told him bluntly.  “It was a job to me, not a life.  He violated the terms, so I ended the contract.  He knew the consequences, he just didn’t care because he thought he was above them.  You know how annoying it is to have an old, unreliable boss’s employees harass you for years on end?”  I smiled coldly while I surveyed him again.  “I mean, I could always show you what that’s like, just make you constantly wonder when I’ll pop up again, and if you move?  Well, don’t worry, it’s easy to find you again.  I could make your life hell.  Or I could skip all that, save myself the bother, and end you now.”

I shrugged a bit as I settled my hand comfortably onto the hilt of my knife.  “It’s all really the same to me, but there is some hassle involved in stalking you, and I have better things to do with my life than harass someone from decades past who can’t let things go.”  I ran my tongue over my fangs again.

“So, what’s it going to be?”  I asked in a deadly quiet tone.  “Want to let bygones be bygones, call it a night, and walk away forgetting we ever met?  Or would you rather take the chance that I wouldn’t kill someone in cold blood?”

He hesitated.  He could see in my face that I was serious, and he was at a very distinct disadvantage.  I could also see he didn’t like the terms of the agreement, though.