“It’s not undone,” Sully said. “But it’s… repacked. Neater. I can carry it.”
Sully laughed—a dry, broken sound. But he picked up the glass. The first sip made him flinch. The second made him pause. The third, he closed his eyes.
Leo leaned on the bar. “That’s a lot of packing to undo in one night.”
He caught the eye of the other bartender, a silent woman named Elara who communicated through eyebrow raises and the precise clink of ice scoops. She nodded once, then began subtly turning away other customers. “Water main break in the back,” she’d lie. “Ten minutes.”
He reached under the bar to a small, locked cabinet that didn’t appear on any inventory list. Inside were not bottles, but tools: a silver teaspoon, a sprig of dried rosemary from Mags’s final harvest, a pinch of black lava salt, and a small glass vial containing a single, overproofed white rum that had been infused with chamomile and—if you believed the lore—a drop of tears collected from the bar’s patrons on New Year’s Eve 1999.