Dani winced. The words hit too close to home.
“I know that,” she said.
“Do you?” Edith’s gaze was steady. “Because if you walk into this thinking love fixes the way men like him are raised to think of us, you risk getting hurt again. The difference is, you’re mated to him now.”
Silence again, thick and heavy.
Lavinia exhaled. “On that cheerful note,” she said, rising, “I’m going to check the house wards. Penelope, Tamsin, and me. The rest of you can find some way of entertaining yourselves, I’m sure.”
Chairs scraped. Cloaks were pulled on. The covens moved with practiced efficiency when given a task; the room emptied quickly, like a tide going out.
Within a few minutes, only Dani and Edith were left.
The quiet felt louder without the others' voices.
Dani stared into her tea. “You could work on your timing, you know,” she said, “if there’s a more brutal way to say ‘don’t get your hopes up,’ I haven’t heard it.”
Edith snorted, “You’d complain if I sugar-coated it. You always have.”
“That’s not untrue,” Dani conceded.
Edith sank into the chair opposite her, neatly crossing her legs, “I’m not saying he can’t…change,” she said. The word had an edge. “I’m saying men who’ve been taught their whole lives to fear something don’t just wake up one morning and decide everything is roses.”
Dani’s cheeks heated. “He did.”
“And last week,” Edith went on, “before the mating, he was still calling what we do a plague.”
Dani huffed out a sigh, “So what, I just…stop doing magic and keep my feelings in a box?”
“I think you let him earn trust instead of handing it over like a free sample,” Edith said, “and you remember that you are a witch first, not in a coven hierarchy sense,” she added, seeing Dani bristle. “In a bone sense. Magic is who you are. If he can’t look at that without wanting to flinch, that’shiswork. Not yours to make easier by shrinking.”
Dani’s gaze dropped to her own hands. Small burns and ink stains, the faint shimmer under the skin when power stirred.
“I know,” she said quietly.
She did know. She’d spent ten years building a life that didn’t bend to anyone’s fear but her own. Coming back here, to him, threatened to wrap her in old shapes she’d outgrown.
And yet.
He had held her as if she were something precious last night. Not a problem. Not a tool. Just…Dani. Witch, mate, mess and all.
“I just wish…” she trailed off, biting the inside of her cheek.
Edith’s mouth quirked. “You want him to accept all of you. Not just the pieces that make strategic sense.”
Dani met her gaze. “You’re very rude today.”
“You’re very obvious,” Edith said.
Something in Dani’s chest squeezed.
Because yes. That was it. She wanted him to see her, whole. The girl he’d first kissed in a Nordan winter, the woman she’d become in Salem, the mother, the witch whose magic didn’t behave. All of it. And not flinch.
Childish, maybe. Dangerous, definitely.
Probably futile.
She sighed, rubbing her thumb along the mug’s rim. “It’s stupid,” she said.
