“Yes.” She crossed her arms. “Is there a problem?”
Several. Starting with the fact that I haven’t voluntarily woken before eight since law school.
“Fine.” The word came out clipped. Bitter. The taste of surrender. “I’ll need to retrieve my things from the hotel.”
“Fine.”
“And make arrangements for my work. I have cases. Clients. A life that doesn’t involve…” He gestured vaguely at the hotel around them, at her, at the entire catastrophic situation.
“A life that doesn’t involve clumsy bakers from nowhere?” Her voice was sharp.
She felt that. She felt me thinking it.
“I didn’t…”
“You did. I felt it.” She crossed her arms tighter. “Just get your things. I’ll wait in the lobby. Apparently I have to.”
“And this doesn’t mean…”
“Trust me,” Marina interrupted, “I know exactly what this doesn’t mean. You don’t want to be here. I don’t want you here. We’re stuck with each other for twenty-eight days, and then you’ll go back to your life and I’ll go back to mine and we’ll never speak again.”
She said it like a vow. Her desperation flooded him, how badly she wanted this to be over.
He felt the same way.
Didn’t he?
“Agreed,” he said.
The Salty Siren was not what Alessandro expected.
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, exactly. Something small and quaint, probably. Forgettable. The kind of place tourists photographed and immediately forgot.
But the bakery at twilight was… charming. Blue shutters and window boxes full of flowers. Warm light spilling through windows that displayed an artful arrangement of pastries. A hand-painted sign that swung gently in the evening breeze, readingThe Salty Sirenin elegant script.
It looked like something from a painting. Something from another century. The kind of place his grandfather might have visited, back when the Dravens had money to spend on quaint coastal vacations instead of desperately trying to outrun a curse.
Marina unlocked the door, and the smell engulfed him. Cinnamon. Vanilla. Sea salt. Something yeasty and alive, the ghost of bread that had been baked that morning.
His dragon stirred, not with anger this time, but with interest. With longing he didn’t want to examine.
“The apartment is upstairs.” Marina didn’t look at him. “There’s a couch. You can sleep there.”
“A couch.”
“It’s a nice couch.”
He followed her through the darkened bakery, past display cases and a counter worn smooth by generations of use. The floorboards creaked underfoot. Photographs lined the walls: a woman who looked like an older version of Marina, smiling beside the bakery’s entrance. Her grandmother, he realized. The one Mortimer had mentioned.
Marina’s exhaustion seeped into him: deep and wearing, the kind that came from emotional devastation rather than physical exertion.
She’s as tired as you are. She didn’t ask for this either.
He pushed the thought away.
The stairs to the apartment were narrow and steep. His designer suitcase bumped against the walls. At the top, Marina unlocked another door and stepped aside to let him enter.
The apartment was small. Tiny, really: a combined living room and kitchen, a single bedroom visible through an open door, what appeared to be a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in. Every surface was covered in something: books, plants, mismatched cushions in sea-glass colors. It smelled like the bakery below, but warmer. More lived-in.
