Surprise played across her face. She’d expected him to fight harder.
She’s not a pushover. She’s just quiet.
“Good,” she said, her shoulders dropping slightly, the tension easing. “Now help me restock the flour. We’re running low.”
The afternoon passed in uneasy truce.
Alessandro forced himself to nod at customers. To answer questions with something other than monosyllables. When a vampire asked about his work, he actually explained: briefly, without detail, but explained. When Mrs. Thornberry returned (because of course she returned, these people had no concept of holding grudges), he apologized again. Properly this time.
She patted his hand and told him her niece was still available if he changed his mind.
Progress.
His phone buzzed at three. He glanced at the screen and felt his blood go cold.
Malachar.
“I need to take this,” he told Marina.
She nodded, not looking up from the register. But her attention sharpened; he could feel it like a blade being drawn.
He stepped into the kitchen, putting as much distance between them as the bond allowed. Forty feet. The ache in his skull started immediately: a low-grade headache that would become agony if he pushed further.
“Alessandro.” Malachar’s voice was warm as ever. Warm like a hearth fire. Warm like something designed to make you forget what it could burn. “I’ve been worried. You haven’t returned my calls.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“So I’ve heard. A mating bond, of all things. How… unexpected.”
How do you know about that?He didn’t ask. Malachar always knew. That was the point of him: the help you never asked for, arriving exactly when you were too desperate to refuse it.
“It’s temporary. A month at most.”
“Of course. These things usually are.” A pause. Calculated, like everything Malachar did. “But I’m concerned, Alessandro. You went to Sweetwater Cove to find the original contract. To break the curse. And instead you’ve gotten yourself tangled up with a selkie baker.”
“The situations are unrelated.”
“Are they?” Malachar’s voice dropped, taking on that particular quality that always made Alessandro feel like prey. “The Pearls were there when the curse was cast. Did you know that? Their family has been in Sweetwater Cove as long as yours has been suffering.”
Alessandro’s hand tightened on the phone. He knew. The journal entry he’d read on the jet had named them: a thin lead, the only one he’d had.
“What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m offering information. If you’d let me help…”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Don’t you?” The warmth was gone now. Something older looked out through Malachar’s voice, something that smelled like smoke and copper and very old blood. “You’ve been searching for ten years, Alessandro. Your grandfather searched for forty. Your great-grandfather for sixty. None of you have found the answer. And here I am, offering it freely, and you keep refusing.”
“Because I don’t trust you.”
Silence. When Malachar spoke again, his voice was perfectly pleasant. That was the worst part. The pleasantness never cracked.
“That hurts, Alessandro. After everything I’ve done for your family.”
“What exactly have you done? Besides watch us suffer for two centuries?”
The line went dead.
