“I probably shouldn’t…”
“Please? Just a little fire? I’ll be really careful, I promise.”
Alessandro looked at Marina again. She shrugged; her shop, but his choice.
Alessandro exhaled a tiny flame, slow and deliberate, the way someone might tip a single drop from a full pitcher. It flickered above his palm, no bigger than a candle’s: golden and warm and not remotely threatening.
Jamie’s face lit up brighter than the flame. “COOL!”
“It’s not cool. It’s approximately 800 degrees…”
“That’s the COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN!”
By the time Jamie and his mother left (with extra cookies, on the house, plus a small bag of dragon-shaped shortbreads that Marina had made for a birthday order and now couldn’t possibly sell), the little werewolf had decided that Alessandro was his new favorite person. He’d made Alessandro promise to show him “more fire stuff” next time, had asked approximately forty-three questions about dragon scales (Alessandro didn’t have scales in human form, but Jamie refused to accept this), and had declared that he wanted to be a dragon when he grew up.
“You can’t become a dragon,” Alessandro had said, with the patient tone of someone who’d explained this multiple times. “It’s a hereditary condition.”
“Then I’ll be a werewolf who’s FRIENDS with a dragon! That’s almost as good!” Jamie had high-fived Alessandro’s kneecap, the highest point he could reach, and bounded out thedoor still chattering about fire and scales and how his friends were going to be SO jealous.
Marina watched Alessandro watch Jamie leave. Something soft and surprised surfaced in his expression, pleasure he didn’t quite know what to do with.
“You did well.”
“I terrified him initially.”
“And then you showed him fire and made a friend for life.” She handed him a chocolate sea salt cookie. “Jamie’s going to tell everyone at school about his dragon friend. You’re going to be the most popular supernatural in the under-eight crowd.”
He took the cookie. “It was nothing.”
The special order from the Hendersons required a recipe Marina hadn’t made in two years.
She stood in front of her grandmother’s recipe book, hesitating. It had been sitting on the shelf since the funeral, gathering dust alongside Nana’s other things: the pearl earrings, the embroidered apron, the collection of supernatural romance novels she’d thought Marina didn’t know about.
Opening it felt like visiting a grave.
“What’s wrong?”
Alessandro appeared in the kitchen doorway, drawn by whatever shift he’d sensed in her. Marina’s hand rested on the book’s leather cover, trembling slightly.
“I need a recipe. The Hendersons want my grandmother’s lemon cake, the one she was famous for.” She swallowed. “I haven’t opened this since she died.”
He didn’t say anything. Didn’t offer advice or solutions. He just stood there, present and patient, while she worked up the courage to open the book.
The smell hit her first. Old paper and dried lavender and something that was just Nana: flour and sugar and years of love baked into every page. Marina’s eyes blurred.
“She used to let me help,” she said, her voice thick. “When I was little. She’d stand me on a stool and let me stir the batter. Always said I had a baker’s hands.”
“You do.”
She looked up. Alessandro was watching her with an intensity that made her pulse quicken.
“She would have liked you,” Marina said, and was surprised to find she meant it. “She would have called you ‘that stubborn dragon boy’ and tried to fatten you up and told you off for not sleeping enough.”
“She sounds like Bea.”
“Bea learned from the best.” Marina turned a page, finding the lemon cake recipe in Nana’s familiar handwriting. “I miss her every day. It’s been two years, and I still wake up sometimes expecting to hear her singing in the kitchen.”
“That doesn’t go away.” He leaned against the doorframe. “The missing. It just becomes… part of you. Like a scar you learn to carry.”
