He closed his eyes and realized he hadn’t thought about the curse in three hours.
Three hours. The longest stretch in ten years. He’d spent every waking moment, and most of his sleeping ones, focused on breaking the curse, on saving his family, on solving the unsolvable problem that had defined his entire adult life.
And today he’d spent three hours thinking about a cookie. The cookie Marina had pressed into his hand and told him to chew.
This is dangerous, the rational part of his brain insisted.This is exactly what you can’t afford.
And somewhere in the apartment above him, he knew she was doing the same thing.
The cursor on his laptop blinked at him. He closed it.
“You’re in trouble,” he told the empty room.
The empty room did not disagree.
Chapter Ten
Marina woke to the smell of bread rising.
For a disoriented moment, she thought she was back in her childhood: Nana already at work in the kitchen below, the rhythm of early morning baking as steady as a heartbeat. Then the present reassembled itself: her apartment, her bakery, day twelve of her accidental bond with a dragon who had apparently learned her schedule.
The ovens were already warming. She could hear them through the floor, the particular hum they made when heating to the right temperature, a sound she knew as intimately as her own breathing.
Alessandro had started the ovens.
She found him in the kitchen, laptop open on the counter but forgotten, his attention on the sourdough starter she’d been nurturing for three years.
“You fed it,” she said.
He looked up. In the grey pre-dawn light, he looked softer somehow, less polished, more human. “You were running late. The starter needed attention at four.”
“I wasn’t running late. I woke at four-oh-three.”
“That’s three minutes late.”
“That’s a perfectly reasonable variation.”
“Your schedule said four. It’s now four-fifteen. The starter needed feeding at four.” He gestured to the starter, now bubbling happily in its jar. “I followed your notes.”
Marina stared at the jar, then at him.
“You read my notes.”
“They were detailed. I appreciate detailed notes.”
His satisfaction at having done something right came through the bond, warm and unguarded. Marina filed the discovery away with a kind of dread: somewhere under all that Italian tailoring lived a man who got sincerely happy about a well-annotated sourdough schedule. It was the most dangerous thing she’d learned about him yet.
Sixteen days, she thought.Only sixteen more days.
The countdown was supposed to be a railing, an exit clearly marked. But the reminder felt hollow now, and instead of relief it dredged up something inconvenient. She’d caught herself that morning thinking about her pelt, folded in its cedar trunk under sweaters she never wore, and how long sealskin kept before it forgot the shape of you.
She moved to the counter, acutely conscious of the space between them. Two feet. Less, as she reached past him for the flour bin. Close enough to feel the heat radiating from his skin, the warmth that never quite banked even at rest.
He turned toward her at the same moment she looked up.
Their eyes met.
The bond hummed between them, not with words, but with want. Awareness. The kind of desire that had been building for twelve days and no longer pretended to be anything else.
