Sometime around midnight, Marina’s eyes started to close.
“You should sleep,” Alessandro said.
“I’m fine. Keep reading.”
“You’ve been yawning for twenty minutes.”
“I’m interested.”
But her head was heavy, and the couch was soft, and Alessandro’s shoulder was right there…
She didn’t mean to fall asleep. One moment she was listening to him read a passage about the magical properties of selkie song, and the next she was drifting, her head against his arm, the bond humming with contentment.
Alessandro didn’t move.
She surfaced once, sometime later, to the slow realization that she was being carried. The world tipped gently—his arms under her knees and her shoulders, the cramped couch giving way to the cool dark of the hall. She could have saidput me down.She was a grown woman with functioning legs and a strict no-feelings clause she’d written herself.
She kept her eyes shut and let him carry her anyway.Just this once, she told the part of her that was keeping score.
He laid her on the unmade bed, pulled the blanket to her shoulders, and stood in the doorway longer than a houseguest had any business standing. Through the bond she could feel him not-leaving, his thoughts circling back over the same dark water.
Fifteen days.The number drifted across the tether, his and not hers. And under it, for the first time, something that wasn’t relief. Something that felt like loss. She should have found that alarming. Half-asleep, she filed it underdeal with tomorrowand didn’t.
Something else was snagged and circling in him too, worn smooth from handling. The curse-breaking cake, she was fairly sure; she’d read it aloud herself that afternoon.The flame of a dragon who loves without claiming.Dragons claimed, he’d told her once. Dragons hoarded. She could feel him turning the phrase over and over, baffled, like a man holding a key to a door he couldn’t find.
Marina, unguarded and nearly under, thought she might know where the door was. She just wasn’t ready to say so. Not tonight.
The floor creaked as he finally retreated. She listened to him settle onto the too-small couch, felt him lie awake the way she was lying awake—two people pretending the wall between them meant something.
Fifteen days, she thought. Hers, now. And reached, traitorously, for the warmth on the other side of the bond before she let herself sleep.
Chapter Eleven
“Honeycrisp is too sweet,” Alessandro heard himself insist, standing in the middle of the farmer’s market like someone who had opinions about produce. “The tartness of Granny Smith provides necessary contrast to the cinnamon.”
Estelle Nakamura regarded him with what might have been approval. “You’re learning, dragon boy. Next week we’ll discuss flour protein content.”
He had been arguing about apples for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes. About apples. And he’d been genuinely invested in the outcome.
That was, by his own honest accounting, a problem.
He was becoming one of them. A local. A fixture.
Mrs. Whitmore had started saving him cinnamon scones. Mr. Callahan greeted him by name. The nixie twins from the bookshop waved when he passed their window. Even Estelle, the town’s most formidable gossip, had stopped treating him like an outsider and started treating him like entertainment.
He knew the mailman’s name (Herbert). He had opinions about the farmer’s market schedule (Saturdays were too crowded, although—fine, the energy was nice, but the parkingwas objectively terrible). He’d developed a preferred route for his morning walk to the harbor, which he told himself was about the view and not about the way Marina looked when he brought back coffee for her too.
He was in so much trouble.
His phone buzzed: the fourth call from Dante this morning. Alessandro had been avoiding his brother for days, but the guilt was mounting. If anyone would understand what was happening to him, it was Dante.
“Finally,” Dante said when he answered. “I was starting to think Malachar had eaten you.”
“Don’t joke about that.”
“Who’s joking? You’ve been incommunicado for two weeks. David says you keep postponing meetings. The partners are asking questions. And you haven’t returned a single one of my calls about…” Dante paused. “Wait. Your voice sounds different.”
“My voice sounds the same.”
