When the bakery closed, Marina went upstairs alone. Alessandro stayed on the couch, laptop open, pretending to work. She didn’t need the bond to know he’d been not-reading the same document for twenty minutes; his attention circled back to her like a compass needle that wouldn’t settle.
She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to make the pieces fit.
Malachar knew about her family. He’d researched the Pearls specifically. He’d found connections between selkie magic and curse-breaking.
Her grandmother had hidden a counter-spell in a recipe book, using code that only someone who understood selkie traditions could read.
And Malachar had been “helping” the Dravens for exactly as long as the curse had existed.
There were no coincidences in magic. Her grandmother had taught her that.
Which meant Malachar’s interest in her was strategic. He hadn’t wandered into her bakery; he’d come hunting.
He saw her as a threat.
And Alessandro couldn’t see it because seeing it would mean accepting that he’d trusted the wrong person for a decade. That he’d let a monster into his family’s inner circle. That all his careful research, all his determined independence, had been exactly what the enemy wanted.
Marina understood the impulse to deny. She’d denied her own grief for years, hidden from the sea, locked away her pelt rather than face what swimming without her grandmother would feel like.
That night, after Alessandro had fallen into restless sleep on the couch, Marina crept downstairs with her grandmother’s recipe book clutched to her chest.
She hid it in the flour storage closet, behind the emergency supplies she never used, wrapped in plastic and tucked inside a container marked “EXPIRED - DO NOT USE.”
Malachar could search the apartment all he wanted. He wouldn’t think to look in a baker’s boring pantry supplies.
As she climbed back upstairs, Marina thought about the way Malachar had smiled at her. Patient. Certain. A predator who knew his prey wasn’t going anywhere.
She thought about Alessandro’s blind spot: decades of trust that had hardened into something he couldn’t see past.
And she thought about her grandmother’s warning, scrawled in the margins of a recipe that wasn’t quite a recipe:When the dragon comes, remember what matters.
The dragon part she could handle. She’d been handling him for two weeks.
She pulled the closet door shut and pressed her ear against it. Nothing. Just flour and silence and the small, unconvincing sound of her own breathing.
Chapter Fourteen
The bond had gone quiet.
Alessandro felt it the moment he woke: a muted quality to the frequency that had been clear for weeks, like static where a song used to be. She was still there, still connected, but the emotions flowing through weren’t the warm, open ones he’d grown accustomed to.
She was pulling away. And he didn’t know why.
He found her in the bakery kitchen at four-thirty, already elbow-deep in bread dough. The sight should have been comforting, but her posture was wrong. Shoulders too tight. Movements too sharp.
“You’re up early,” he said.
“I’m always up early.”
“Earlier than usual.”
She didn’t look at him. “Couldn’t sleep.”
A flicker of doubt, or worry, reached him before she clamped down on it. The sudden silence was jarring. He’d gotten used to feeling her, to knowing her moods before she spoke them.
Now he felt like he was reading a book with half the pages torn out.
“Marina.” He crossed to stand beside her, close enough to touch but not touching. “Whatever happened yesterday, with Malachar, we should talk about it.”
