“Like what?”
“Like he was planning something.”
“And you’re still not sure if Marina’s right about him?”
Alessandro was still resisting and they both knew it, still trying to find an explanation that didn’t require him to admit he’d been blind. That he’d invited danger into his family’s orbit and refused to see it.
“I don’t know what I’m sure of anymore,” he admitted.
“Then maybe start there.” Dante’s voice softened. “You don’t have to have all the answers, Alessandro. You just have to be willing to ask the right questions.”
He left Alessandro standing in the empty bakery, surrounded by the smell of bread that Marina had made before everything went wrong.
She was at Bea’s, and the bond carried all of it: hurt, scared, determined. She wasn’t giving up on him. Not yet. But she was waiting for him to prove he could change.
Alessandro thought about his father. Decades of dismissing his mother’s concerns. The curse handled in stubborn, lonely silence. The slow erosion of trust that had turned his parents’ marriage into a polite armistice.
He’d always sworn he wouldn’t become that man.
And yet here he was. Making the exact same mistakes.
I have to be different, he thought.I have to actually change, not just promise to.
But change required admitting he’d been wrong. About Malachar. About himself. About everything.
Two words he had spent his whole adult life refusing to say.
He picked up his phone and started typing the apology, deleted it, started again.
Chapter Fifteen
One week until the full moon.
Marina sat cross-legged on Bea’s living room floor, surrounded by papers, printouts, and the musty smell of old records she’d borrowed from the town archives. Bea had disappeared an hour ago, muttering something about chaos magic and needing crystals, leaving Marina alone with her research.
And her research was telling her something terrifying.
Malachar had been the Draven family’s “advisor” for exactly as long as the curse had existed. To the year. To the season.
The records were clear. In 1824, a Draven ancestor had broken an oath to protect a witch’s descendants. Had stood by while a mob burned their home. The dying witch had cursed the Draven line: a slow drain on the family fortune that would last until the debt was paid or the bloodline burned out. And the demon who’d witnessed the curse being cast? Who’d attached himself to the suffering like a parasite and been “advising” the family ever since?
Malachar.
Marina stared at the yellowed document, a copy of the original contract, preserved in the town’s supernatural archives.The signature at the bottom was unmistakable. The same elegant script. The same flourishes on the capital letters.
Two hundred years, and he hadn’t aged a day.
She pulled out her phone and started cross-referencing. Financial records. Investment histories. Every time the Dravens had made a major business decision, there was a note in the margins: “Per Malachar’s recommendation.”
And every single one of those recommendations had failed.
Not obviously. Not immediately. But slowly, steadily, predictably, exactly the way the curse worked. A promising investment that turned sour. A reliable partner who suddenly went bankrupt. A market that crashed just when the Dravens were most exposed.
He wasn’t trying to help them break the curse.
He was feeding on it.
Marina understood. Her grandmother had known. That’s why she’d hidden the counter-spell in a recipe book: because she’d understood that someone was actively preventing the Dravens from finding a cure. Someone who’d been watching. Waiting. Profiting.
