“Two hundred years of feeding on my family’s curse. Sabotaging every attempt to break it. Killing Marina’s grandmother when she got too close to a cure.” Alessandro stepped forward, and he felt the dragon in his blood rise: heat building in his chest, smoke curling at the edges of his breath. “We have records. Witnesses. Evidence that even your charm can’t explain away.”
“This is absurd…”
“The recipe book.” Marina’s voice was steady. “You took it from my bakery. I want it back.”
Danger moved behind Malachar’s eyes. The charming facade cracked, and Alessandro saw what lay beneath: old and hungry and utterly without mercy.
“Careful, little seal. You’re making threats you can’t?—”
“We’ve already informed Estelle,” Alessandro cut in. “If we’re not back at the bakery within an hour, with the book, she broadcasts everything to every supernatural network she can reach. By sunset, every creature within five hundred miles will know exactly what you are and what you’ve done.”
No one moved.
Malachar’s expression shifted through calculation, rage, and finally, reluctantly, acceptance.
“The book is at my hotel,” he said. “I’ll have it sent to the bakery.”
“No. You’ll go get it. Bring it to us. Now.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then I shift right here, in front of everyone, and we see who’s faster: you running or me burning.” Alessandro let smoke curl from his nostrils. “I’ve been looking for an excuse, Malachar. Don’t give me one.”
Malachar laughed, a cold, hollow sound.
“You’ve grown teeth, dragon boy. I didn’t expect that.” He adjusted his cuffs with exaggerated care. “Very well. You’ll have your book. But understand this: this isn’t over. You’ve made an enemy today. And I have a very, very long memory.”
He walked away toward his hotel, and Alessandro watched him go. This creature who had destroyed his family for centuries, who had killed Marina’s grandmother, who had smiled and offered condolences at funerals for people he’d murdered.
The dragon in his blood screamed to pursue. To shift right here in the afternoon sunlight and end this. Two centuries of suffering, paid for in fire.
But Marina’s hand found his arm.
“Not yet.” Her grip tightened on his arm. “We need the book first. We need to be smart.”
“I hate being smart.”
“I know.” For just a moment, a flicker of warmth slipped through the walls she’d built. “But smart is how we win.”
They stood on the harbor, salt wind whipping around them, and waited.
Forty minutes later, a hotel bellhop arrived with the recipe book wrapped in brown paper. Marina took it with trembling hands, opening the cover to verify it was really her grandmother’s book: the familiar handwriting, the water-stained pages, the smell of old paper and magic.
It was real. He hadn’t substituted a fake.
“Why would he give it back?” Alessandro asked, unable to trust their luck. “He knows it can destroy him.”
“Because he’s planning something else,” Marina said. “He thinks he has time. He thinks we don’t know how to use it yet.”
“Do we?”
She looked down at the book, at the recipe for Curse-Breaking Cake that had been hidden in plain sight for decades.
“We’re about to find out.”
The book felt heavier in her arms than it should have. She tucked it inside her jacket anyway and started for home.
Back at the bakery, Marina held her grandmother’s book like a relic. Her fingers traced the worn leather, the familiar handwriting, the pages that contained the key to everything.
