"Fair enough."
The wind hit the cottage broadside and the lamp flame bent sideways. In the pause after, when the walls stopped shaking and the rain eased back from a roar to a pour, Isla looked at the candle and then at him.
"Someone left a note at my door," she said.
He waited.
"Yesterday, while I was at Corin's. No signature, no envelope. Three lines about something that happened when I was seventeen." She said it the way she said most things, clean and direct, but her hands were flat on the table on either side of the candle. "Details that nobody in Hollow Oak should have. Dates. Location. Things that only exist in coast records and harbor filings."
"What kind of details?"
"The kind that tell me someone went through municipal archives and fae-weather records and followed a trail from there to here." She met his eyes. "Moira confirmed it. The records are public, but pulling them together takes intent. Someone was looking for me specifically."
Rafe's wolf had gone very quiet. "When you say fae-weather records."
"There's an archive. Three institutions maintain it. Two academic, one commercial." She paused. "A trading consortium on the north channel."
He processed that. Trading consortium. North channel. The same territory Malrick had been running for a decade, the same network he used to track competitors, map routes, and build the kind of informational leverage that made him dangerous.
"Did the note threaten you directly?"
"It was subtler than that. The vessel count was wrong. Moira thinks it was deliberate, a way to draw a correction out of me. If I respond, I confirm who I am and where I am."
"Did you respond?"
"I'm talking to you, aren't I?"
The candlelight moved between them. Rain ran down the windows in sheets that turned the dark outside into something depthless. She was watching him with those blue-gray eyes that missed very little, and he could see the question forming before she asked it.
"I’m telling you this because your life is the water. And I assumed this, but now, after telling you, I know I’m right. You know something," she said.
"I know a lot of things. Most of them about river trade and cargo manifests."
"Rafe."
His name sounded different in her voice. Lower, the consonants softer.
"I don't have a name to give you yet," he said. "But I've got someone asking after me on the north channel, and the timing lines up with your note in ways I don't like."
"Someone with access to trade records and fae-weather archives?"
"Someone with access to a lot of things."
She was quiet. The storm filled the silence, wind and rain and the deeper sound of the lake working against the shore outside. The candle burned between them, steady despite the drafts, and in its light her face held the particular stillness of a woman deciding how much further to go.
"My father died in a storm," she said. "On a dock. The boats went down and the town pointed fingers and I ran." She said it like reading from a card, rehearsed, the short version meant to satisfy a question without inviting more. "That's the version in the records. And what’s in that note."
"And the real version?"
Her hands pressed harder against the table. "Longer."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"No." She looked at the rain on the window. "Not tonight, you're not."
The quiet sat between them and he let it. He sensed the pull of her, the same gravity that had hit him when he'd touched her wrist outside the inn, sharpened now by proximity and low light and the particular intimacy of being trapped in a small space while the world outside made itself unlivable. His wolf was paying close attention and Rafe was paying close attention to his wolf and the entire arrangement was becoming untenable.
He wanted to tell her. The words were right there, already built, already true.You're my mate. I knew it the moment I touched you. Everything since then has been me trying not to corner you with it.
