She pulled the papers off the board, folded them and put them in her jacket pocket.
Her first instinct was to go to the dock. Confront him. Hold the letters in front of his face and demand an answer the way she'd demanded answers the first time they'd spoken. But the thought of standing on that dock, in front of his crew, asking the man she'd slept with whether he'd been tracking her before he ever arrived, made her stomach turn.
Her second instinct was to go to Moira. Cross-reference the letters against the records Moira had already pulled. Check dates, check handwriting, check whether the claim about the trading consortium request was even verifiable. That was the rational move. The smart move.
She stood in the square and did neither. Because underneath the anger and the doubt, something worse was taking shape. The formal complaint from Ardenmere. The witness account from the coastal village. Those weren't forged. The details weretoo specific, the formats too consistent with real municipal documentation. Even if Malrick had planted them on the board, even if the third letter was a fabrication designed to poison her trust in Rafe, the first two papers were real. They were her history. The trail she'd been running from for a decade, laid out in public for anyone who passed the council notice board to read.
People in this town would see those. People who had accepted her on the condition that she was trying, that she was safe, that the storms were being managed. They would read about Ardenmere. About the coastal village and a pattern of weather with a woman who left before questions could be answered. And whatever fragile tolerance Hollow Oak had extended to her over the last year would crack.
She thought about Rafe. Past the anger, past the doubt. The man who'd sat in her kitchen and said because she deserved better than what he's offering.
If that man was real, if the care was real, if any of what he'd said in the last week was what it sounded like, then she was the worst thing that could happen to him. And it had nothing to do with the bond. It was what she carried. The history. The damage. The trail. Malrick was already using her to take apart Rafe's livelihood. The forged manifests, the rumors about weather magic, the narrative that tied them together publicly. Every day Rafe spent near her gave Malrick more ammunition.
He'd told her about the mate bond because he was trying to be honest. He'd said he hadn't decided whether to leave. And she could see, with a clarity that hurt, where that indecision led. A river captain anchored to a stormcaller with a documented history of destruction. His contracts gone. His reputation shredded. His life on the water, the thing he loved most, sacrificed for a biological pull he hadn't chosen.
He'd said the recognition wasn't a choice. That it was something that happened to him. And he'd said a bond required consent.
She could withhold that consent. She could remove herself from the equation. She could do what she'd done four times before in four other towns. Leave before the damage spread. Give him back the river and the routes and the life he'd built. Let the mate recognition fade into something he could live with, the way a pulled muscle healed if you stopped using it.
Distance was the only thing she'd ever been good at giving people.
The clouds from the north ridge had moved over the valley. The first drops of rain hit the cobblestones around her. She pulled her jacket tighter and walked out of the square toward the western path.
She walked past the cottage, down the shoreline to the far point where the land curved around the lake's western arm, a stretch of rocky bank that nobody used because the footing was bad and the wind came straight off the water with nothing to break it. She sat on the largest rock and let the rain come.
The storm built over the next hour. Steadily, the way natural weather built when it had enough pressure behind it. Rain thickened into a pour. The wind picked up off the lake, driving spray across the rocks. She sat in it with her jacket soaked through and her hair plastered to her face and let the weather do what it wanted because right now she wanted to feel a strom that wasn’t her own.
The charge came back. She could feel it in her hands, in her chest, in the space behind her eyes where the connection lived. Her power was responding to the grief the way it always responded to strong emotion, amplifying what was already there, feeding the natural storm with her own frequency untilthe line between what was weather and what was her became impossible to find.
She let it blur. She was too tired to hold it separate. Too tired to ground, to compress, to manage. The salt pouch was in her pocket but she didn't reach for it. The iron filings were at the cottage but she wasn't going back there. Not yet. Not until she'd decided what she was doing, where she was going, whether the woman who'd been happy on the birch path yesterday was someone who got to exist or whether she was just another version of the girl in the tree line, watching something she loved burn and calling it survival.
She sat on the rock and let the distance grow.
26
RAFE
Dex was at the gangway holding a stack of papers in one hand, his yellow-green eyes sharp, his body angled like a fox that had just dug up something dead. He didn't say good morning to Rafe. He just held out the papers.
"These were on the notice board in the square," he said. "I pulled them down an hour ago. There were copies at the tavern too. Petch had already taken those, but not before the morning freight crews saw them."
Rafe took the papers and read them. The noise in his head went very quiet.
"Where did you find these?" His voice came out low. Controlled. The kind of controlled that Dex had learned to treat as a warning over seven years.
"Square board and dock tavern, like I said. Pinned up overnight. Nobody saw who posted them." Dex paused. "The first two are real documents. Municipal filings, coastal archives. The third one is a forgery."
"I know it's a forgery. I never requested anything from the consortium records office."
"I know that. You know that. But the people who read it this morning don't."
Rafe read the third letter again. The captain of the Ashvane requested copies of these documents three weeks before his arrival in Hollow Oak. He knew who she was before his ship ever docked. The handwriting was the same neat script from the forged manifest. The same hand that had written the note left at Isla's door. Malrick's man, whoever held the pen, was consistent.
"Isla," Rafe said.
"The square copies are gone. I got them. But if she walked through town this morning before I did and there were others..."
Rafe just knew. "She saw them."
