Rafe let go of the jacket. Garren stumbled back against the barge rail.
"What artifacts?" Rafe asked.
"I told you, I don't know. Something from the coast. From the night those boats went down. He said Sloane had been collecting them for weeks."
Rafe stood on the barge and felt the shape of Malrick's plan come into focus with a clarity that made his stomach turn.
Malrick wasn't just trying to ruin his reputation. He wasn't just trying to steal his routes. He was planning to weaponize Isla's trauma. Find artifacts connected to the worst night of her life, use them to trigger an uncontrolled storm, and let the destruction speak for itself. One catastrophic weather event over Moonmirror Lake while the Ashvane sat in her mooring, freshly repaired, fully loaded. The ship would be wrecked. The stormcaller would be exposed as exactly the danger the rumors had been building toward. And Malrick would be standing bywith clean hands, ready contracts, and the sympathetic smile of a man who'd tried to warn everyone.
"Dex," Rafe said without turning around. "Get to Emmett. Now. Tell him what Garren just said. Every word."
"What about you?"
"I'm going to the Hargrove farmstead."
"Rafe." Dex's voice carried an edge. "If Malrick's there with a man and artifacts designed to trigger a stormcaller, walking in alone is exactly the kind of thing that ends with someone getting hurt."
"Then it ends with someone getting hurt."
"That's not a plan."
"I don't have a plan. I have a woman sitting alone somewhere in a storm that's getting worse by the hour because a man I should have dealt with years ago is pulling her apart piece by piece." He stepped off the barge. "Get to Emmett. Tell Rowan. Tell whoever else matters. I'll handle Malrick."
"Handle him how?"
Dex’s yellow-green eyes showed the fox reading the wolf, and whatever he saw made him nod once and step off the mooring post.
"Emmett first," Dex said. "Then Rowan. I'll find you at the farmstead."
"Bring backup."
"I always do." He was already moving up the bank road, fast, his slight frame disappearing around the bend in under thirty seconds.
Rafe stood on the dock. The storm from the north ridge had moved over the valley now, the rain starting, the lake going dark under the cloud cover. He could feel the weather changing, the way anyone who'd spent fifteen years on water could feel it, and underneath the natural pressure system there was something else. A frequency. A vibration in the air that he recognizedbecause he'd felt it the night his ship came in, the night the lightning rose from the the lake in columns too precise to be natural.
Isla was out there somewhere, her power bleeding into the storm, and Malrick was counting on exactly that.
Rafe turned north toward the ridge road and started walking.
27
ISLA
The cottage shook when the third gust hit.
She'd come back from the rocks an hour ago, soaked through, her hair dripping lake water on the stone floor, her hands carrying so much charge that the door latch sparked when she touched it. She'd changed into dry clothes on autopilot. Lit the stove because the cottage was freezing. Sat at the kitchen table with her palms flat on the wood and tried to do what she'd been training herself to do.
The storm didn't care about her training.
It had been building since she'd let her power bleed into the natural front at the shoreline, her frequency tangling with the north ridge system until the two fed each other into something larger than either would have been alone. She could feel it now, a massive low-pressure cell sitting directly over the lake, the wind rotating counterclockwise in a pattern she recognized as her own signature woven through the weather like thread through cloth.
The shutters rattled. Rain hammered the windows. Through the south glass she could see the lake churning, whitecaps running in rows, the water dark as slate.
She saw the charge now, a faint blue-white glow at her fingertips, the static arcing between her index and middle fingers in tiny jumps. She let herself see it for what it was.
Her.
All of it. The storm over the lake, the charge in her hands, the wind tearing at her cottage, the pressure system that was growing because she was feeding it with every emotion she refused to process. The grief from last night. The letters on the notice board. The fear that every choice she'd made with Rafe had been instinct disguised as freedom. She'd taken all of it to the shoreline and poured it into the sky because that was easier than sitting still with it.
