Things that complicate matters. Old things. Council matters.
His lion paced restlessly, alert now in a way that had nothing to do with attraction and everything to do with instinct. Danger.That’s what the beast sensed. Not immediate, not physical, but danger, nonetheless.
He should have gone home.
Instead, Hux found himself at the window, staring north toward the edge of town where the Celestial Gardens sat in their decades of neglect. From here, he couldn’t see them—just the dark mass of forest and the faint glow of stars above.
The stars seemed brighter tonight. More present. Moreaware, if such a thing were possible.
You’d be surprised, she’d said when he mentioned the gardens were dormant.
What had she found out there? What had distracted her enough to make her twenty minutes late to her own ceremony, covered in moss and dirt and looking like she’d been wrestling with the very earth itself?
His hand found the windowsill, fingers pressing against the cool glass. Forty years old, eight years as mayor, and he’d never once felt the pull to investigate those gardens himself. They were dormant. Historical. A project for restoration, not a mystery to solve.
Hux pressed his forehead to the glass, breathing slowly, fighting for the control that had come so easily before today.
The candle in his desk showed nothing. Whatever his lion thought it sensed was a mistake. A glitch. A malfunction in instincts that had been dormant so long, they’d forgotten how to work properly.
And yet.
Memories of the way she’d looked at him filled his mind. The flash of recognition when she asked if it had to be him. Theunderstanding in her voice when she saidyour joblike she knew what it cost him.
Hux closed his eyes against the wanting that shouldn’t exist.
He would keep his distance. Maintain professionalism. She was a contractor, here to do a job, and he was the mayor who would oversee her work. Nothing more.
His lion called him a liar again.
This time, standing alone in his office with the stars burning bright and the vacant candle waiting in his desk and his father’s cryptic warning echoing in his ears, Hux wasn’t entirely sure the beast was wrong.
FIVE
LUNARIA
“Absolutely not.”
“Luna.”
“I have work to do. The gardens won’t restore themselves.”
“You’ve been working for three days straight.” Junie planted herself in the cottage doorway, arms crossed, channeling the same immovable stubbornness that had terrorized their childhood. “You need to meet people. You need wine. Both are non-negotiable.”
Lunaria looked down at her hands—dirt under the fingernails, scratches from thorns she hadn’t quite dodged, the faint shimmer of celestial residue clinging to her skin. She’d spent the past seventy-two hours cataloging the garden’s flower beds, mapping the ley line intersections, trying to make sense of what she’d awakened that first night.
The Warning Bells had chimed twice more since then—brief bursts, quickly silenced.
“I don’t do friend groups,” she said. The excuse sounded weak even to her own ears.
“You don’t do a lot of things. That’s the problem.” Junie’s expression softened slightly. “You’re staying at least through therestoration. That’s months. You can’t hide in the gardens the whole time, Luna. That’s not healthy.”
“One hour,” she said finally.
Junie’s face split into a triumphant grin. “Three.”
“Two.”
“Deal. Now go shower. You smell like compost and desperation.”
