“Don’t go getting all noble on me, baker.”
His mouth curved, slow and infuriating. “Still a bastard where it counts.”
She hated that her lips twitched. Hated worse that he saw it.
Wesley lingered a moment, still looking at the door. “You and he…” He trailed off, voice casual, almost careless. “Are you?—?”
Maude huffed. “Oli’s family. Closest thing I’ve got to one, anyway.”
“Right,” he said quickly, tone smoothing itself out. “Didn’t mean to pry. He just seems... close to you.” A beat. “Which is good. Everyone needs someone like that.”
Maude’s brow arched. “Didn’t realize you cared so much about my emotional well-being, Rivers.”
He smiled faintly. “Don’t. Just making conversation.”
She tilted her head, studying him for a heartbeat too long before letting it drop.
The shop had slipped into that hour where even the ghosts got bored.
Lanterns outside sank to patient embers; the gutters whispered with runoff; Blightbend’s clamor dwindled to the clack of a distant cart and the soft hiss of starlight orbs dimming along the lane. Inside, the Elixir Emporium—currently theHaunted Bakery, as Mistwood Hills had christened it—breathed a wary, sugar-and-sage quiet. The yeasty warmth from the cauldron-mixer on Wesley’s side seeped over the chalk line that divided their “domains,” meeting Maude’s lingering nettle and nightshade like two strangers stuck sharing a pew.
She should’ve gone home hours ago. Grim would be perched in the window, a furry gargoyle judging her life choices. Her cut wrist tugged whenever she flexed her fingers, a low, irritated throb beneath the bandage. She’d told herself she would lock up after decanting the blackthorn steep.
Then Wesley started working.
He had his sleeves rolled to the elbow and a clean apron tied carelessly at his hips. The flour-dusted world made a frame around him: scales, scrapers, a brass timer, a small bowl of water for smoothing stubborn edges. He moved as if he was counting in some internal rhythm—four-beat measures, the same tempo he kept when he built dough from nothing: weigh, whisk, fold, rest. He always made it look easy, which was vexing, because nothing was easy anymore. Not for her.
She found herself leaning on her own counter, pretending to organize tincture labels while actually watching him. The curse had left everything jittery—jars buzzed on their shelves; the chandelier tinkled as if impatient. But the longer he repeated the sequence—roll, fold, quarter-turn, pat—the calmer the room felt.The magic that usually prowled the eaves like a hungry thing seemed to curl up and breathe with him.
Huh.
She scoffed at herself for even noticing and pretended she’d only wandered over because she needed the mortar he wasn’t using. “You always do it exactly like that?”
He glanced up, a curled lock of hair stuck to his forehead. “Like what?”
“The ritual,” she said. “The obsession. The sacrament of butter.”
A smile curved at the corner of his mouth. “It’s lamination. Not a cult.”
“Hm. Looks cultish.”
He tipped his chin at the slab in front of him. “Want to see?”
Her first instinct—say no, bite, retreat—flared and went out. A different impulse rose, smaller and far more dangerous:curiosity. She was too tired to fight it. “Fine,” she said. “Enlighten me.”
He wiped his hands, then slid the dough toward the center of his bench. “This is détrempe—the base dough. Not sweet. Just flour, water, salt, a little yeast. It’s chilled so the butter won’t melt when we fold.”
She approached warily, as if the dough might bare fangs. It was cool and obedient under her fingertips, lightly floured, pale as bone. He nodded toward the square of butter on parchment—softened, then rolled thin. “That’s the block. We’re going to marry them.”
“Romantic,” she said, because she couldn’t help herself.
“Practical,” he returned, unoffended. He set the butter in the center of the rolled dough. “You wrap the détrempe around the block like a present, then you roll it out to a long rectangle. Here.”
He handed her the pin. Their fingers grazed. It was nothing—except her skin apparently hadn’t gotten the memo, because heat chased along her knuckles. She pretended to be fascinated by the grain of the rolling pin.
“Even pressure,” he said. “Don’t smash it. Coax it.”
The dough yielded with a faint sigh. She could feel the butter as a cool, pliant layer beneath the surface—resistant, then giving, the way grief sometimes let you out for errands before dragging you back inside. She rolled it into a long rectangle. Wesley watched her hands, not correcting, merely tracking.
