“What the—” A woman’s voice. High, panicked, distinctly American. “Oh my GOD?—”
Not again.
That was his first thought. Notwhere am Iorwhat just happened, but the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who’d lived through enough magical chaos to recognize the signature. He knew that feeling—the displacement, the disorientation, the way reality bent around you when a witch’s spell grabbed hold.
Fiona had done similar things to him during their marriage. Different circumstances, different spells, but the same fundamental violation: his body moving without his consent, pulled by someone else’s magic.
He pushed wet hair out of his eyes, already cataloging: small kitchen, dated appliances, signs of poor maintenance everywhere. A woman backed against the counter, wielding a wooden spoon like a weapon, wearing wet, wine-stained clothes and an expression of absolute horror.
Not Fiona.
Someone new.
Someone who was staring at him with the wild eyes of a person who had absolutely no idea what she’d just done.
“Who ARE you?” she demanded. “Why are you NAKED in my KITCHEN?”
Ah. So she’s the summoner and she doesn’t know it.
That was worse, in some ways. At least Fiona had known exactly what she was doing when she manipulated him. This woman—something slimy in her partially wet hair, mascara smudged, vibrating with uncontrolled magical energy that made his skin prickle—looked like she’d accidentally triggered a bomb and was still trying to figure out where the fuse was.
He assessed her while she babbled apologies and stared determinedly at his face. Mid-forties, probably. Attractive, in a disheveled, overwhelmed sort of way. Magic crackling off her like static electricity, wild and raw and completely undisciplined.
Newly awakened witch. Just what I needed.
“Could I trouble you for a towel?” he asked, because someone had to be the calm one, and it clearly wasn’t going to be her.
The first fewdays were hell.
Not because of the binding—though that was uncomfortable enough, a constant awareness of her presence like a splinter under his skin. Not because of the chaos, though there was plenty of that: the house developing opinions, the garden explodinginto impossible bloom, the bloody gnomes rearranging themselves when nobody was looking.
No. The hell was watching her.
Cassie Morgan was a disaster. She cast spells while he was in the shower. She argued with her cat. She had entire conversations with her toaster in broken French. She cycled between confidence and crippling self-doubt so fast it gave him whiplash, and her magic responded to every emotional shift like a seismograph during an earthquake.
She was also nothing like Fiona.
He kept waiting for it—the manipulation. The subtle pressure. The way Fiona had pushed at his thoughts until he couldn’t tell which feelings were his and which were hers. Twelve years of that, and he’d gotten good at recognizing the shape of magical influence. The way it felt when someone was trying to nudge his emotions in a particular direction.
Cassie wasn’t doing that.
Cassie was too busy accidentally setting things on fire to manage anything as sophisticated as manipulation. Her magic leaked everywhere—through the walls, into the appliances, out into the garden—but it neverpushed. Never tried to change what he was feeling. Just… existed. Chaotically. Loudly. Without any of the calculated precision that had made Fiona so dangerous.
She was a mess.
A beautiful, infuriating mess who looked at him like she expected him to leave and seemed genuinely surprised every time he didn’t.
He should have been annoyed. Hewasannoyed. But underneath the annoyance was something else—something that felt dangerously like recognition.
She’s been made to feel small, he realized, watching her apologize for taking up space in her own kitchen.Someone taught her to disappear.
He knew that feeling. Fiona had been subtle about it, but by the end, he’d been a shadow of himself—agreeing with things he didn’t believe, wanting things he didn’t want, unable to trust that any of his feelings were actuallyhis.
Cassie wasn’t trying to make him smaller. If anything, she kept pushing him away like she was trying to protect him from herself.
Like she thought she was the dangerous one.
Bloody hell, he thought, the third time she apologized for existing in his general vicinity.She actually believes it. She thinks she’s too much.
