"Yes," I said.
"They're all waiting for her."
"I know."
"Do you think she'll still come? After everything?"
I looked at the clock above the door.
Seven thirty-eight.
"Yes," I said, without a single doubt in my mind. "She'll come."
Because Amara Brooks had been walking through that door at seven forty-five every single morning for six months and becoming bonded to a dragon prince after a Valentine’s ball was not the kind of thing that changed a routine like hers. Not on a Monday and not on the first workday back after the world had apparently decided to reorganize itself around the two of us.
She’d would show up, but I knew she would be nervous about it.
Still, she would show up anyway, because that was exactly who she was.
My dragon stirred beneath my ribs, restless and alert.
Marco leaned against the counter beside me, arms crossed, eyes on the door. "You know what's funny?"
"What?"
"She's going to walk in at exactly seven forty-five."
"Yes," I said agree.
Marco’s shit eating grin had me grinning. “Same as always."
"Same as always."
He shook his head slowly. "Two of the most predictable people I have ever met in my entire life."
I didn't argue because he wasn't wrong. Six months of the same morning, the same time, the same order, the same two people finding their way back to the same counter like gravity. The gala and the scales and the bond hadn't changed that. If anything it had just given the routine a name.
At seven forty-four the room seemed to hold its breath.
And at exactly seven forty-five exactly the bell above the door chimed, and every head in the bakery turned.
She was wearing jeans and her own cardigan, the soft cream one I recognized from a hundred Monday mornings just like this one, and she was carrying my old forest green cardigan folded carefully over her arm. Her leather crossbody bag was on her shoulder. Her hair was up in its usual bun with a few curls escaping around her face. Her chin was lifted in that particular way she held it when she was walking into something she'd already decided to face.
She stepped inside and felt the room looking at her and went very still.
I watched it happen in real time. There was a slight stiffening of her shoulders. Her eyes moved carefully across the full tables and registered not just the number of people but the quality of their attention. The way that attention landed on her like something with weight.
Her scent reached me a half second later.
Nerves sharp underneath the lavender, cutting right through the smell of coffee and fresh pastry and the thirty people pretending they weren't staring.
The scales flared hot beneath my skin.
I was already moving around the counter.
"Marco," I said.
"Already on it," he said, stepping into my place before I'd finished saying his name.
