She hauled boxes from the car as the last light faded, making trip after trip up the creaking porch steps. The inn’s one functional bedroom—the Full Moon Suite, at the end of the second-floor hallway—had a mattress that was merely old rather than decrepit, and a window that faced the sea.
By the time she’d dragged in everything essential—clothes, toiletries, theEmotional Baggage (Literal)box she still hadn’t opened—the stars were out. The fog had lifted, revealing a sky dense with more stars than she’d ever seen. The lighthouse onthe western bluff swept its beam across the water in steady, patient arcs.
Avine stood on the widow’s walk, a glass of Aunt Sue’s wine in hand, and watched the sea turn dark beneath the emerging moon. The wind whipped at her hair. The night hummed with magic and the salt-sweet promise of beginnings.
She’d bought a building she couldn’t afford to fix. She had no plan, no income, no idea what she was doing. She apparently now lived in a semi-sentient Victorian that came with a ghost and roses with territorial ambitions.
And she was happy. Genuinely, bone-deep happy.
The realization washed over her like a wave. When had she last looked at tomorrow as anything other than an obligation to survive?
“I did it.” She whispered it to the sea, to the stars, to the ancient magic humming through the boards beneath her feet. “I did it.”
The inn creaked around her—not complaint, but celebration. The wind carried the scent of wild roses. The waves beat their eternal rhythm against the cliffs below.
Avine Bell—exhausted, divorced, forty years old, and exactly where she was meant to be—smiled.
It was going to be a hell of a lot of work.
She couldn’t wait to start.
THREE
THEO
The surge hit Theo Vance like a rogue wave.
One moment, he was nursing a pint of Alpha’s Amber at the bar of the Wolf Moon Brewery, reviewing next week’s supply orders while the evening crowd filtered in. The next, power slammed through the pack’s ward lines and straight into his bones.
The predator inside him lunged for the surface so fast he barely had time to breathe. Hackles metaphorically rising. Instincts screaming. The beer glass in his hand cracked, amber liquid seeping through his fingers and onto the polished bar top.
What the hell?—
Beck was at his side in an instant, the easy smile gone from his beta’s face. “Theo.”
“I feel it.” The words came out rough, scraped raw by the wolf pushing at his skin. Around them, every shifter in the brewery had gone still. Conversations died mid-sentence. Pool cues lowered. A dart hit the board with a dull thunk that no one acknowledged. The jukebox kept playing some classic rock song, but no one was listening anymore.
Danny, one of the younger wolves, had his hand pressed to the bar top, claws half-extended. Two of the construction crewfrom the harbor had gone rigid in their booth, heads turning east in unison. The bartender—human, but pack-adjacent for three generations—set down the glass she’d been polishing and stepped back from the till.
The ward lines—silent for decades—were singing. Turquoise fire racing along paths he could sense but not see, lighting up the magical infrastructure of Haven Shores from the harbor to the bluffs. The whole town’s defensive magic awakening at once.
And beneath that, a pull. Something his wolf strained toward before he could stop it.
No.
He shoved the reaction down. Buried it. It was the wards. The surge. It was anything except what his instincts were trying to tell him it was.
“The cliffs.” Beck’s head was turned toward the eastern bluffs, nostrils flaring. “It’s coming from the Siren’s Rest.”
The old inn. The one that had been empty for years, rejecting every owner who tried to claim it. The one Sue Tidewell had been making cryptic comments about for months.
Her great-niece. The one who left. The one who came back.
The gossip had reached him, of course. Everything reached him eventually. A witch from the mainland, buying the cursed inn on a whim. He’d filed it away as Sue’s latest scheme and moved on.
Now his wolf was clawing at the inside of his skull, desperate for him togo, tosee, to acknowledge something he’d buried so deep he’d forgotten it existed.
“Truck.” He was already moving, dropping a bill on the bar to cover the broken glass. “Now.”
