Junie couldn’t move. Her boots crunched on broken glass as she took one step, then another, her brain refusing to process what her eyes were seeing. Her grandmother’s copper cauldrons—overturned and dented. Her distillation system—shattered into a thousand crystalline pieces. The consultation nook’s velvet chairs—slashed open, stuffing scattered.
Not random vandalism. Too thorough. Too targeted.
She stumbled toward the back of the shop, toward her brewing station. Toward the shelf where she kept?—
Please. Please, please, please.
The shelf was empty.
Bare brackets and dust outlines where her grandmother’s recipe book should have been. Where it had always been. Where Junie could reach out and touch the worn leather cover whenever she needed to feel Rosalind’s presence.
Gone.
Her knees hit the floor before she realized she was falling. Glass bit into her palms, and she didn’t care. The book. Twenty-six years of reaching for that leather spine when the world got too hard. More than two decades of tracing her grandmother’s handwriting in the margins, of pressing her nose to the pages and pretending she could still smell Rosalind’s perfume.
All those years of wondering what secrets hid in those encoded entries. What knowledge Rosalind had deemed too important—or too dangerous—to write in plain text.
Gone.
Glimmer returned, butting her head against Junie’s thigh. The snake’s scales cycled through colors Junie had never seen before—grief and rage and fear all tangled into a pattern that made her throat tight.
“I know,” she whispered. Her voice came out thin. Hollow. “I know.”
She should call Wyatt. The pack. Her friends. She should do anything other than kneel in the wreckage of everything she’d built and everything she’d lost.
But she couldn’t force her limbs to obey. Couldn’t make herself care about the shattered glass, the ruined inventory, or the thousands of dollars in damages. None of it mattered.
The book was gone.
Rosalind was gone all over again.
The bell above the door—somehowstill intact—chimed forty minutes later.
Junie hadn’t moved. She’d stopped crying at some point, her tears drying on her cheeks in itchy tracks she couldn’t be bothered to wipe away. Glimmer had coiled around her wrist, scales steady and present, the only anchor keeping her from flying apart completely.
“Junie.” Sheriff Wyatt Gentry’s voice cut through the fog in her head. Low. Calm. The kind of voice that expected answers and usually got them.
She looked up.
The panther shifter stood in the doorway, tall and lean in his khaki uniform, whiskey-colored eyes sweeping the destruction. His sharp cheekbones caught the weak morning light filtering through the broken display window. He didn’t gasp or curse or show any visible reaction to the devastation.
He studied it. Cataloged it. Filed it away.
“Got a call from Narla.” He stepped carefully over the debris, each movement containing that coiled grace panthers were known for. “Her candles started screaming around dawn. Knew bad news was coming.”
Of course, Narla’s candles knew. The candle witch’s emotional magic was connected to half the businesses on Main Street. She probably felt Moonrise Mixology’s violation before Junie did.
“They took the book.” The words scraped out of Junie’s throat. “My grandmother’s—they took?—”
She couldn’t finish. Wyatt’s face remained impassive, but recognition flickered in those eyes. He’d grown up in Haven Shores. He knew what Rosalind Reed’s recipe book meant.
“Stand up.” Not harsh. Firm. “Let me see your hands.”
Junie blinked, confused, until she looked down and saw the blood. Glass cuts across both palms, embedded shards catching the light. She’d forgotten. It didn’t seem important.
She stood anyway.
Wyatt produced a first aid kit from somewhere—the man was perpetually prepared, unfailingly competent, three steps ahead of whatever crisis landed in his jurisdiction. He guided her to the one unslashed chair in the consultation nook and began extracting glass shards with tweezers, his movements efficient and surprisingly gentle.
