“Done.”
Junie looked at her shop—the splintered shelves, the broken glass, the empty space where her grandmother’s book should be—and felt the grief harden into resolution.
Anger. Slow, burning, and absolutely certain.
Someone had violated her home. Stolen her heritage. Tried to break her.
They had no idea who they were dealing with.
“Wyatt.” Her voice came out steadier than she expected. “Whatever you need from me. Whatever it takes. I want these bastards found.”
The sheriff’s lips twitched. Almost a smile. “Noted.”
Leo caught her eye across the wreckage.
He’s dangerous. This thing between us is going to hurt.
But for the first time since she’d walked into the ruin of her shop, Junie didn’t feel alone.
And that, more than anything, terrified her.
THIRTEEN
LEO
The data spread across Leo’s borrowed desk like a battlefield map. Victim reports. Shell company registrations. Ley line coordinates. Buyout offer timelines. Property records dating back eighteen months.
He’d been at it for seven hours.
The Siren’s Rest had provided him with a private study off the main library—Avine’s doing, probably, though she’d said nothing when she’d handed him the key. Her knowing eyes reminded him uncomfortably of Theo’s warning at the brewery.
If you hurt her, I’ll kill you myself.
Leo pushed the thought away and refocused on the papers. The pattern was emerging, clearer with every data point he added. Not random surge effects. Not coincidental business failures. A systematic campaign designed to look like chaos while operating with surgical precision.
The map on his laptop showed Haven Shores’s ley line network—a web of magical energy that powered the town’s supernatural infrastructure. He’d overlaid it with the locations of every business that had experienced “surge-related” problems in the past six months.
Piprick’s Peculiar Provisions. May. Major ley line intersection.
Spellbound Lights. June. Secondary intersection, connected to the harbor ward anchor.
Honey & Hex Bakery. July. Minor intersection, but adjacent to two major nodes.
Three more harbor district businesses. August through October. All on ley line convergence points.
And now Moonrise Mixology. The largest ley line intersection in Haven Shores. The shop that sat directly on top of a nexus so powerful, it made ordinary potions extraordinary.
He pulled up the corporate filings he’d traced through three different shell companies. Coastal Acquisitions LLC. Haven Properties Group. Pacific Magical Holdings. Different names, different registration dates, different stated purposes.
Same parent company.
Sable Acquisitions.
Leo’s hands went still on the keyboard.
Sable.
The name crawled through his memory, dredging up things he’d spent five years trying to forget. A charming smile that never reached the eyes. Quarterly reports that didn’t quite add up. The sick certainty when he’d finally traced the missing funds.
