The lockbox on its shelf began to hum. Low, steady, approving—like a cat's purr translated into bronze and ancient mechanism.
Nate brushed sparkly page fragments from his sleeve. A sentence aboutthrobbing masculine energyclung stubbornly to his cuff. "So you're saying the more emotionally honest we are with each other?—"
"The stronger you become against whatever's been watching this town." Mrs. Shufflewick's Regency curls were already deflating back into her customary bun, though one quill pen remained defiantly lodged above her left ear. "Your ancestors never figured that part out. The historical records show competent partnerships, effective ones. But none of them—" She tapped her notebook. "None of them had resonance readings like yours."
Hazel looked at the settling cloud of romance novel confetti. At the lockbox humming its bronze approval. At Nate, who still had glitter in his hair and page 247 on his collar and something unfinished in his green eyes.
"Our partnership is becoming a weapon," she said.
"The weapon," Mrs. Shufflewick corrected, already cataloging the destroyed paperback for replacement. "Against The Collector specifically. Emotional resonance disrupts corruption magic. It's in the texts your families left behind—I just didn't understand what they meant until your magicexploded a Cordelia Ravenswood novel across my restricted archives."
She surveyed the sparkling devastation with the expression of a woman who had maintained these archives for thirty years and had never once permitted glitter.
"I'll expect you both to help clean this up.Afteryou finish whatever you were saying to each other."
She gathered her notebook and retreated to her satellite desk with magnificent dignity, trailing one last sparkle from her hem.
The archive glitter followed them upstairs like a guilty conscience.
Hazel found traces ofThe Highland Laird's Forbidden Desirein her hair, between the pages of her notebook, and somehow inside her left shoe as she climbed the stairs to the main reading room at a quarter past six the next morning. Dawn light poured through the tall gothic windows in long amber columns, catching dust motes and the occasional stray sparkle that drifted down from the mezzanine level like the library itself hadn't finished processing last night's events.
She'd barely slept. Not because of the Codex's steady pulse through the floorboards beneath her bed—she'd grown accustomed to that particular magical heartbeat. No. She'd lain awake replaying the moment Nate's thumb had traced that circle against her palm, the genealogical map branching gold between their fingers, and the precise instant before the romance novel had decided to editorialize.
Someone I couldn't bear to lose.
She adjusted her glasses. Pushed a wayward curl behind her ear. Found another piece of sparkly confetti in the curl.
Nate was already at the main reading table.
He sat in the amber light with two paper cups of coffee, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, case files spread in a careful grid across the worn oak surface. His hair looked like he'd runhis hands through it approximately forty times since arriving. A pink sparkle clung to his jaw.
"You're early," she said.
"Couldn't sleep."
"Me neither."
She sat across from him. Took the coffee he slid toward her—dark roast, splash of oat milk, no sugar. He'd remembered from Tuesday. Such a small thing. Such a dangerous small thing to notice.
The silence between them stretched taut as a bowstring.
"About last night—" they both started.
Stopped.
Nate's mouth twitched. Hazel pressed her lips together against something that wanted to be a laugh and had no business existing at six in the morning after a sleepless night.
"You first," he said.
"We work well together." She wrapped both hands around the cup. Professional. Measured. The kind of sentence that could mean everything or nothing depending on how you held it up to the light. "The research last night—our families' connection, the translation work. Your analytical framework and my intuitive approach, they?—"
"Complement each other."
"I was going to say 'don't clash as horribly as expected,' but yours is more diplomatic."
From the mezzanine, the unmistakable sound of Mrs. Shufflewick's orthopedic shoes changed cadence. Hazel glanced up to find her mentor descending the curved staircase in a tweed blazer over a cream turtleneck, tortoiseshell glasses replacing her usual wire frames, and a leather-bound journal tucked under one arm. The transformation was subtle by Shufflewick standards—no ball gowns, no deerstalker hats—but the particular way she settled into the chair at the end of theirtable, crossed her ankles, and opened her journal to a fresh page with an encouraging nod spoke volumes.
"Don't mind me." Mrs. Shufflewick uncapped a fountain pen. "Continue."
