Page 18 of Moth to a Flame

I lunged for the slippery little pest, but he dodged easily and wound between Hawk’s legs, purring and rubbing against the edges of his boots.

“Well, that’s new,” I murmured.

“What is?” Hawk knelt to scratch behind Mugen’s ears.

“Mugen doesn’t normally like men.”

Hawk looked down at my familiar with amusement, a disarming smile on his face. “Should I be insulted, creature? Concerned for my masculinity, perhaps?” He chuckled, rubbing under Mugen’s chin.

“I don’t think you need to worry about that.” The words slipped out before I could stop them, and heat rose to my cheeks. Even without the curse, apparently, I was capable of saying the most fucking embarrassing shit all on my own.

I snatched up Mugen, who clawed me indignantly, and fled to my room. As my door closed, I heard a soft, “Goodnight, Lucia.”

I leaned back against it, and for the first time since a mothman had come through my greenhouse wall, I was alone.

Except I wasn’t. Not really. He was there, on the other side of the wall, a warm, steady presence at the edge of my awareness that would not go away no matter how I tried. The house was louder than it had been in years with just the soft sounds of him moving around the guest room, sitting on the bed to untie his boots.

I slid down the door and buried my face in Mugen’s fur as he squirmed, his wings flapping.

I glanced around the room. My ancient four-poster bed, the vanity my mother had given me, and the peeling silver-green wallpaper stamped with small crescent moons that I had loved as a child. The entire room was a museum to a life I no longer had.

I did like when he called me boss. It reminded me of my old self, back when I ran the entire research division of Atropa Pharmaceuticals. Back when I’d been someone, not the shadow I was now. Back when I was developing cutting-edge cures to help the supernatural community. Back when a few words from me had moved millions of dollars, not sent the townsfolk of Pumpkin Hollow scrambling for their purses.

Even now, I clung to it, that identity that had been built on lies.

We’d rolled out a new medicine for shifters the year I turned twenty-seven, and I was the one who’d signed off on the formula. My team had developed it in response to the growing number of autoimmune cases along the East Coast—or so I’d thought—until I’d checked the original research and found the recipe, verbatim, in a field notebook my great-uncle had brought back from Oaxaca in 1943. They’d developed it for the same purpose and shared it freely to help their community.

We had patented it.

I told myself it was an oversight. Nearly a century-old sloppiness that would be embarrassing but fixable once I revealed it.

Then I pulled the women’s tonic that had made the family its fortune in the eighties and traced it to an Ayurvedic ritual that was nearly two thousand years old, which we had also patented. Then we had defended that patent in court against three separate Indian pharmaceutical companies that had been making it correctly and cheaply for years.

We had won.

I kept digging. Every flagship product we had, not one of them was ours. Not one of them had named the women—because they had almost all been women—who had spent lifetimes refining those recipes and had given them, in good faith, to the pale strangers with notebooks who had promised only to study.

I spent eight months building my case, then walked into my brother’s office and set it on his desk.

He’d laughed at me. “You’ve always been so emotional, Lucia. Why don’t you go home and calm down for a bit?” He’d stood up, circling the mahogany desk of the CEO, and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Just like when we were kids, huh? You’ve never had what it takes. This is business. Our family’s business. Think about that before you bother me with this again.”

I had gone home. I had thought about it.

Then I sent the file to the New Salem Daily Times.

I had known there would be consequences, but I’d thought lawsuits, fighting it out in the press. I never thought that…

Now all I had was this decaying manor and a rusting greenhouse.

My greenhouse, where I’d spent every moment of the last few years nurturing the Moon Queen flower from a seed to now…nothing. I had planned every step. I’d raised hundreds of seedlings. I’d researched and tested and tried every backup, but only one had made it until tonight, and that hadn’t been enough.

No, don’t think like that. Keep moving.

I’d make a new plan. I’d figure this out. That’s what I always did.

Everything was fine. Everything was fine. Everything was…

I squeezed Mugen until he yelped, but he didn’t try to escape as tears streamed down my cheeks.