Page 16 of Mane Brew

“They’ve been preparing for an endgame.” The realization settles cold in my gut. “This isn’t just about disrupting matings. This is⁠—”

“Forty years of infiltration leading to a specific outcome.” His voice is quiet. Certain. He’s still holding my scrawled timeline like it’s evidence, like it matters. “The incidents we’ve seen—the attacks on the mated pairs, Cordelia’s Council seat, the contamination of your brewery—they’re all connected. All building toward the same goal.”

I watch the pattern take shape between us—not just his methodical precision, but the place where it meets my chaos and makes something neither of us could have built alone.

His mind is sharp. Methodical.

Why do I find that attractive? That’s not supposed to be attractive.

“We figured that out together.”

“You noticed the rotation.” He glances up, catches me watching him. His pen stops moving. “I would have been staring at those manifests for another week without it. What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re staring.”

“I’m observing.” The words come out before I can stop them, thrown like a challenge. “Observing is what I do now, apparently.”

His expression shifts—recognition, maybe. Amusement, definitely.

He holds my gaze for one beat. Two. Three.

Then he looks away, reaching for another file with more force than necessary.

“We should consult Anouk. Her expertise in ingredient manipulation may confirm the methodology.”

“Running away from the conversation?”

“Progressing the investigation.”

“Same thing.”

He doesn’t deny it. I file that observation away for later.

Thornveil Apothecary is the opposite of my brewery in every way—controlled where I’m chaotic, precise where I’m experimental, organized where I’m creative. I should hate it.

I kind of love it.

“Whoever did this is testing something broader than your brewery.” Anouk stands at her workbench, setting down her silver instruments after a final pass over the modified moonflower sample. Her dark hair is pulled back, her posture perfect, her expression coolly analytical. She looks like a witch should look, according to everyone who’s ever told me I’m doing it wrong. “Healing potions. Growth enchantments. The Warding Line itself. Every form of living magic that grows and changes could be vulnerable if they perfect this technique.”

Behind me, Caius shifts at his position near the door, his wolf’s protective instincts obviously prickling. His presence fills the small space—alpha energy responding to threat.

“Half the magic in Mistvale.”

“More than half.” Anouk’s gaze moves to Rhodes, then back to me.

“The Warding Line.” Rhodes’s pen stills on his clipboard. “That’s not possible. The Line is protected by layers of ancient magic⁠—”

“By layers of living magic, accumulated over centuries.” Anouk’s voice carries the flat certainty of someone who has already run the calculations and doesn’t like the results. “You already know it’s been weakening—the siphons, Valesh’s sabotage, all of it before most of us were mated. The new pairings reinforced sections of it, near your territories especially. But reinforcement isn’t restoration. There are still holes. That’s what makes it vulnerable to something patient enough to target the gaps that are already there.”

“And without the Line...” Caius steps forward, his broad frame filling the doorway.

“Mistvale loses its protection.” Anouk meets his eyes, and I catch the private communication between them—the shorthand of a mated pair. “Everything that makes this place a sanctuary goes away. Every magical being who came here for refuge would be exposed.”

“Everything that makes the mated pairs safe goes away.” I think of Leire and Aslan, Sakura and Torin—pregnant, for gods’ sake. The first child to be born to a mated pair in town. “They’d all be targets.”

“They’d all be vulnerable.” Anouk moves to a shelf near the window and retrieves a leather-bound volume, the cover cracked with age. “There’s more. Information from Chione, the dragon Caius and I consulted a few months ago, about the Severing itself.”