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Not the air temperature. Something in how the crowd held itself—the shift that occurs when a commanding presence enters a space, and people adjust their behavior around it without consciously deciding to. A collective shift so slight, it was almost undetectable yet entirely unmistakable.

Valene appeared at her side and elbowed her. “Heads up.” She sounded like she was about to deliver useful information whether Althea wanted it or not. “That’s Drayce Waryn. He’s the sheriff. Has been for twenty-seven years.” She gave her a look and waggled her brows. “He handles things. Maybe… he’ll handle you too.”

“You’re losing touch with reality, Valene.”

“Hey, it was worth a try. I want to see you happy.”

“And by happy, you mean?”

Valene chuckled. “You know, get laid.”

Of course.

Drayce Waryn walked onto the boardwalk.

Six foot four. Dark hair threaded with silver at the temples, worn short and effortless, as if he’d never once thought about it. The breadth of his shoulders was not a statement. It was a fact about the space he occupied. He wore a dark jacket over a henley, boots, and jeans — everything functional and nothing performed. He moved through the festival crowd the way water moves through its own current: directional, unhurried, the people around him adjusting their trajectories before they had consciously decided to.

His eyes swept the boardwalk, methodical — checking every person.

Those eyes stopped on her.

Althea’s brain produced three thoughts in quick succession.

First: she’d raised her hands, and a shimmer in the air in front of her had no business being there, and the heat radiating from her palms was visible.

Second: the man looking at her from across the boardwalk was — there was no other word for it — devastating. Her pulse clocked his presence with blunt efficiency, as her body had already made up its mind without consulting its owner.

Third: he had not looked away.

Her sternum tracked him like a compass needle finding north. The nearest lamppost flickered, its amber light stuttering in its iron casing. The heat climbed.

No. Absolutely not.

She looked at the water. Took a careful breath of salt air and festival noise. Pressed the heat down, practiced after seventeen years of containing inconvenient responses—she was forty-three, recently divorced, and she did not have a physical reaction to a stranger on the boardwalk; she was a grown adult, she had more dignity than this⁠—

It did not go down.

It built.

She didn’t notice it building. That was the honest answer she would give later, and it would be true. She recognized no escalation, no warning she could have caught and managed. The warmth had been ambient since she arrived, and then it wasn’t. It had been held too long. It escaped.

She looked at her hands.

Fire erupted from her palms.

Not an explosion. Not the disaster-movie version. A fierce, hot burst — orange-gold and entirely real — shot from her hands and struck the nearest candle arrangement at full force. Three candles shot sideways. The decorative banner above the adjacent stall caught fire at its left corner, a fast, hungry edge of flame spreading along the fabric. A customer’s paper cup began to smoke. Someone screamed. The crowd erupted into the organized chaos of immediate evacuation.

Althea stood with her hands out and stared.

Well. There it is.

“Here you are,” said a warm voice at her elbow.

She turned.

A woman in her early fifties stood beside her, completely undisturbed by the evacuation unfolding around them. White-haired, blue-eyed, wearing crescent-moon earrings and carrying a small cloth bag, radiating a warmth that said she’d been expecting you and was delighted you’d finally shown up.

“Oh good.” She smiled. Not a reassuring smile — a genuine one, warm and knowing, as if her read on the situation had just proven correct. “You’re finally here.”