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“I suspected. The cliff path suggested it — you were managing an active surge environment without escalating. The square fire suggested it earlier, but that was more ambiguous.”

“You’ve been watching me.”

“I’ve been watching the ward data.” Which was true. His wolf, which had also been watching the ward data and considerably more besides, kept its own counsel.

She held his gaze a beat longer, weighing whether to press the point. Then she let it go — she’d made her point, it had landed, and she didn’t need to make it twice. He’d learned this about her.

“Same time next week.”

“You’re going to make me do this again?”

“You made seven marks on seven stones in your first deliberate session. Yes, we’re doing this again.”

She looked at the stones, working out which category of feeling to file this under.

“The jacket.”

“Will be fine.”

“I’ll—” She stopped, something crossing her face as she edited what she’d been going to say. “Next week.”

“Next week.”

She walked back through the clearing to the path, and he stood at the center of the worn earth, watching her go. His wolf was satisfied—plainly—it had gotten exactly what it came for. She’d redirected. She’d extinguished a live fire. She’d notched seven marks in sequence and moved her target each time without being asked twice.

She was good at this.

He was going to need a new jacket.

He looked at the mark on the cuff for one more moment, then folded it down and walked back through the clearing toward the path.

NINE

ALTHEA

The northern end of the boardwalk was quieter at this hour — fewer stalls, fewer people, the amber lampposts spaced farther apart, and the ocean correspondingly louder. The boards underfoot were older here, their creak a half-step lower than at the festival end. She’d walked this stretch in her first week, alone, testing the edges of the town the way she tested most things: carefully, at a pace that left room to reverse course.

“You didn’t have to walk back this way.”

She looked at the ocean over the railing as they passed. It had that Spelltide Cove feel it always did — the faint sense of an animal aware of being watched, choosing, for now, to behave. The tide was coming in. She’d learned to read the tides in the past week, though she hadn’t planned to.

She looked at him sideways. “Almost thirty years.”

He didn’t ask what she meant. She’d noticed this about him: he could stay two steps ahead in a conversation without needing transition sentences.

He looked at the water. “Yeah,” he confirmed.

“You took the job because the town needed someone who could manage both sides, the governance and the supernatural.” She’d heard this from Valene, from Gerri’s oblique references, and from how the council talked around him. “Most people couldn’t hold both.”

“Most people didn’t want to.”

“But you did.”

He didn’t answer right away. Not the deflecting quiet — the considering kind, where she could almost track the words as they were selected and arranged.

“The town needed it. I could do it.” He walked another twenty feet. “That was the whole calculation.”

She believed him. That was the alarming part. Most people who said things like that were performing for an audience. He was describing how he made decisions, the same way he’d describe the patrol schedule or the ward coverage map.