Page 5

This was — carefully, from what she hoped was a safe distance — extremely inconvenient.

She ate the third cookie.

In the short time she’d been in Spelltide Cove, she’d set a banner on fire, met a woman who had apparently been expecting her, and been looked at by a man she refused to develop feelings for. She hadn’t checked-in yet. She hadn’t found her bed. She hadn’t begun to process the significant things that had happened to her since leaving Boston this morning.

One thing at a time. She had the borrowed apartment and a cloth bag of excellent cookies, and she’d run out of options — only to find, to her considerable surprise, that this was not the worst position she had ever been in.

Fine. She caught herself using the word and ate the last cookie instead.

She walked toward the northern end of the boardwalk, toward the bookstore supposedly in that direction, toward the borrowed apartment, the borrowed bed, and the beginning of whatever was going to happen next.

TWO

DRAYCE

The report should’ve taken twenty minutes.

Drayce had been at his desk for forty-five minutes, and he was still on the cause field.

The facts were straightforward. One banner. Three candles. No injuries. His wolf grumbled low in his chest, restless and pointed, the way it had been since the boardwalk, when she’d looked at him with those dark eyes and said a line that made him want to hear her voice for considerably longer than the situation required.

Drayce argued she was going to be a problem.

His wolf was winning.

He wrote in the cause field — Undetermined magical disturbance. Founding-line origin probable — and set down the pen. The department was quiet at this hour. Dispatch was low. Rain against the windows. The clock above the door was doing its job. He’d worked in this building for almost thirty years, and every sound it made was familiar, none of which were helping.

His wolf recounted the last twenty minutes he was on the boardwalk, noting how she pressed her palms against her thighs and held a steady gaze afterward—not apologetic, panicked, or embarrassed.

Drayce grabbed his cold coffee, took a sip, then picked up the ward report and read it three times.

The degradation pattern in the northern dock ward matched the close-range emotional discharge from the founding line. He cross-referenced the property records. A new resident at Ink and Ember’s upstairs apartment as of this evening. He pulled her name.

Virelli.

Something in his wolf locked into place.

Then it surged forward with a territorial possessiveness that hit Drayce before he could brace for it — a deeply inconvenient territorial instinct to get up from this desk, go to the building where she was staying, check the perimeter, make certain⁠—

He stayed at his desk anyway. It cost. He moved on.

The Virelli line was one of the four original founding families. Their magic had been built directly into the ward infrastructure — not as decoration or ceremony but threaded into the very foundation of the wards. Any active Virelli wasn’t separate from the wards. They’d always been the same system.

That meant her emotional state and the stability of the town’s containment were one and the same. Her surges didn’t just affect the wards.

Her surges were the wards.

He stood in his office doorway. His wolf considered this a perfectly reasonable arrangement. It meant she needed him close. It meant keeping a professional distance was not only impossible but actively counterproductive.

Drayce was suspicious of any situation his wolf found perfectly logical.

He went back to the desk. Distance wasn’t an option anymore. Fine. He’d worked with worse constraints.

Pike arrived, jacket still on, grinning and clearly delighted with how his evening had gone. He dropped into the chair across the desk and pulled out a notebook — larger than his usual, Drayce noticed. He’d prepared.

“You look like you want to either fight someone or marry someone,” Pike said. He set the notebook on the desk like evidence. “I can’t tell which. The paperwork is different.”

“The incident report is filed.”