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His wolf had been waiting for someone to say that. It settled — not to contentment, but to the focused patience of something that had identified what it was protecting and was prepared to take whatever form that protection required.

Drayce pushed back his chair. There was still the supplemental report, the briefing, and the conversation he owed her — the same list as always, closer now.

“Good briefing,” Pike said without looking up. “Multiple new tabs. Very productive morning.”

“Goodnight, Pike.”

“It’s eleven in the morning.”

He left before Pike could open another tab.

Behind him, he heard the notebook open.

His wolf found this exit lacking a certain dignity. Drayce wanted to get back to his desk before he said anything else that would end up color-coded in a tabbed notebook using Bexley’s organizational system.

He was getting there.

FIVE

ALTHEA

Her plan for the morning was simple.

She was going to be a normal person. A completely normal person who lived in a coastal town, drank coffee in public, handled administrative tasks like an adult, and did not think about the last three days. She was not going to think about the espresso machine. She was not going to think about Gerri’s calm demolition of her understanding of reality over cookies. She was not going to think about the gray-eyed sheriff who had treated her arson as if it were no more dramatic than parallel parking.

She had three steps. Coffee. Paperwork. Return to apartment without incident.

She gave herself excellent odds-on step one.

The town square in the morning smelled first of the fountain — old stone, moving water, and the cold mineral note beneath — then of coffee from the cafes on the south side, and then of the layered beeswax-and-resin scent drifting from the magical supply district along the east edge. She’d walked past it yesterday without paying much attention. Today, with a few days of magical awareness sitting in her chest like a radio tuned to a new frequency, she noticed everything.

The cobblestones were old in a way that suggested the people who laid them thought in centuries, not convenience. The fountain at the center had runes carved around its basin, worn smooth by decades of water and hands. She’d have called them decorative four days ago. She did not call them decorative now. She recognized the shape of the language — the same patterns she’d started noticing in the foundation stones of buildings, in the dock pilings on her walk yesterday, and in the smooth-worn faces of the marker stones along the cliff path.

Load-bearing, and she chose not to ask where that information came from.

The magical supply district had four shops she could identify from across the square: an apothecary with brass fittings and a chalkboard listing tinctures by intended outcome; a candle and oil shop whose scent reached her long before she was close enough to read the hours posted on the door; a crystal merchant with a window display that was doing considerably more than a typical window display; and a place with tasteful sans-serif signage reading ARTISANAL WELLNESS PRODUCTS, whose back room she suspected was considerably less artisanal than the front.

She set it all aside to investigate later, when she was less likely to accidentally set something on fire.

The café had tables outside in the morning sun. She ordered a coffee like a woman with twenty years of stress-coffee experience, knowing exactly what she needed. The barista didn’t ask any questions. Althea appreciated that.

She sat down. She put the envelope on the table. She put her coffee cup on top of the envelope. She drank the coffee.

The envelope waited.

Divorce paperwork wasn’t as dramatic as you expected.

No one was yelling. No one was saying anything terrible. The attorneys had already handled the parts where things were said, and now they were expressing everything else in the clean, bloodless language of legal documentation, which left little room for the texture of things. She unfolded the pages like someone shoving a hand into a snake pit.

The asset division of the former marital residence — their word, not hers, former marital residence, a clinical term for an apartment where she’d lived for eight years — was listed at its current assessed value, and the division of proceeds was detailed to two decimal places.

Two decimal places.

She’d built marketing budgets with less precision than that. It seemed a little late for the rigor.

She turned to the next page.

The retirement account letter came from his attorney’s office. It was politely worded. The letterhead was clean. She’d opened the account at twenty-seven, at a job she’d taken for its benefits and a retirement plan. After all, even at twenty-seven she’d already been someone who planned. The letter expressed the division in numbers. She did the math automatically — marketing had required her to process a lot of numbers quickly — and arrived at a figure that represented approximately fifteen years.