Knot on Fire (Ember Hollow #1)

Chapter 1

One

Wren

The trick to a quiet life is simple. Lock the door. Light the oven. Don’t give anyone in town a reason to learn your business.

Three weeks in Ember Hollow, and I’ve nearly cracked it.

It isn’t even six in the morning, and the bakery is warm, gold, mine. First batch of cinnamon rolls proving on the counter. Coffee on. Out on Main, a truck rumbles past, slow. Everything’s slow here, like the whole town ate too much dinner and needs a minute to recover.

I take down Aunt Marigold’s recipe box and flip to the scones.

Her handwriting is still in there, every card of it. Loops and slants and little notes in the margins that don’t help me even a bit. Use the good butter. As if I know which one that is. Don’t rush them, they can tell. As if a scone has feelings and a grudge.

She left me the whole place when she died.

The shop, the apartment over it, the sourdough starter older than I am, the regulars who still call me by her name half the time.

I came up from the city for the funeral and just never left.

Everyone back home thought I’d lost my mind.

Maybe I had. But I stood in this little kitchen the morning after we buried her, and it was the first room in years that felt like it wanted me in it.

I miss her so much, it sits in my throat some mornings. No time for that today, though. There’s a standing order of forty scones for the diner, and Della will have my hide if they’re late.

The mixing I can do in my sleep by now. Flour, cold butter, the smell coming up warm and sweet. My hands know the work even when my head wanders off. That’s the best thing about this place. In here it’s only me. Nobody wanting anything. Nobody watching. Nothing to get wrong but the bake.

Back in the city, I spent six years at a patisserie so upscale the butter practically had a passport, turning out two hundred identical croissants a day for a boss named Diane, who ran that kitchen like a submarine and still, six years in, wrote the wrong name on my schedule.

I ran everyone else’s stations, smoothed everyone else’s disasters, and stood at the edge of everyone else’s photos.

Nights I rode the train home to a third-floor walk-up that asked me nothing and gave me the same.

Here I’m the woman who makes the cinnamon rolls.

Turns out that’s the happiest I’ve been in a long time.

Or I would be, if my own body hadn’t decided, three weeks ago, to redo its paperwork without consulting me.

Twenty-eight years as a beta. Twenty-eight years of nothing to declare, no scent, no cycle, no fuss, the biological equivalent of beige paint, and I mean that as a compliment, beige never ruined anybody’s life.

Betas get to stand outside the whole overheated alpha-omega opera and just live, unbothered and unread, and I had built an entire personality on it.

Then, the week after we buried Marigold, I went down with what I firmly decided was the flu.

Three days of fever on the couch upstairs, aching like I’d been taken apart and put back together by someone working off bad instructions.

On day four, the fever broke, and the world came back wrong.

Loud. I could smell rain coming through a shut window.

I could smell yesterday’s cardamom in a closed tin two rooms away.

I could smell the firehouse across the street, cedar and smoke and something warm underneath that made me stand stock-still in my own kitchen with my heart going like a rabbit.

That was what sent me to a doctor. Not the fever. The wanting that came attached to it.

The doctor two towns over — because God forbid, I see the one here, who plays canasta with half my customers — swabbed my cheek, ran the designation panel twice because I made her, and said late presentation, omega, in the tone people save for surprise twins.

It happens, apparently. Rare, but it happens.

A body can sit quiet for decades until something knocks it loose.

Grief will do it, she said. So will finally standing still somewhere.

Then she handed me a pamphlet written for sixteen-year-olds, with a smiling cartoon of my own endocrine system on the front, and a cheerful your first heat could be months out — a year, even, with late ones, hard to say — and I chose to hear that as permission to shelve the entire subject.

Never mind that a designation is the one thing on this earth you can’t keep private, not from anyone who gets within arm’s reach.

There’s no locking a door on your own scent.

All you can do is keep the counter between yourself and the world and hand nobody a reason to get close, which, three weeks in, I have turned into an art form.

The oven, I understand. The rest of it can wait its turn.

Through the front window, the street is just starting to wake.

The hardware store with its shutters half up.

The diner two doors down, lights already on, Della moving around behind the counter.

And the firehouse, big and red and directly across the street, close enough that the bay doors going up rattle my front glass.

Three weeks, and I’ve kept my head down past all of it.

A wave here. A nod there. Nothing that turns into a conversation and then turns into people knowing things about me. It’s been working beautifully.

It took some doing, too. Small towns don’t hand out privacy, they lay siege.

The casseroles started before the funeral flowers wilted, dishes on the back step, kind notes, a pie from somebody who signed it THE PELHAMS, PLURAL.

I ate what I couldn’t bear to waste, washed every dish, and returned the lot to the church hall in a stack at an hour when nobody’s up, to duck the conversations that come attached.

The town let me get away with it, mostly.

Grief buys you a grace period, even in the nosiest zip code in the state.

And the firehouse, strange to say, has been the easiest part to dodge.

They wave. They nod. They keep to their side of the street like somebody chalked a line down the middle of Main.

Marigold used to feed them, Sunday loaves out the door for years, and I suspect whatever they’re doing over there behind that line is its own kind of missing her.

They came through the receiving line at the funeral, the three of them, pressed into dress uniforms, shoulders like a rowhouse, and said kind things that went into the same fog that ate the whole of that day.

The town says their names in one breath, like a single word, calandrhettandeli, and I have carefully not learned which name goes with which set of shoulders.

Knowing which is which is how a wave turns into a conversation.

It suits me fine. That’s what I’ve been telling myself, anyway.

Then the smoke alarm goes off.

Nothing is burning. That’s the insult of it. The scones aren’t even in the oven anymore, they’re in my hand. The alarm over the back door has decided, all on its own, with no smoke and no reason, to shriek like the building’s coming down around me.

“No,” I tell it. “No, no. Not today, you little bastard.”

It does not care what I think.

I drag a chair under it, climb up, flap a dish towel at the stupid thing like that has ever worked for a single person in history.

The shriek keeps going. It bounces off the tile and straight into my teeth.

I jab the little button. Nothing. I jab it again and hold it down, and I’m halfway through a word my aunt would not have approved of when someone knocks on the front glass.

Loud. Three raps, calm, like the noise doesn’t bother them one bit.

I twist around on the chair. There’s a man on the other side of the door.

A big one.

Even through the glass and the dark of the street, he fills the frame. He lifts a hand, points at the door handle, then at himself, eyebrows up. Can I come in?

I climb down, wave the towel, mouth sorry through the glass, and scoop the fresh tray off the side to move it clear. Then I flip the lock and shoulder the door open.

That’s when I get my first real look at him, and my hands forget they’re holding anything at all.

He’s in the tan pants with the red suspenders, the ones that mean firehouse, and a navy tee pulled over a chest that has never once skipped a workout.

Blond hair, too long, shoved back like he did it with his fingers and no mirror.

A jaw you could set a level on. And a grin.

A big, slow, sure grin. He has never once walked into a room and wondered whether he’s wanted. It’s written all over him.

Then the smell of him reaches me. Cedar warmed in the sun. Sweet hay. A thread of woodsmoke under it. It slides right past my brain and lands somewhere lower and a lot less sensible.

My whole body sits up and pays attention.

I hate that.

The tray tips out of my hands.

Forty scones, still warm, hit the sidewalk and his boots in one slow-motion disaster. We both look down. His boots are buried. One lone scone balances on the toe of the left one like it’s trying to apologize for the rest.

“Fuck.” It’s out of me before I can stop it, loud enough to carry down half of Main. “Fuck. Sorry. Fu— sorry.”

“Well,” he says. “Those smell incredible.”

“They were for the diner.” Which is not the point. Which is nowhere near the point. But it’s what comes out of me.

“Della can wait.” He crouches, easy, and starts stacking ruined scones back onto the tray with two fingers like this happens to him all the time. “She’s had my order wrong for six years. She owes you one.”

Up close, the scent is worse. Better. Worse.

“You’re the fire department,” I say.

“Cal.” He straightens, sticks out a hand, sees it’s covered in scone, wipes it on his own pants, and offers it again. “Cal Shaw. Firehouse. We met at the funeral for about eight seconds, which I’d never expect you to remember, you met the whole county that day. We heard your alarm having a moment.”

So that one’s Cal. Three weeks of calandrhettandeli, and now one of the names has a face on it. It would have to be this face.

“It has a lot of moments.” I don’t take the hand. If I touch him, I might do something with the rest of my life that I’ll regret before lunch. “It’s not smoke. It just screams sometimes. For the attention, I think. It’s broken.”

“Yeah, I can hear that.” He’s already looking past me at it, still going off up there. “Want me to?”

“Please.”

He comes in like he owns the place, which somehow isn’t rude on him, ducks under the door frame, and takes the chair from me with a look that says he saw the towel plan and thinks it’s adorable.

He steps up. The suspenders do a lot of work.

I study the floor. I study the ceiling. I study everywhere but up and to the left, where a strip of his back shows above his belt, and I fail at that too, more than once.

He pops the cover off, does something quick and certain with the wires, and the shriek dies mid-breath. The quiet after it rings in my ears.

“Battery backup’s corroded.” He climbs down. “Whole unit’s shot. I’ll swap it this week if you want. Ten-minute job.”

“How much?”

“For you?” He looks at the graveyard of scones on the tray. “A scone. A clean one, if you’ve got one going spare.”

He’s in no rush to leave. He takes a slow look around instead, at the glass case, at the little chalkboard I still haven’t filled in, at Marigold’s old chair by the window that I can’t make myself move. Then back at me.

“You’re Marigold’s niece,” he says. Not a question.

“That obvious?”

“Whole town’s been wondering when you’d come up for air.” He says it kindly, but it lands wrong all the same, the idea of a whole town wondering about me. “She talked about you. A lot. Real proud.”

That one gets in under my guard before I can stop it. I turn to the tray so he can’t see my face do something stupid.

“Well.” I clear my throat. “Here I am. Covered in scone.”

“Here you are.” He says it like it’s good news. Like I’m worth the wait. I have no idea what to do with that, so I do nothing at all.

And there it is. The pull of him, warm and lazy, tugging at a person like a change in the weather. I’ve met men like Cal Shaw. They flirt with the whole world because the whole world flirts back. It costs them nothing, and it means less.

“I moved here for a quiet life,” I tell him.

I don’t fully know why I say it. Maybe just to hear it out loud in front of the problem.

He picks his ruined boots up off my clean floor, one at a time, and heads for the door, still grinning like I’ve made his morning.

“Sugar,” he says, “you moved in across from a fire station.”

Then he’s gone, out into the gray dawn with my scones all over his boots, and I’m left standing in my warm gold quiet with my heart running like I chased him down the street.

The shop settles. Just the fridge humming and the coffee ticking away on its plate.

But it doesn’t smell only of sugar and flour now.

There’s cedar in it, warm and low, tucked under everything, and I catch myself standing in the middle of my own kitchen breathing it in like it’s a smell I’ve been missing.

I put the kettle on hard enough to make a point.

Forty scones to start over. Della waiting on them. A busted alarm. A fireman coming back this week to stand on my chair and pull half his shirt loose from his suspenders again, with me apparently no help to anyone about it.

It’s fine. I’m fine. I did not move to the ass-end of nowhere and inherit a bakery and rebuild my whole damn life from crumbs just to lose my mind over the first alpha who wiped his hand on his own pants.

I have a shop to run. A quiet to protect.

A very simple list of rules that have served me beautifully for three whole weeks.

Rule one. Lock the door.

I go and lock the door.

Three weeks. I so nearly had it.