Chapter 12 Bonus Scene （Liam’s POV）
BONUS SCENE (LIAM’S POV)
The day it started.
Liam had just stepped out of the shower when the pull hit.
He’d been in his own bathroom, in his own house—the small place he’d rented after the divorce, nothing fancy but his.
One minute he was reaching for his jeans, the next there was this sensation like someone had grabbed his soul by the bollocks and yanked.
Not a physical sensation, exactly. More like a hook behind his sternum, dragging him toward something he couldn’t see or name. The bathroom tiles blurred. The steam swirled. He barely had time to grab his work jeans and haul them on before—
Then he was somewhere else entirely. Standing in a stranger’s kitchen with wet hair dripping down his bare chest and a wrench materializing in his hand like the universe had a sick sense of humor.
“What the—” A woman’s voice. High, panicked, distinctly American. “Oh my GOD—”
Not again.
That was his first thought. Not where am I or what just happened, but the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who’d lived through enough magical chaos to recognize the signature.
He knew that feeling—the displacement, the disorientation, the way reality bent around you when a witch’s spell grabbed hold.
Fiona had done similar things to him during their marriage. Different circumstances, different spells, but the same fundamental violation: his body moving without his consent, pulled by someone else’s magic.
He pushed wet hair out of his eyes, already cataloging: small kitchen, dated appliances, signs of poor maintenance everywhere. A woman backed against the counter, wielding a wooden spoon like a weapon, wearing wet, wine-stained clothes and an expression of absolute horror.
Not Fiona.
Someone new.
Someone who was staring at him with the wild eyes of a person who had absolutely no idea what she’d just done.
“Who ARE you?” she demanded. “Why are you NAKED in my KITCHEN?”
Ah. So she’s the summoner and she doesn’t know it.
That was worse, in some ways. At least Fiona had known exactly what she was doing when she manipulated him.
This woman—something slimy in her partially wet hair, mascara smudged, vibrating with uncontrolled magical energy that made his skin prickle—looked like she’d accidentally triggered a bomb and was still trying to figure out where the fuse was.
He assessed her while she babbled apologies and stared determinedly at his face. Mid-forties, probably. Attractive, in a disheveled, overwhelmed sort of way. Magic crackling off her like static electricity, wild and raw and completely undisciplined.
Newly awakened witch. Just what I needed.
“Could I trouble you for a towel?” he asked, because someone had to be the calm one, and it clearly wasn’t going to be her.
The first few days were hell.
Not because of the binding—though that was uncomfortable enough, a constant awareness of her presence like a splinter under his skin.
Not because of the chaos, though there was plenty of that: the house developing opinions, the garden exploding into impossible bloom, the bloody gnomes rearranging themselves when nobody was looking.
No. The hell was watching her.
Cassie Morgan was a disaster. She cast spells while he was in the shower.
She argued with her cat. She had entire conversations with her toaster in broken French.
She cycled between confidence and crippling self-doubt so fast it gave him whiplash, and her magic responded to every emotional shift like a seismograph during an earthquake.
She was also nothing like Fiona.
He kept waiting for it—the manipulation.
The subtle pressure. The way Fiona had pushed at his thoughts until he couldn’t tell which feelings were his and which were hers.
Twelve years of that, and he’d gotten good at recognizing the shape of magical influence.
The way it felt when someone was trying to nudge his emotions in a particular direction.
Cassie wasn’t doing that.
Cassie was too busy accidentally setting things on fire to manage anything as sophisticated as manipulation.
Her magic leaked everywhere—through the walls, into the appliances, out into the garden—but it never pushed.
Never tried to change what he was feeling.
Just… existed. Chaotically. Loudly. Without any of the calculated precision that had made Fiona so dangerous.
She was a mess.
A beautiful, infuriating mess who looked at him like she expected him to leave and seemed genuinely surprised every time he didn’t.
He should have been annoyed. He was annoyed. But underneath the annoyance was something else—something that felt dangerously like recognition.
She’s been made to feel small, he realized, watching her apologize for taking up space in her own kitchen. Someone taught her to disappear.
He knew that feeling. Fiona had been subtle about it, but by the end, he’d been a shadow of himself—agreeing with things he didn’t believe, wanting things he didn’t want, unable to trust that any of his feelings were actually his.
Cassie wasn’t trying to make him smaller. If anything, she kept pushing him away like she was trying to protect him from herself.
Like she thought she was the dangerous one.
Bloody hell, he thought, the third time she apologized for existing in his general vicinity. She actually believes it. She thinks she’s too much.
The music box changed everything.
It was a small thing—a broken heirloom she’d mentioned in passing, something her grandmother had given her, something her ex-husband had knocked off a shelf and never bothered to fix.
She’d found it while sorting through old boxes, and the look on her face when she held the pieces had been so raw, so unguarded, that Liam had felt it through the binding like a punch to the chest.
He’d fixed things his whole life. It was what he did—broken pipes, broken fences, broken houses. He was good at seeing how pieces fit together, at making things work again.
He wasn’t supposed to fix her.
But he took the music box anyway. Spent an evening at the table with tiny gears and delicate springs, working by the light of the emotional walls that kept shifting from anxious yellow to curious amber.
The toaster offered commentary in French.
The cat watched from the counter with an expression of feline judgment.
And when he handed it back to her, when she wound the key and the melody played for the first time in years—
She smiled.
Not the tight, apologetic smile she used when she was trying to take up less space. Not the nervous smile she deployed when she thought she’d done something wrong. This was something else entirely: surprised, delighted, radiant.
Something cracked open in his chest.
He’d been closed off for so long. Since Fiona. Since the divorce. Since he’d realized he couldn’t trust his own feelings and had decided it was safer not to have any. He’d built walls around himself as solid as any he’d ever constructed professionally, and he’d been perfectly content behind them.
Cassie Morgan and her broken music box had just put a fissure in the foundation.
Well, he thought, watching her cradle the music box like it was precious. That’s inconvenient.
He left because she asked him to.
Not because the binding broke—though it did, finally, severed by her desperate midnight spell and the letter from her great-aunt that had given her permission to want things. Not because he wanted to go.
But because she’d spent so long being told she was too much that she couldn’t believe anyone would choose to stay.
And he couldn’t make her believe it. That was the one thing he’d learned from Fiona: you couldn’t force someone to feel something they weren’t ready to feel.
Even with magic. Even with good intentions.
So he went to the motel on Route 9.
And he stayed.
Close enough to come back. Close enough for her to find him. Close enough that if she figured it out—if she finally understood that he wasn’t leaving, that he’d never been planning to leave, that the binding had been an inconvenience but not the reason he was there—she would know where to look.
The motel was terrible. The faucet dripped. The railing wobbled. The ice machine hadn’t worked in years.
He fixed all of it, because he didn’t know how to sit still, and because fixing things was easier than thinking about the woman twenty minutes away who didn’t believe she deserved to be chosen.
Two days.
That’s how long it took.
He was under the bathroom sink when he felt it—a shift in the air, a warmth that had nothing to do with the climate. The binding was gone, but something else had taken its place. Something that felt like her, like Cassie, like the way she glowed when she wasn’t trying to hide.
He stood up. Opened the door.
And there she was.
Standing in the motel parking lot, shimmering with soft golden light, looking at him like she’d finally figured out the answer to a question she’d been afraid to ask.
There she is, he thought. Finally.
“The bathroom faucet?” she asked, because she was ridiculous and he loved her for it.
“Dripping,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
She laughed—nervous and wet and perfect—and started talking. Apologizing. Explaining. Getting everything wrong and right at the same time, words tumbling over each other like she was afraid he’d disappear if she stopped.
He let her talk.
And then he told her the truth.
“You’re not too much. You’ve never been too much. You’re exactly enough.”
The look on her face—God, that look—was worth every miserable moment in this terrible motel. Worth every broken faucet he’d fixed while waiting. Worth twelve years of Fiona and three years of wandering and a lifetime of building walls that had never kept out anything that mattered.
She kissed him.
No magic required. Just her choice, finally made.
She’s chaos, Liam thought, pulling her closer. She’s difficult and messy and she sets things on fire when she’s emotional.
She was also warm in his arms, and brave despite her fear, and she’d driven to a crappy motel to tell him she wanted him. Not because of a spell. Not because she had to.
Because she chose to.
She’s worth it, he decided.
And for the first time in longer than he could remember, Liam MacLeod let himself believe that something good might actually last.