CHAPTER 6 #2
She gripped the edge of the table. Her hands shook.
The Collector hadn't just watched from a distance.
He'd reached into her son's magic and scraped it clean.
Before the party. Before the polite conversation and the wine compliments and the card with no name.
All of it was a performance. The man in the dry coat had already been inside their lives, and Kalen had known since six in the morning, and nobody told her.
She bit down on the inside of her cheek. Filed it. She'd deal with the withheld information later. Right now she needed to know what came next.
"How does he operate?"
Charlie turned his glass on the table. "Through others.
Proxies, purchased loyalties. He doesn't attack.
He wears you down. Takes the sentries first. Then the wards.
Then the people around you. By the time he comes for what he wants, you're standing alone and the only option left is the one he prepared for you. "
"The Connacht pattern." Kalen's voice was flat. "I watched it happen three centuries ago. A provincial lord lost everything. Sentries, wards, allies. Then the man himself."
"So what do we do?"
"We need allies." Kalen looked at her. "My people. From the book world. Ash. Frost. Bruno. If there's a way to reach them, I'll find it."
"And I'll rebuild the ward network tonight." Charlie drained his glass and set it on the table with the quiet care of a man handling something breakable. "I've been patching them for weeks. Time to do it right."
Lainie looked between the two of them. A dragon and a berserker, planning a defense over the last of her cabernet. Three and a half months ago she'd been living in a trailer, hiding cash under the mattress, and flinching when the front door opened.
She pushed back from the table. "I'm going to the house. I need a minute."
Kalen stood. "I'll walk with you."
"No." She shook her head. "I need to do this alone."
He sat back down. His golden eyes tracked her as she crossed the grounds.
The walk from the winery to the house took four minutes. Tonight it took longer.
The vineyard was quiet. The vines dark against the last light in the sky. Her boots left prints in the damp ground. She passed the well—the old fieldstone ring, the rusted iron cap. The timepiece warmed as she came close. Cooled as she moved past. She did not stop.
The house was lit up. She could see the blue flicker of the TV through the family room window. She opened the door and stood in the kitchen doorway.
Jenna was on the couch, legs curled under her, a bowl of popcorn balanced on the armrest. Hadlee sat at the other end with Bitsy in her lap, the dog's nails clicking every time she shifted position. The movie was loud—some action thing with too many explosions. Upstairs, a door closed. Brennon.
Normal. Ordinary. A house with teenagers in it, doing what teenagers did on a February evening.
Jenna didn't look up. She was tucked into the corner of the couch with her popcorn, laughing at something on screen, and she had no idea that a man in a dry coat had just named her safety as a line item on a contract.
None of them did. Lainie found herself watching them the way you watch something you are about to fight to protect.
Ten seconds. Fifteen. Then she climbed the stairs.
Her bedroom was quiet. She closed the door and sat on the edge of the bed. Sawyer's chair by the window was empty—he was downstairs somewhere, or out on his own rounds. The room was hers alone.
The jacket came off. A wine stain on her white top she hadn't noticed until now—a dark splash near the hem, the cabernet she'd been handed and set down without tasting.
She took the business card from the pocket and held it in both hands.
White stock, heavy between her fingers. A phone number in black ink.
No name. No title. The card of a man who operated outside every system she understood.
She turned it over. Blank.
She set it on the nightstand, next to the spot where the timepiece usually rested overnight.
Then she took the watch off. The chain pooled in her palm, warm metal on skin.
The timepiece sat in her hand the way it had sat in her hand a hundred times before—small, round, the weight of it disproportionate to its size.
She ran her thumb over the case. The fairy, the jewels, the scrollwork she'd never been able to read.
This small metal thing that had conjured chocolate cake the first night she wore it.
That had brought a dragon shifter out of a romance novel and a new life from the wreckage of the old one.
The Collector wanted this. He'd been watching her use it, tracking its output, cataloging its abilities.
He knew what it could do. He knew things about it that she didn't.
And he'd offered to tell her.
The offer played back in the quiet of her bedroom.
Protection. Her family, safe. No more storms, no more threats, no more wondering what was coming up the private road.
Knowledge. Everything about the relic—where it was made, who made it, what it could do that she hadn't discovered.
Her grandmother's history. Her bloodline.
The answers Nana took with her when she died.
Immortality. He'd said that, too, back at the party, in front of Kalen and sixty guests who were thankfully clueless.
She hadn't processed it then. She processed it now.
Other women her age were finishing Valentine's Day dinner right now.
Watching a Hallmark movie. Arguing about whose turn it was to load the dishwasher.
Lainie Cassidy was sitting on a bed holding a pocket watch and deciding whether to hand her entire life to a man whose business card didn't even carry a name.
Each offer was specific. Each one aimed at something she wanted.
The protection was aimed at the mother in her—the woman who'd thrown herself between John and her children for eighteen years. The knowledge was aimed at the daughter—the woman who'd found a pocket watch in her dead grandmother's things and still didn't know why it chose her. The immortality was aimed at the forty-three-year-old—the woman who’d just discovered magic and could lose it to the same body that was already going gray at the temples. This was the Lainie she recognized most in the silence of a cold bedroom, the self that paced at midnight when her children were asleep and her house was dark, the one that cataloged every new wrinkle, every twinge in her knees, every shock of silver at her part. She’d read the medical sites. She’d done the math on family history and average lifespans, measured them against the likelihood of her children needing her a decade from now, or twenty, or forty. She’d tried not to count the years left.
She’d tried to be honest about which parts of her life were actually hers, and which had been mortgaged to the next set of needs, the next crisis.
But magic had cracked the math wide open.
For the first time in her life, she wasn’t just surviving—she was changing.
Waking up with something like purpose, even if it was just learning to keep Brennon from turning the backyard into a crater.
The things she could do with the watch, the things she could become, had started to mean something.
And yet the body that performed those miracles was still hers, still breakable, still ruled by cycles she couldn’t outwit or negotiate.
She’d run her hands over her face in the morning and wondered if the power inside her was burning through her too fast, if the cost of carrying it would be paid in years she could never get back.
The Collector’s offer was a trap, but it was also a seduction, and she hated how thoroughly she understood that.
He’d aimed it straight at the part of her that still wanted more than to simply not die.
The part that had never stopped wanting, even when it meant she hurt people or let herself believe in impossible things.
He’d seen that in her. He’d seen everything.
The way he'd done his homework on the cabernet and the tasting room bar and Todd's house and Brennon's name.
I'll keep you safe. That was protection.
I know things you don't. That was knowledge.
You need what I can do. That was immortality.
Each one a door. And Lainie knew what doors looked like when the lock was on the outside, because she'd spent eighteen years opening and closing them at someone else's command.
Her skin went cold. Not the cold of the February air coming through the window she hadn't opened yet—a different cold, starting behind her sternum and spreading outward, the temperature of recognition.
You can't do anything right. John's voice.
Not a ghost—the voice that lived in her head, the one she'd been fighting since she fled the trailer with two suitcases and her children in the van.
Nobody else will love you. The Collector hadn't said those words.
He'd said the opposite: I can protect you.
I can teach you. I can make you more. But the architecture was the same.
The blueprint underneath the polish. Give me what's yours, and I'll take care of everything.
The timepiece pulsed in her palm. Once. The same deliberate beat from this morning, from the kitchen, from the moment before the storm broke. The heartbeat that wasn't hers.
But this time she listened to it differently. The relic wasn't burning. Wasn't warning. Wasn't pushing her toward anything. It sat warm in her hand and waited.
The way it had waited in Nana's jewelry box.
The way it had waited the first morning Lainie put it on and a chocolate cake appeared on the kitchen counter.
The way it had waited when she signed the papers for the vineyard, when she chose to let Kalen stay, when she told Karen and Alaina the truth about the magic.
The timepiece did not make her decisions. It waited for her to make them.