Chapter 16 #3
“Why do you hate me?” I ask. The question comes out quieter than I intend, and more honest. “We’re supposed to be family, Lenora.”
It lands like something physical. I watch her step back from it, one small, involuntary movement, her hand rising to close around the Thorne crest at her throat the way someone reaches for a railing when the floor shifts under them.
“Hate you?” The word comes back stripped of its usual armor, something genuinely wounded underneath it now alongside the bitterness.
“I don’t hate you, Keisha. I resent what you represent.
Everything I built in this town, everything I sacrificed for Ruby Springs and yet, my mother still chose you.
The granddaughter who never visited. Who showed no magical aptitude, none, not a flicker that anyone could measure.
My sister took you away from your heritage instead of raising you inside it, and our mother rewarded that absence by handing you everything.
” Her voice is climbing despite herself, the careful control fraying at the edges with each word.
“This shop should have been mine. The house should have been mine. The legacy—” She cuts herself off hard, pressing her painted red lips together.
“The power,” I finish for her, quietly. “That’s the part you can’t say out loud, isn’t it? It’s not the shop. It’s not the house. It’s the power of the Thorne line. That’s what you actually want.”
Something moves behind her eyes as they shift back and forth. A fast, complicated sequence of things I don’t have names for, calculation and desperation and beneath both of them, sitting at the very bottom, something that looks distinctly like fear.
“You have no idea what is coming,” she says, her voice dropping low enough that I have to lean slightly forward to catch it.
“I need those grimoires. They contain things you cannot yet interpret, information that has kept this town safe through crises you have never witnessed. I have been here, Keisha. Holding this place together while you were somewhere else living a human life. You think that finding a little bit of your magic makes you qualified to—”
The bell above the door jangles, bright and sudden in the charged air.
Three sets of footsteps cross the threshold, and I don’t need to look in their direction to identify them. Their presence registers in my chest like tumblers falling into place, each one distinct and grounding. Steady and certain and exactly where they should be.
Lenora’s expression undergoes a swift reorganization, drawing itself back into composed hardness as she takes in Ezra, Lucien, and Maceo standing just inside the door. By the unhappy expression on their faces, I can guess they heard more than the last thirty seconds of our conversation.
“Gentlemen,” Lenora greets them, her tone cool and unhurried, the performance reinstated with impressive speed. “What a coincidence, all three of you arriving at once.”
“Not a coincidence at all,” Lucien replies, his voice carrying that particular quality of his, unhurried, almost leisurely, the cadence of someone who has lived long enough not to be rattled by much.
His eyes train on my aunt. “The wards are failing, Lenora. I would imagine you’ve noticed, you’ve been in this town long enough to see the fluctuations.
Does the weather outside not alarm you? We’ve just come in from the perimeter.
The degradation is accelerating. If it continues at this rate, Ruby Springs won’t remain hidden much longer.
Not from the outside world, and not from anyone looking for it.
You know what that means as well as any of us. ”
Lenora draws her coat around herself, a single smooth gesture that she wears like a closing argument.
“I am aware, Mr. Vale, and I am already making arrangements to correct the problem. I just need the right tools. . .” she trails off then looks to me.
“We’ll continue this conversation another time, Keisha,” she says, pivoting away from Lucien.
“When you’re feeling more reasonable about the family archives. ”
I don’t move from where I’m standing. I stay exactly where I am, Maceo and Ezra move into the shop, making room for her to leave. “The grimoires stay with me, Lenora. Where they belong.”
She pauses at the threshold, one hand resting on the door frame, and looks back at me over her shoulder.
Whatever softness had surfaced in her face during that unguarded moment is completely gone now, smoothed over and sealed.
“Nothing stays where it belongs forever, niece,” she says.
“Change is coming whether you are prepared for it or not. When these wards fail entirely, and they will, there will be one person this town holds responsible.” A pause, precise and deliberate. “It won’t be me.”
The door closes behind her. The bell sounds again, quieter on the way out, and then the shop settles back into silence.
Maceo crosses to me in two long strides, the warm weight of his hand rests on my shoulder like something I didn’t know I’d been needing. “You okay, Beautiful?”
I pull in a long breath through my nose and let it out slowly. “I’m fine. She’s not nearly as intimidating as she thinks she is.”
“On the contrary,” Lucien says, moving to examine a shelf, one hand lifting a small glass bottle and tilting it toward the light, “she is almost precisely as intimidating as she believes herself to be.” He sets the bottle down with a gentle click.
“Which is what makes her dangerous in ways that are entirely distinct from the obvious ones.”
Ezra has not spoken since they came in. He hasn’t moved far from the door, but his eyes haven’t left my face since the moment he crossed the threshold, reading me in the quiet, thorough way he always has.
After a moment he moves towards us, coming around the counter.
He finds the cabinet without having to look for it, draws out my grandmother’s grimoire, and places it on the counter between us.
“The wards are degrading faster than they should be,” he says.
No preamble, no softening of it. “Based on what we saw this morning, and based on what we just walked in on,” he glances briefly toward the door Lenora passed through, “she is getting desperate. A desperate Lenora is a Lenora running out of moves. She believes the grimoires give her a solution, something that restores her position or her access to the Anchor magic. She is wrong about that, but desperation makes people take actions they would otherwise reconsider.”
I look at him, then at Lucien, then at Maceo, and feel my resolve harden.
My Wizard. My Fae. My Wolf. Three men standing in my shop because they have decided to be and I’m truly grateful for the places they’ve claimed in my heart.
The realization is something I don’t have a word for yet, but I’m not afraid of it.
“She’s not the solution,” I say, drawing the grimoire across the counter toward me and flipping it open.
The pages rustle softly, the faint scent of old paper and dried herbs rising from them.
I look up and meet each of their eyes in turn.
“I am. I need to find a way to remove this suppression completely before Founder’s Day.
If the wards fail while the whole town is out celebrating, we’re exposed. That’s not a risk we can afford.”
The shop is quiet around us. Outside, though faint, I can still hear the distant sound of traffic bleeding through from the world beyond Ruby Springs.
We don’t have long. I don’t have long.