Her Reluctant Protector (Halo City Protectors #8)

Chapter 1

Kari

Halo City hits the windshield like a dare.

Sycamore Lane is three turns off the main drag, and the shift is immediate — brownstones, iron fences, trees old enough to vote. A neighborhood that the city grew around but never absorbed. Quieter. Older. The kind of block where people know each other's names and opinions.

The Foxglove Inn sits at the end of the block like it's been waiting.

The smell hits first — dust and old lavender and something deeper, something that might be wood rot or might be character. My great-aunt Margit would have called it character. She also called her cats by the wrong names for years, so her judgment isn't exactly the gold standard.

The key sticks in the lock the way the estate lawyer warned me it would.

Jiggle left, then right, then apologize to it.

He'd actually said that last part, straight-faced, like he'd been personally victimized by this door.

I jiggle. I apologize. The lock gives with a grinding protest that I feel in my back teeth.

"Hi," I say to the Foxglove Inn. "I'm Kari. I'm going to live here now. Please don't fall on me."

The foyer answers with a creak that travels the full length of the second floor, like the house is stretching after a long nap.

Three years empty. Three years of dust settling into every groove and crack, of wallpaper peeling in slow motion, of a garden gnome in the front garden bed standing guard over absolutely nothing.

I patted that gnome on the head on my way in. Chipped nose, expression that suggests he's seen things.

The light through the front windows is all wrong — gray and flat where the photos showed honeyed afternoon glow.

Because of course the listing photos were lies.

Gorgeous, seductive, real-estate-pornography lies, the kind that made me pull over at a rest stop outside of Tucson and cry into a gas station coffee because something this beautiful was mine.

What's actually mine: a foyer with water-stained crown molding, a staircase that curves like it was built to make women in long dresses look devastating, and wallpaper departing the walls with the quiet dignity of a guest who knows it's time to leave.

"It's fine," I tell the staircase. "We'll fix it."

My car is parked out front, stuffed to the roof with everything I own, which turns out to be surprisingly little when you subtract a boyfriend, an apartment, a friend group, and a life you thought was permanent.

What I do have: three suitcases, a box of cookbooks, my grandmother's cast-iron skillet, and a truly irresponsible collection of power tools I bought from increasingly concerned hardware store employees on the drive across the country.

Bernadette — the circular saw — rides shotgun. She earned it.

The floorboards announce every step as I move through the first floor.

The front parlor has good bones — high ceilings, original molding with acanthus leaves someone carved by hand a century ago.

The plaster is cracked above the bay window, and there's a dark stain near the fireplace that I'm choosing to believe is water damage, because the alternative involves my imagination and I need to sleep here tonight.

The dining room is wallpaper carnage. Three different patterns layered like mismatched event linens, peeling back to reveal each other. The built-in china cabinet still has one of Margit's teacups on the middle shelf, alone, like the last guest at a party who doesn't know everyone else has left.

My throat goes tight.

"She loved you," I tell the teacup, and then I have to walk into the kitchen before I do something embarrassing, like cry in a dining room that smells like mouse droppings and regret.

The kitchen is enormous. This is the good news.

The bad news is that enormous just means more square footage of problems — a commercial range that's either vintage or condemned, tile that might have been white in a former life, and a window over the sink that looks out onto what the listing described as "established gardens" and what I'd describe as "nature reclaiming its territory with enthusiasm. "

The faucet drips when I test it. Water comes out brown, then rust-colored, then something approaching clear. Progress. I lean against the counter and pull out my phone for inventory photos, already composing the caption for Del: Surprise! Everything is terrible and I've never been happier.

Under a curl of peeling contact paper near the sink, a piece of lined paper. Torn from a cheap spiral notebook, handwriting all capitals — blocky and even, like someone took their time.

YOU DON'T BELONG HERE.

My hand stops mid-reach. For a breath, maybe two, my brain does the thing it always does — categorizes, contextualizes, defuses.

Kids. Has to be kids. The inn's been sitting empty for three years, and broken windows are basically engraved invitations to bored teenagers with spray paint and opinions.

I'd already spotted the graffiti on the garden shed — a crude but anatomically ambitious drawing that suggests Halo City's youth have a future in the arts, if not the sciences.

The note goes in my back pocket. I take my inventory photos. I keep cataloguing.

The second floor has four guest suites and what Margit used as her private rooms at the end of the hall.

Three are in various stages of beautiful decay — one has a ceiling medallion that makes me want to weep with its intricacy and a floor that makes me want to weep with its softness.

My foot goes through a board near the bathroom threshold, and I extract my ankle with the poise of a woman who has never in her life put her foot through a floor.

"Rude," I say.

The fourth suite — overlooking the street — is livable. Margit must have kept this one up in the final years, because the mattress is only mildly suspicious, the wallpaper is intact, and the bathroom has a clawfoot tub with actual grout still connecting the tiles.

"This one," I tell the room. "We'll start here."

Four trips to haul everything upstairs. Bernadette stays in the car — she's not a second-floor kind of girl — but Gerald the drill and Patricia the power sander come up with the suitcases because I want them where I can see them.

The cookbooks go on the nightstand. Grandma's skillet goes on the radiator, because it's flat and I don't have a kitchen shelf that won't collapse under the weight of cast iron and ancestral expectations.

The bed gets fresh sheets — mine, bought at a rest stop in New Mexico, covered in tiny yellow flowers that have no business being this cheerful. I tuck the corners with the precision of someone who spent years making centerpieces symmetrical for people who didn't notice, and then I stand back.

A made bed. In a room that's mine. In a building that's mine. In a city where nobody knows me, nobody needs me, and nobody is waiting for me to be useful.

The tears come fast and stupid. I swipe at them with the back of my wrist and sit on the edge of the mattress and call Del.

She picks up before the second ring.

"Are you dead?" she says by way of greeting. "I've been tracking your location like a psycho and you stopped moving a while ago. If you're dead, I need to know so I can plan the funeral, and I'm telling you right now, your mother is not doing the catering — "

"I'm not dead."

"Debatable. Send a photo."

I flip the camera and give her a slow pan. The cheerful sheets. The cracked ceiling. The window where late afternoon light does something gorgeous with the original glass, casting wobbly rainbows across the wallpaper.

"Oh," Del says, and her voice does something soft that she'd deny under oath. "Kari."

"I know."

"It's — "

"A disaster. A beautiful, rotting, perfect disaster, and I love it and I'm going to live here forever or until the floor eats me, whichever comes first."

"The floor is going to eat you?"

"My foot went through a board. I'm choosing to see it as the house being affectionate."

"The house is trying to kill you."

"The house is testing me. It's different."

Del goes quiet. Her catering kitchen bleeds through — the clatter of prep, someone calling out an order, the chaos that means she's in the middle of a service and answered anyway.

Because she always answers. Even when Matt was still around and I was too busy being someone's amenable girlfriend to pick up her calls half the time, Del answered.

"Okay," she says, and a door closes behind her. "How bad is it really?"

I tap my thumbnail against my teeth. "The bones are incredible. The staircase alone is worth the move. Kitchen is huge, ceilings are original, and there's a garden gnome out front who I've already emotionally bonded with."

"And the bad?"

"Plumbing is questionable. Electrical is probably a fire hazard. Three of the four suites need full rehab. The wallpaper situation is an actual crime scene. And the kitchen range might predate the moon landing."

"So an eleven."

"A very charming eleven."

"Kari." Her voice shifts — the no-bullshit register she uses when someone tries to negotiate her catering rates. "You have renovation experience in the amount of exactly zero. You have savings in the amount of — what did you tell me?"

"Enough for six months if I'm careful."

"You've never been careful a day in your life."

"That's not — okay, that's fair."

"I love you, you know I love you, but I need you to hear me when I say that this is objectively insane.

You quit your job. You drove across the country.

You are going to live in a collapsing building and try to turn it into a business with nothing but optimism and a circular saw you named Bernadette — "

"Bernadette is very reliable."

" — and I am going to support you completely because that's what I do, but I need you to have a plan. An actual plan. Not a vibe."

My eyes sting again, and this time I let them.

"I have a plan," I say. "Step one: make one room livable. Done. Step two: learn how to do everything else. Step three: open for business before the money runs out."

"That's three steps. That's not a plan, that's a haiku."

"A very actionable haiku."

Del laughs, which is what I wanted, and then she wants photos of everything — the damage, the kitchen, the gnome. Estimates. Timelines. She wants me to find the electrical panel so her cousin Tony, the electrician in Jersey, can tell me whether I'm going to die in a fire.

"I'll send everything tonight," I say.

"You better. And eat something. You've been living on gas station coffee and whatever Del-isn't-watching snacks you think I don't know about."

"I had a protein bar at the state line."

"Which state line?"

"...I decline to answer."

She threatens overnight delivery of a meal kit, which is her love language, and we hang up. The room is quieter after. The house settles around me — ticks and groans and the creak of old wood adjusting to someone's weight after years of emptiness.

"Just us," I tell it.

The light is fading, going amber and then gray through the old glass.

I should go down and bring up the rest — flashlights, battery lanterns, the cleaning products I optimistically purchased as though a bottle of Murphy's Oil Soap could fix a century of neglect.

But first I want to look at this room in the almost-dark, with my sheets on the bed and my books on the nightstand, and just have it.

Hold the moment where this is new and possible and entirely mine.

Not Matt's. Not the job's. Mine. Inherited from a woman who loved me enough to leave it to me, and I'm going to make it into something, even if I have to learn everything from YouTube and sheer stubbornness.

I tap my thumbnail against my teeth.

Tomorrow: electrical panel, plumbing assessment, full damage inventory. Hardware store, grocery store, a coffee shop that doesn't know me. Start.

The flashlights, the lanterns, the cleaning supplies — still in the car.

My footsteps echo through the empty house on the way down, and the lanterns make the foyer look almost romantic once I set them up — warm circles of light against the water-stained walls, shadows pooling in the staircase corners.

I'm hauling supplies toward the kitchen when my foot catches on something near the parlor doorway.

A piece of paper on the floor, just inside the threshold. Same cheap notebook paper. Same blocky capitals.

LEAVE WHILE YOU STILL CAN.

This one isn't dusty.

This one wasn't here when I walked through an hour ago.

The warmth drains out of my chest in a single, sudden pull, like someone opened a valve. My hands stay steady — they've learned that trick — but my heart is hammering something frantic behind my ribs.

Someone was in this house. While I was upstairs, on the phone with Del, making jokes about the floor eating me — someone walked into this parlor and left this note and walked back out, and I didn't hear a thing over my own voice.

The front door. Did I lock it? The kitchen has a back entrance — did I even check it?

Every creak sounds different now. Every tick of the radiator, every groan of settling wood. The shadows in the staircase aren't romantic anymore. They're just dark.

I call Del.

Something in my voice must land wrong, because she goes silent — no jokes, no teasing, just listening. I tell her about the notes. Both of them.

"You're leaving," Del says. Not a question. "Right now. Get in your car and — "

"I'm not leaving."

"Kari — "

"This is mine." My voice comes out quieter than I want it to. Steadier. "Someone is trying to scare me out of my own building, and I'm not going. I'll call the police. I'll get the locks changed. But I'm not running."

Del goes quiet long enough that her breathing shifts — the controlled inhale she does right before she loses it.

"Fine," she says. "Lock every door. Barricade if you have to. I'm making some calls."

"What kind of calls?"

"The kind you make when your best friend is alone in a murder house and too stubborn to leave."

She hangs up before I can argue.

I fold the note, tuck it into my back pocket with the first one, and go lock every door I can find.

Then I go upstairs, sit on the bed with the cheerful yellow flowers, and listen to every tick, every groan, every sound I dismissed an hour ago as charming.

Someone was in here with me. And I never heard them leave.