Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
LEO
The flashback released him with a jolt, leaving Leo staring at his laptop with his pulse thudding in his ears.
Five years. Victor had spent five years building this operation.
Targeting paranormal businesses. Perfecting his predatory model.
And now he’d brought it to Haven Shores—to the town where Leo was investigating surge activity, to the businesses under Leo’s protection, to the woman whose shop sat on the most valuable ley line intersection on the Pacific Coast.
This wasn’t a coincidence. Victor didn’t do coincidence.
This was revenge. He hadn’t stumbled onto this investigation—Victor had engineered it. A few well-placed rumors about instability in Leo’s portfolio territories, and the Coalition assignment had been all but inevitable.
Leo shoved back from the desk, pacing the length of the study with restless energy.
I should have prosecuted. The thought circled like a vulture. Should have destroyed him when I had the chance. Instead, I let him walk, and he used those five years to become this.
The image of Junie’s shop rose unbidden. Shattered glass and ruined potions, on her knees, crying over an empty shelf. The devastation in her eyes when she’d told him about her grandmother’s book.
Victor had done that. Victor’s people, Victor’s scheme, Victor’s revenge campaign against Leo personally.
And Junie was paying the price.
But the words rang hollow. They’d been ringing hollow since the moment he’d seen her standing in the ruins of her shop, and a crack had formed in the walls he’d spent decades building.
He forced himself to sit. To focus on the data instead of the rage. Victor was careful, methodical, patient—traits Leo recognized because they were his own, twisted into a predatory version. Beating him would require the same qualities.
The shell companies were clever but not impenetrable.
Leo traced the registration paper trails, finding breadcrumbs that led to breadcrumbs that led to more shell companies.
Sable Acquisitions was the parent, but Victor had buried it under layers of misdirection.
If Leo hadn’t recognized the pattern from his own fraud investigation five years ago, he might never have found it.
But he had recognized it. And now he had proof.
The Haven Shores operation was bigger than he’d realized. Victor wasn’t targeting random businesses—he was systematically acquiring properties on ley line intersections. Control enough of them, and you could theoretically manipulate the town’s entire magical infrastructure.
Leo pulled up the ley line map again, marking every property Victor had already acquired through his shell companies. Three in the harbor district. One on the eastern edge of town. A vacant lot near the tide pools that sat on a minor but strategically located intersection.
And Moonrise Mixology. The crown jewel. The nexus that Victor clearly wanted more than any of the others.
Her grandmother’s recipe book. The thought struck with sudden clarity. The encoded entries she never deciphered.
Victor hadn’t wanted Junie’s shop. He’d wanted what was inside it.
What had Rosalind Reed hidden in those ciphered pages? And how did Victor know about it?
Leo found Junie at the Wolf Moon Brewery.
He hadn’t intended to seek her out. Had told himself he needed to compile his findings, prepare a formal report for Wyatt and the Elder Council, coordinate with the Coalition about the expanded threat.
All logical, practical, necessary steps that had nothing to do with the woman whose face had been hovering at the edge of his thoughts for eight days straight.
But when Beck mentioned she was “drowning her sorrows in Dahlia’s emergency pastries and our best IPA,” Leo’s feet had carried him to the brewery before his brain could object.
She sat in a corner booth, Glimmer coiled on the table in front of her, a half-empty pint glass and a plate of crumb-covered napkins suggesting she’d been here for a while.
Her hair was pulled back in a messy knot, and she wore what looked like yesterday’s clothes—a fitted dress with visible wrinkles and boots that had seen better days.
She’d never looked more beautiful.
Stop it, Leo told the animal prowling beneath his skin. It ignored him, purring with satisfaction at simply being in her presence.
Junie looked up as he approached, and a complicated expression crossed her face. Wariness, maybe. Or recognition of whatever strange gravity kept pulling them into each other’s orbit.
“Castellan.” She gestured at the bench across from her. “Come to gloat about how you were right about the sabotage?”
“I was hoping to avoid being right.” He slid into the booth, keeping the table between them like a barrier against his own instincts. “Being right means Victor Sable is involved. And Victor Sable being involved makes everything significantly worse.”
Junie’s eyebrows rose. “Victor Sable?”
“The owner of Sable Acquisitions. The parent company behind every shell corporation that’s made buyout offers to Haven Shores businesses.
” Leo pulled out his notebook—the leather-bound one that had become as essential as his phone over the past week.
“He’s also a jackal shifter, a former employee of mine, and someone I should have destroyed five years ago when I had the chance. ”
She stared at him. Glimmer raised her head, tongue flickering as if tasting the tension in the air.
“That’s…” Junie shook her head. “That’s a lot of information delivered with zero context. Want to back up and try again? Maybe with some explanation of why a former employee of yours is systematically destroying businesses in a town you’d never visited until last week?”
Leo hesitated. This wasn’t information he shared. The Victor situation, his father’s failures, the way his past kept circling back to haunt him—those were weaknesses he kept locked away, far from anyone who might use them against him.
But Junie was looking at him with those sharp green eyes, her familiar was pointedly not hissing at him, and he’d already seen her stripped of every defense. Maybe it was time to return the favor.
“Victor Sable worked for Castellan Ventures as a junior partner.” Leo kept his voice even, clinical.
“He was good at his job. Charming. Ambitious. The kind of employee everyone wanted to mentor.” He paused.
“He was also stealing from clients. Hundreds of thousands of dollars over three years, routed through shell companies and offshore accounts.”
Junie’s eyes widened. “And you caught him.”
“I caught him. Fired him. Let him walk away without pressing charges because prosecution would have been messy and public and damaging to the business I’d spent twenty years building.” He ground his jaw. “He told me mercy was weakness. I thought he was making excuses for his own failures.”
“But?”
“But he was right.” The admission cost him. He felt it crack through walls he’d built so carefully around his own mistakes. “I let him go because it was easier. And he used the freedom I gave him to build Sable Acquisitions. To target vulnerable businesses. To come here, to Haven Shores, to—”
He stopped. Couldn’t finish the sentence with her watching him, her face unreadable.
“To what?” Junie prompted.
“To hurt you.” The words came out rougher than he intended.
“The attack on your shop wasn’t random, Junie.
It wasn’t even primarily about the ley line or the property value.
Victor chose Haven Shores because businesses here are in my investment portfolio.
Because destroying them makes me look incompetent.
Because—” He forced himself to hold her gaze.
“Because he knew I would come here personally to investigate. And he wanted me to watch.”
The silence that followed was heavy. Weighted.
Glimmer’s scales shifted from their usual purple-green to that amber-gold that Leo had started to recognize. The color she showed when Junie was feeling complicated things about him.
“So let me get this straight.” Junie’s voice had gone dangerously even.
“A man you fired five years ago has been systematically destroying Haven Shores’s businesses as revenge against you personally.
My shop was targeted specifically because you’re invested in it.
My grandmother’s book was stolen because—” She stopped.
“Why was the book stolen? How does that fit?”
“I don’t know yet.” Leo leaned forward, the predator inside him pressing against its cage.
“But I intend to find out. The encoded entries your grandmother left—someone knew about them. Knew they were valuable. Victor doesn’t move without information, and he doesn’t take risks without guaranteed returns. ”
“You think someone told him about the book?”
“I think someone in Haven Shores is working with him.” It was the conclusion he’d been avoiding, but the evidence pointed nowhere else. “The attacks are too precise. Too targeted. Someone with local knowledge is feeding him information about which businesses to hit and how.”
Junie’s face went pale. “A traitor. In Haven Shores.”
“Yes.”
She stared at him for a long moment. Then she picked up her pint glass and drained what was left in one long swallow.
“I hate this,” she said when she set it down.
“I hate that you’re right. I hate that my shop was collateral damage in some asshole’s revenge scheme.
I hate that my grandmother’s book is gone because of someone else’s grudge.
” Her jaw set, stubborn and fierce. “But I especially hate that you’re sitting there blaming yourself for a situation that isn’t your fault. ”
Leo blinked. “I’m not—”