Chapter 1 #2
Sage caught her eye and smiled. Knowing. Kind.
"The pack meeting's at nine, right?" Sage asked, taping a box closed. "At the distillery?"
"Yep. It’s the only place on the island large enough to hold everyone." Mara's pen scratched across paper. "We’re going over Frost Fest logistics, mostly. Faith's been handling prep, but—"
"But I'm growing a person and my brain is pudding and everything makes me tired." Faith waved a hand. "I need help. Someone who's good at organizing things and doesn't want to throttle me when I forget what we talked about five minutes ago."
"You forgot we talked about this five minutes ago," Mara said.
"See? Exactly my point."
"Ryker's handling security." Faith's voice shifted, careful now, almost too casual. "He'll be at the meeting."
Willow’s hands went still on the pastry box.
Ryker. The one pack member who’d spent the last three months trying to get what was left of her coven removed from the island.
How many pack meetings now had he stood up and argued they were a threat?
His insistence that Iris was using them for some unknown agenda and that the pack couldn’t afford to trust them just wouldn’t die.
He’d even pushed for restrictions on where they could go, questioned their presence at every turn, and made sure the pack never forgot whose daughter she was.
And her traitorous body still responded to his name like a match striking a flint.
Heat flooded her cheeks. Her pulse kicked up, her skin prickled, and that familiar ache bloomed low in her belly despite everything he'd done.
She hated it. Hated that she could picture him so clearly.
The sandy brown hair falling across his forehead, the blue-grey eyes that had once crinkled with genuine warmth when he looked at her.
Before he'd learned who her mother was. And before that warmth had frozen into something sharp and hostile.
Now when Ryker looked at her, he saw nothing but Iris's daughter. A threat wearing a familiar shape. And he'd made it his mission to convince the pack to see the same thing.
She wanted to hate him. It made sense. He was actively working to destroy everything she was trying to build here. But her body didn't care about his campaign against her coven. Her body just wanted–him.
Heat rose in her chest, fury and want tangled so tight she couldn’t separate them.
"Willow?" Lily's voice came from somewhere distant. "You okay?"
Willow blinked. Realized she'd been frozen over the same box, her fingers pressed white against the cardboard. She forced herself to relax, to breathe, to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear even though she'd pinned it up an hour ago.
"Fine. Just running through the prep list."
"That's your 'I'm not fine but I don't want to talk about it' face," Faith said. No judgment, just gentle observation.
"It's my 'I'm focused on pastries' face. They're very similar."
Nobody pushed. Faith's eyes went soft with understanding. Lily reached over and squeezed Willow's wrist once, brief and grounding. Even Mara's pen paused before scratching back into motion.
They knew. They'd watched the whole ugly situation unfold.
Ryker's public campaign against the witches, Willow biting her tongue at every meeting while he questioned their loyalty, the impossible tension whenever they shared a room.
They knew she couldn't afford to fight back, not when proving the witches were peaceful and cooperative was the only thing keeping her coven on the island.
Any conflict would just feed his narrative.
So she swallowed her anger. Smiled when she wanted to snarl. Let him land blow after blow while she stood there and took it, because fighting back would cost her people their sanctuary.
These women understood that. They didn't push her to defend herself. They just kept showing up.
Willow finished boxing the pastries, her hands steadier now. These women had chosen her. Chosen to trust her, to include her, and to treat her like she belonged. After everything she'd done in her mother's name, it was more than she deserved.
Maybe that was why she kept trying. Showing up before dawn, baking and boxing pastries for the pack, and walking into rooms where a man who was actively trying to destroy her would scent exactly how much she wanted him. The humiliation was just another price she paid for her coven's safety.
She had something to prove. To the pack, who still watched her with wary eyes.
To herself, because she wanted to do whatever it took to outlast his campaign through sheer stubborn competence.
And to the ghost of the woman she'd been three months ago, the one who'd believed every lie her mother told.
She would not give him any more ammunition or rise to the bait he constantly flung at her. She would be so unfailingly professional, so undeniably useful, that even his suspicion couldn't touch her.
By eight-thirty, eight boxes of pastries were stacked by the door and the women had bundled back into their coats. Morning had shifted to a bright shade of grey, fog blanketing the cobblestone street and softening the weathered cedar of the distillery across the way.
"Ready?" Faith asked. The question held layers.
Willow pulled on her coat and wrapped a scarf around her throat. Her reflection in the window showed hair escaping its clip, flour on her cheek (which she brushed away), and exhaustion bruising the skin beneath her eyes.
She looked like herself and she was learning to be okay with that.
The cold hit the moment she stepped outside, sharp and wet, smelling of salt and pine. Her breath puffed white. Lily fell into step beside her, their shoulders almost touching, and Faith flanked her other side. Sage and Mara followed close behind, the group moving together through the fog.
Their positions weren't accidental. Faith's hand brushed Willow's arm as they crossed the street. Lily walked close enough that Willow could feel her body heat through layers of wool. They made a formation. A statement.
She's with us.
The distillery rose ahead, copper accents dulled in the cloudy morning light.
Figures moved inside where the pack was already gathering, hearing voices she couldn't quite make out.
Ryker would be in there, ready with another pointed comment about witch loyalty or her mother's shadow.
And her body would betray her the way it always did, and he'd smell it, and she'd have to stand there and take it while her blood boiled beneath her professional smile.
But she wasn't going to hide. She'd stood against her own mother in front of the entire pack.
She'd chosen Lily's life over everything she'd been taught to believe, and she'd watched her certainties crumble, and she'd survived it.
She could make it through one more meeting.
One more morning of strategic silence while one man tried to convince the pack she didn't belong.
One day though, when her coven's place here was secure, she'd make him choke on every word he'd said against them.