11. Rafe
RAFE
Freya Bloom had sent him to Isla's door, and he didn’t know her well, but he planned to hold it against her for a long time.
He'd gone to the apothecary that afternoon about the static discharge in the hull wood, the way Silas had suggested.
Freya had listened, asked three precise questions about the type of lightning and how long the charge had sat in the timber, and then told him that residual storm-fae energy in cured wood wasn't something she could diagnose secondhand.
"You need the source," she'd said, already turning back to the row of tincture bottles she'd been labeling.
Copper-auburn hair catching the shop light, green eyes not remotely sympathetic to his discomfort.
"Isla can tell you whether the charge left anything in the grain that'll cause problems down the line. Nobody else can."
"You can't test it here?"
"I can test for herbal toxins, mineral contamination, and about forty kinds of curse residue.
Storm-fae energy signatures aren't herbs, minerals, or curses.
" She'd set a bottle down and looked at him.
"She's the only stormcaller I've ever met.
If her magic is sitting in your wood, she's the one who'll know. "
So here he was, walking the western path at half past five with a six-inch section of hull plank under his arm and the sky doing something ugly to the northwest.
He'd noticed the weather building on the walk over.
The clouds had stacked fast along the ridge, darker than what the afternoon forecast warranted, and the wind had picked up a particular pitch that he'd learned to pay attention to after years on water.
This wasn't fae weather. It was the ordinary kind, a late-spring pressure front dropping hard off the mountains, and it was going to be bad.
Isla's cottage came into view through the birch trees, the lake behind it already turning rough, whitecaps showing where there'd been glass an hour ago. The south-facing shutter was loose. He could see it from thirty yards out, swinging in the gusts, the latch either broken or not seated properly.
She came around the side of the cottage with a coil of rope over one shoulder and stopped when she saw him.
"No," she said.
"Your south shutter's loose."
"I'm aware of that. I'm handling it."
"With what, that rope?"
"With the hardware I've been meaning to replace for two weeks." She shifted the coil on her shoulder. "Why are you here, Lupeus?"
He held up the hull plank. "Freya sent me. She says you're the only one who can tell me whether your lightning left something in my wood that's going to be a problem."
Isla looked at the plank, then at the sky, then back at him. The wind snapped her hair across her face and she pushed it back with her free hand.
"Your timing is remarkable."
"I've been told."
The first gust hit hard enough to slam the loose shutter flat against the cottage wall. Isla flinched at the sound, dropped the rope coil, and moved toward it. Rafe set the plank against the porch rail and followed her.
"I didn't ask for help."
"The wind's about to rip that shutter off its hinge." He reached past her and caught the frame before the next gust could take it. The wood was old, the iron hinge pin half rusted, and the latch plate had pulled two of its screws loose from the sill. "You have a hand drill inside?"
"Under the sink."
"Get it."
She went. He held the shutter against the frame with both hands and the wind tried to take it from him and he let it try, bracing with his shoulder, feeling the storm pressure build across the lake surface behind him.
She came back with the drill and a tin of mixed screws and they worked the latch plate together in the narrow space between the shutter and the sill, her fingers finding the screw holes while he held the frame steady.
Her shoulder pressed against his chest when she leaned in to set the first screw.
He could smell her, the scent that had been sitting at the back of his throat since the first night, and this close it was specific enough to make his jaw tighten.
She drove the screw in, checked the seat, moved to the second one.
Her knuckles brushed the inside of his wrist where he gripped the frame and despite the chaos of the storm rolling in, Rafe felt himself harden as his wolf whined.
They got the south shutter secured and moved to the lake-facing windows, where the latches were holding but the frames were rattling in the gusts.
She handed him a wedge of folded cloth to jam under the sill while she tightened the interior bolt, and they worked around each other in the tight space below the windowsill.
The rain hit when they were finishing the last window. Not gradual but a wall of water driven sideways off the lake, cold and hard enough to sting. They both got inside and pulled the door shut and stood in her kitchen dripping on the stone floor while the wind screamed across the roof.
"Well," she said. "You're stuck."
"Apparently."
The power was already out. The cottage sat in gray storm light, the windows rattling in their frames, the sound of rain on the roof like gravel being poured.
She moved to the counter and found matches, lit the oil lamp on the worktable, and then a candle on the small kitchen table.
The light caught her features, sharp at the cheekbone, softer at the mouth, with her silver-blonde hair dark with rain and plastered to the sides of her neck.
She set the candle between them and sat down.
"Sit," she said. "Unless you want to stand in my kitchen and drip."
He sat. The table was small enough that his knees almost touched hers underneath it. The candle threw their shadows up the walls in long shapes that moved when the wind shook the house.
"The plank's on your porch," he said.
"I'll look at it when the storm passes."
"Freya said you'd be able to feel whether the charge left a signature in the grain."
"Freya's right. Storm-fae lightning isn't the same as natural discharge. If it sat in the wood long enough, it can leave a residual frequency that attracts further strikes." She pulled her wet hair over one shoulder and wrung it out onto the stone floor. "I'll check it. But not tonight."
"Fair enough."
The wind hit the cottage broadside and the lamp flame bent sideways. In the pause after, when the walls stopped shaking and the rain eased back from a roar to a pour, Isla looked at the candle and then at him.
"Someone left a note at my door," she said.
He waited.
"Yesterday, while I was at Corin's. No signature, no envelope.
Three lines about something that happened when I was seventeen.
" She said it the way she said most things, clean and direct, but her hands were flat on the table on either side of the candle.
"Details that nobody in Hollow Oak should have.
Dates. Location. Things that only exist in coast records and harbor filings. "
"What kind of details?"
"The kind that tell me someone went through municipal archives and fae-weather records and followed a trail from there to here." She met his eyes. "Moira confirmed it. The records are public, but pulling them together takes intent. Someone was looking for me specifically."
Rafe's wolf had gone very quiet. "When you say fae-weather records."
"There's an archive. Three institutions maintain it. Two academic, one commercial." She paused. "A trading consortium on the north channel."
He processed that. Trading consortium. North channel. The same territory Malrick had been running for a decade, the same network he used to track competitors, map routes, and build the kind of informational leverage that made him dangerous.
"Did the note threaten you directly?"
"It was subtler than that. The vessel count was wrong. Moira thinks it was deliberate, a way to draw a correction out of me. If I respond, I confirm who I am and where I am."
"Did you respond?"
"I'm talking to you, aren't I?"
The candlelight moved between them. Rain ran down the windows in sheets that turned the dark outside into something depthless. She was watching him with those blue-gray eyes that missed very little, and he could see the question forming before she asked it.
"I’m telling you this because your life is the water. And I assumed this, but now, after telling you, I know I’m right. You know something," she said.
"I know a lot of things. Most of them about river trade and cargo manifests."
"Rafe."
His name sounded different in her voice. Lower, the consonants softer.
"I don't have a name to give you yet," he said. "But I've got someone asking after me on the north channel, and the timing lines up with your note in ways I don't like."
"Someone with access to trade records and fae-weather archives?"
"Someone with access to a lot of things."
She was quiet. The storm filled the silence, wind and rain and the deeper sound of the lake working against the shore outside. The candle burned between them, steady despite the drafts, and in its light her face held the particular stillness of a woman deciding how much further to go.
"My father died in a storm," she said. "On a dock. The boats went down and the town pointed fingers and I ran." She said it like reading from a card, rehearsed, the short version meant to satisfy a question without inviting more. "That's the version in the records. And what’s in that note."
"And the real version?"
Her hands pressed harder against the table. "Longer."
"I'm not going anywhere."
"No." She looked at the rain on the window. "Not tonight, you're not."
The quiet sat between them and he let it.
He sensed the pull of her, the same gravity that had hit him when he'd touched her wrist outside the inn, sharpened now by proximity and low light and the particular intimacy of being trapped in a small space while the world outside made itself unlivable.
His wolf was paying close attention and Rafe was paying close attention to his wolf and the entire arrangement was becoming untenable.
He wanted to tell her. The words were right there, already built, already true. You're my mate. I knew it the moment I touched you. Everything since then has been me trying not to corner you with it.
But she'd just told him someone was pulling her past out of filing cabinets and leaving it at her door, and what she needed right now was someone who believed her, not someone adding another claim to the list of things closing in on her.
Even though he figured she may have similar impulses, especially since she felt the need to share something about her. Not too personal, but enough.
"I'll find out who left the note," he said instead. "I've got people asking the right questions already. If this connects to the name I'm tracking, I'll know soon."
"And if it does?"
"Then we figure out why."
"We?"
"You'd rather deal with it alone?"
"I've been dealing with things alone for a while."
"How's that been working?"
She almost smiled. It didn't quite make it to her mouth but it showed up somewhere around her eyes, and he caught it in the candlelight making it hard to ignore his growing attraction to her.
The cottage had gotten cold. The rain and wind had pulled the temperature down fast, and without power the only heat source was the cast-iron woodstove in the corner near the hearth. He'd noticed the stacked wood beside it when they'd come in. Birch and pine, split small, dry.
"Your stove," he said, and pushed back from the table.
"You don't have to."
"You're shivering."
"I'm wet."
"Yeah, and a fire fixes both." He crossed to the stove and crouched in front of it and opened the door and started building a base with the birch, because the alternative was staying at that table with the candle playing light across her collarbones and her voice low and honest in the dark, and if he sat there another five minutes he was going to reach across and kiss her.
He struck the match and held it to the kindling and watched the flame catch and build.