Chapter Thirty-Four Donny
The days were blurring together like a watercolor left out in the rain.
I’d spent most of them curled up in bed, watching the golden Autumn light shift across the walls while the rest of Castor’s Corner prepared for the big Halloween Bash.
Normally, this time of year would have been my busiest—updos, color refreshes, supernatural glam squads on speed dial.
But my salon sat empty.
My appointment book looked like a barren wasteland.
I’d even caught sight of some very unfortunate bangs wandering around town like lost souls.
Bangs I didn’t cut, mind you.
That would’ve been too much to bear.
And yet here I was.
A Witch with a glittering matebond, a house that finally felt like a home again, and the most perfect Bear Shifter boyfriend-slash-live-in-lover-slash-breakfast god anyone could dream up.
I should’ve been doing cartwheels through the moonlight.
Instead, I was a walking ball of guilt and inertia.
Ryan had officially moved in, and if there were a class on how to be the most attentive, devoted, toe-curling mate in the world, he could teach it blindfolded.
I adored him.
I loved waking up tangled in his arms, sneaking steamy kisses between his bakery shifts, and falling asleep to the sound of his bear-sized snores.
But the joy was laced with something else now.
A knot of shame I couldn’t seem to untangle.
“I’ll see ya later, Honey. I’ve got the early shift at the bakery,” Ryan murmured as he leaned down to kiss me awake.
His lips were warm, tasting faintly of cinnamon and sleepy devotion.
“Love you,” I replied softly, nuzzling into his chest.
“I love you too, Donatella.”
He winked at me, pulled the blanket back up to my chin like I was made of spun sugar, and was gone in a swirl of flannel and oven-bound purpose.
And what was I doing?
Hiding under a blanket fort with my hair in a scrunchie that hadn’t seen daylight in three days.
I was an emotional Waffle House. Open, but barely functioning. And mostly, not good for anyone.
I sighed and pulled the covers over my head again.
What else did I have to do?
Every spell I’d tried to help Grandpa Al cross over fizzled out like old soda.
Our seance attempt had been a bust.
No ghostly whispers.
No magical sparkles.
Just me, Evie, and Bella sitting around a table with tea lights and zero results.
I felt useless.
And I hated it.
I was just sinking deeper into my self-pity pit, contemplating whether I should go full recluse and live among the squirrels, when suddenly—BANG!
The bedroom doors burst open with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball, and then—“YAAAAAAH!”
A hairy, cranky, two-and-a-half-foot-tall missile launched itself at my bed.
“GYAAH—GRYN?!”
Before I could react, the covers were torn off me like I was the main course at a magic-infused intervention, and there stood the newly rejuvenated Domovyk—his fur fluffed to perfection, eyes glowing with righteous fury, and his little hands planted on his hips like an angry Soviet auntie.
“DONATELLA ANDREWS,” he bellowed in a voice that quite literally made the entire house shake, “IT IS TIME TO PUT ON YOUR BIG GIRL PANTS AND GET OUT OF THIS BED!”
I blinked, stunned. “Um. Excuse me?”
“You are acting like you have been beaten,” Gryn growled, eyes narrowing. “When you have not even FOUGHT.”
“I have fought,” I mumbled.
“You sulked. You cried. You rewatched every season of Buffy. Thrice! Now get up! And for the love of the Goddess, brush your teeth! TODAY—” he raised his tiny arms, lightning crackling from his fingers like a pissed-off Pikachu “—WE GO TO WAR!”
Then he zapped me.
ZAPPED. ME.
A bolt of pure Domovyk magic hit me square in the stomach, and I screamed—but not in pain.
Oh no.
I screamed because I was suddenly airborne, wrapped in my top sheet like a flying burrito, and hurled into my own shower stall like a high-speed cannonball of Witchy doom.
SLAM. SPLASH.
The water turned on by itself.
Yep, it really did.
Gryn stomped to the edge of the bathroom and shouted over the sound of the water, “Be clean. Be proud. Be dangerous.”
And then he was gone.
I just sat there in the stall, soaking wet, dripping and stunned for full ten seconds. Before I started laughing.
I laughed so hard I wheezed.
That little hairy menace had just shock-launched me back into functioning.
And you know what?
He was right.
I wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot.
Someone had come for my livelihood. They tried to take my reputation, my clients, my confidence. But they forgot one very important detail.
I was a Castor’s Corner Witch.
And now?
I had a mate, a houseful of magic, and a damn Domovyk ready to go full mystical mafia on my behalf.
So yeah. I’d start with clean hair and brushed teeth.
And then?
Then I’d remind this town exactly who the fork they were messing with.