Chapter 23 Mira
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Mira
The bookshop was coming back to life.
I stood in the center of the main room and turned in a slow circle, letting the potential of the space settle into my chest. The last time I’d been here, I’d been stepping over ash and charred paperbacks with Solomon beside me, mourning a life that Hudson had burned to the ground.
Now I was planning paint colors.
Funny how things will get worse first before it gets better.
Solomon was already on the far wall, roller in hand, laying down the first coat of warm cream I’d picked. He painted with no drips, no missed spots, no wasted motion.
His shirt sleeves were rolled to his elbows, his forearms streaked with paint, and the scar on his face caught the light every time he reached up.
The bond pulsed in my chest. One heartbeat that wasn’t mine.
Soon there would be two. Then three.
I shut that thought down before it could gain traction.
I’m planning to save dignity and not act as if I’m a dog in heat.
The front door swung open and Percy walked in carrying two brown bags that smelled so good my stomach audibly growled.
“That better not be your cooking,” I said.
He pressed a hand to his chest. “Your lack of faith wounds me.” Then he grinned. “I bought it from the diner. The waitress asked if I wanted my usual, and by usual she meant the five-item breakfast combo I’ve been ordering three times a week for a year.”
“You order breakfast for lunch?”
“Time is a construct. Pancakes are eternal.”
He set the bags on the makeshift table we’d assembled from sawhorses and a plywood sheet. Lucian appeared behind him in the doorway, uniform still on, folder tucked under one arm. He scanned the room with a critical eye.
“The window trim needs caulking,” he said.
“Hello to you too.” I pulled a container from the bag. “Nice to see you. Love what you’ve done with the brooding today.”
“The trim will leak.”
“And good morning.”
His mouth twitched. He crossed to the table and set the folder down, and I caught the logo of the town’s property management office on the cover. I’d seen that folder before. Had been avoiding asking about it for three days.
“You bought the building,” I said.
He didn’t blink. “I purchased the lease.”
“The entire lease. For the whole building.”
“The property was undervalued. It was a sound investment.”
“With what money, Lucian?” I crossed my arms. “Because I’ve done the math on a firefighter captain’s salary, and it does not cover downtown commercial real estate.”
Percy bit into a pancake and watched us with the fascination of a man who’d found front-row seats to his favorite show.
Lucian’s expression remained perfectly neutral. “I have additional resources.”
“Additional resources.” I let the words sit. “You mean the ancient kingdom you rule? The one with a palace and, I’m assuming, a treasury?”
“The Valdris treasury is managed by a council-appointed steward. My personal holdings are separate.”
“Your personal holdings.” I stared at him. “So you’ve been converting Veyndral assets into human currency. For how long? What’s the exchange rate on magical wolf gold? Does it get taxed? Are you committing tax evasion?”
Percy choked on his pancake.
“There is no magical wolf gold,” Lucian said.
“But there is a treasury.”
“There are gemstones. Certain minerals that don’t exist in the human realm and command significant value when sold to specialty collectors.” He paused. “It’s all quite legitimate.”
“You’re an ancient royal selling interdimensional rocks on the black market to buy me a building.”
“The market is not black. It’s niche.”
“I can’t believe I’m dating a rich royal show-off with a niche rock empire.”
“I prefer the term ‘diversified investment portfolio.’“
Solomon snorted from the far wall. An actual, audible snort. From Solomon. Percy looked at me as if saying do you realize what you just achieved?
Before I could press further, the radio on Lucian’s belt crackled. Static, then a voice I recognized from the station dispatching a call.
Lucian’s demeanor shifted in a blink. The teasing evaporated, replaced by the focused calm of a man who’d commanded rooms for centuries.
“Percy.” One word. An order.
Percy was already on his feet, pancake abandoned with focused intensity. He caught my eye and winked, but his jaw was set.
“Go.” I waved them toward the door. “Both of you. Be heroic. Try not to get singed.”
Lucian paused at the threshold. His eyes found mine and held, and through the bond I felt the reluctance. The pull to stay. The automatic calculation of leaving me with only one guard.
“Solomon’s here,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
He nodded once. Then he was gone, Percy’s boots hammering the sidewalk behind him, and the truck roared to life down the block.
The bookshop settled into quiet.
Solomon’s roller kept moving. Steady strokes, top to bottom, the wet sound of paint on drywall filling the space their absence had created.
“So.” I turned to face him. “It’s just us.”
“It is.”
“And a lot of empty wall.”
He glanced over his shoulder. Those pale silver eyes found mine, assessed, returned to the wall. “The cream is a good base. What were you thinking for the accent?”
I’d been thinking about this all week, actually. The old shop had been functional. Safe, practical, forgettable.
I didn’t want forgettable anymore.
“Teal,” I said. “For the reading nook wall. And I want the romance section to have its own alcove. Not just a shelf. A whole recessed nook with a bench seat and built-in lighting.”
Solomon set down the roller. Turned fully to face me. His expression was unreadable, but his eyes had the particular intensity they carried when he was calculating.
“The east wall could accommodate a recess,” he said. “Three feet deep, seven wide. We’d need to box out the framing and add a header for the load.”
“And the ceiling. Can we expose the beams? I want it to feel open, not boxed in. The old shop had these low ceilings that made me feel trapped.”
His gaze lifted to the ceiling, then returned to me. “Removing the drop panels would expose the original timber. It would need sanding and sealing, but the beams are in good condition.”
Every outrageous idea I threw at him, he caught and made it work.
“You’re good at this,” I said.
“Construction is straightforward.”
“I don’t mean the construction.” I picked up a brush from the tray he’d set up and dipped it into the cream paint. “I mean hearing what someone wants and figuring out how to give it to them.”
He went quiet. The silence lasted three strokes of my brush before he spoke.
“You wanted a reading nook in the corner of the first shop. Cushions from a garage sale, a blanket you’d had since college.
” His voice was low, steady. “The register stuck on seven and you’d hit it with the side of your palm to unstick it.
Your favorite mug was behind the counter, the blue one with the chipped handle. ”
My brush stilled against the wall.
“You organized the romance section by heat level, not author name. The top shelf was what you called ‘light and fluffy.’ The bottom shelf was...” He paused. “You described it as ‘absolutely unhinged.’“
I turned to look at him. He was facing the wall, roller moving in precise strokes.
“You remember all of that?”
“I remember everything about you.” He said it the same way he’d said it the first time, with certainty, no exaggeration. “Even the things you’ve forgotten.”
My chest ached. The bond pulsed with a second thread. Faint, waiting, not yet sealed but present. Solomon’s frequency, reaching for me the way his silence always did.
I dipped my brush in the paint. Flicked it at him.
The cream splattered across his shoulder and neck. He went completely still. The roller stopped mid-stroke.
I bit my lip. “Oops.”
Solomon turned his head slowly.
“Did you just...”
“It slipped.”
He set the roller down. Picked up his own brush from the tray. His movements were measured.
“Solomon.” I took a step back, grinning, hands up. “Let’s be reasonable about this.”
“I’m always reasonable.”
“You’re holding a paintbrush with murder eyes.”
He advanced. I retreated. The empty bookshop became our arena, the drop cloths crinkling under our feet as I circled behind the sawhorse table.
“If you throw that at me,” I warned, pointing my brush at him, “I will escalate. And I fight dirty.”
“I know.”
He flicked the brush.
Cream paint arced across the space and caught me on my collarbone, a stripe that dripped down toward the neckline of my tank top. I gasped, partly from the cold of it, mostly from the shock that Solomon, three-word Solomon, Mr. Efficiency, had actually retaliated.
“Oh, it’s on.”
The next ten minutes were chaos.
I scrambled for the paint tray, dipped my whole hand in, and smeared it across his shirt when he caught my wrist.
The moment shifted.
His fingers closed around my wrist and my momentum carried me into his chest. Wet paint pressed between us, soaking through fabric, and the laughter in my throat died as his body registered against mine.
Neither of us moved.
His grip on my wrist loosened but didn’t release. My painted hand was pressed flat against his chest, fingers splayed over his heartbeat, and I could feel it hammering.
“Mira.” My name in his mouth. Low, rough, a warning and a request in the same breath.
“Don’t tell me to stop.”
I tilted my face up. Those silver eyes were burning.
Not with the controlled intensity I’d come to expect from him. With hunger.
“I wasn’t going to.”
“Good.”
I rose on my toes and kissed him.
His hands found my waist and lifted me off the ground in a single motion. My legs wrapped around him and his mouth consumed mine with a desperation that stole my breath.
This was need. Primal, ferocious, centuries of patience shattering.