Chapter 6
Chapter Six
Day three of captivity, and Alessandro was starting to understand why dragons historically lived in caves.
Caves were quiet. Caves didn’t have customers. Caves didn’t have elderly selkies who wanted to discuss their grandchildren’s career prospects while Alessandro was trying to review a merger contract worth forty million dollars.
“And Finnegan, that’s my youngest grandson, he’s just finished his accounting certification. Very eligible. Stable income. Do you know any nice young dragons looking to settle down?”
Alessandro stared at Mr. Callahan across the bakery counter. The old man had been talking for fifteen minutes. The merger contract remained unreviewed. Marina’s amusement drifted in from the kitchen: warm and unhelpful.
“I don’t.” He kept his voice level.
“Pity. He’s a lovely boy. Very good with numbers.” Mr. Callahan leaned closer, smelling of salt water and pipe tobacco. “Between you and me, he’s been lonely since his pod relocated to Nova Scotia. A dragon might be just the thing to spice up his life.”
“I’m not a matchmaking service.”
“No, no, of course not. But you must know people. Important people. Manhattan people.”
I know people who would eat your grandson for breakfast and pick their teeth with his accounting certification.
“I’ll keep him in mind,” Alessandro said, because the alternative was setting something on fire, and he was beginning to understand that Marina had very strong feelings about fire safety. The town had already discussed his near-immolation of her stove at length. Twice. In front of him.
Mr. Callahan beamed like Alessandro had promised to personally deliver his grandson to a dragon’s lair. “Wonderful! I knew you’d come around. Very reasonable fellow, for a dragon.”
I haven’t come around to anything. I’m being held hostage by social convention.
The bell chimed. Another customer. A brownie this time, the fae kind, three feet tall with moss-green skin and eyes like polished acorns. She marched up to the counter with the determination of a small army.
“You’re the dragon,” she announced.
“I’m aware.”
“My niece is looking for a husband. She’s a very talented herbalist. Excellent teeth. Can I give her your number?”
Alessandro’s control, already fraying, snapped.
“No,” he said, and the word came out with more heat than he intended—literal heat, smoke curling at the edges of his breath.
“You cannot give her my number. You cannot set me up with your niece, your grandson, your second cousin twice removed, or anyone else in this town. I am not available. I am not interested. I am trying to work, and if one more person interrupts me to discuss my romantic prospects, I will—”
He stopped.
Disappointment landed in his chest, cold and sharp, and it wasn’t his own.
Marina stood in the kitchen doorway, flour on her apron, her expression carefully neutral.
But he could feel what she felt: the sharp sting of secondhand embarrassment, the protective surge toward her customers, the quiet anger at being put in this position.
She hadn’t moved. Hadn’t said a word. That was worse than if she’d shouted.
The brownie’s lower lip trembled.
You absolute idiot.
“I apologize,” Alessandro said stiffly. “That was uncalled for.”
“Mrs. Thornberry,” Marina said, stepping forward with a grace that made his presence feel even more oafish, “why don’t you try one of the new honey cakes? On the house. I think you’ll love them.”
She guided the brownie away with gentle hands and a warmer smile than Alessandro had ever seen directed at him. Her fury pulsed through the bond—not the explosive kind, but the banked, patient kind. Worse.
He was in trouble.
The shop cleared within minutes. Whether that was coincidence or supernatural gossip moving at the speed of light, Alessandro couldn’t be sure. Marina flipped the CLOSED sign early, and he felt her decision like a door slamming shut.
“Outside,” she said. “Now.”
He followed her through the back door into the narrow alley behind the bakery. Salt air hit his face. Seagulls cried overhead, their calls mocking. Marina turned on him with fire in her eyes, fire that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with the quiet woman he’d underestimated.
“Those people are my community.”
“I know.”
“They’re my neighbors. My friends. The people who kept this bakery alive after my grandmother died.
” Her voice shook, just slightly, but he felt the earthquake beneath it.
“Mrs. Thornberry brought me soup every day for a month after the funeral. Mr. Callahan fixed my oven for free when it broke last winter. These aren’t just customers, Alessandro. They’re family.”
“I understand that.”
“Do you?” She stepped closer. He could smell flour and vanilla and underneath it, the salt-and-seaweed scent that was distinctly hers.
“Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you think you’re too good for them.
Too important. Too busy with your Manhattan contracts to treat people like human beings. ”
He was Alessandro Draven. He’d been insulted by kings of hell and board members alike. A small-town baker’s opinion shouldn’t have registered at all.
But it did.
“I’m not…” He stopped. Tried again. “I’m not good at this. Small talk. Friendly conversation. People wanting to know things about me.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“I know it’s not.” He ran a hand through his hair, frustration bleeding in both directions between them. “I know. I just… I’ve spent my entire life building walls, Marina. Keeping people at a distance. It’s how I survive.”
She was quiet. Her anger shifted, making room for something else. He recognized it: the particular look of one isolated person seeing another.
“You will be polite.” Her chin lifted. “Or you will be silent. Those are your options.”
“I’m not some trained pet…”
“No.” Her voice cut through his like a blade through butter.
“You’re a guest in my home and my business.
You eat my food. You sleep on my couch. You use my wifi to do whatever very important work you think is more valuable than basic human decency.
” She crossed her arms, and he noticed for the first time that her hands were trembling.
This confrontation was costing her something.
She was shy, deeply, genuinely shy, and she was doing it anyway.
“Act like a guest. Or find somewhere else to stay.”
They both knew he couldn’t. The bond wouldn’t let him.
But that wasn’t why he nodded.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ll do better.”
Surprise played across her face. She’d expected him to fight harder.
She’s not a pushover. She’s just quiet.
“Good,” she said, her shoulders dropping slightly, the tension easing. “Now help me restock the flour. We’re running low.”
The afternoon passed in uneasy truce.
Alessandro forced himself to nod at customers.
To answer questions with something other than monosyllables.
When a vampire asked about his work, he actually explained: briefly, without detail, but explained.
When Mrs. Thornberry returned (because of course she returned, these people had no concept of holding grudges), he apologized again. Properly this time.
She patted his hand and told him her niece was still available if he changed his mind.
Progress.
His phone buzzed at three. He glanced at the screen and felt his blood go cold.
Malachar.
“I need to take this,” he told Marina.
She nodded, not looking up from the register. But her attention sharpened; he could feel it like a blade being drawn.
He stepped into the kitchen, putting as much distance between them as the bond allowed. Forty feet. The ache in his skull started immediately: a low-grade headache that would become agony if he pushed further.
“Alessandro.” Malachar’s voice was warm as ever. Warm like a hearth fire. Warm like something designed to make you forget what it could burn. “I’ve been worried. You haven’t returned my calls.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“So I’ve heard. A mating bond, of all things. How… unexpected.”
How do you know about that? He didn’t ask. Malachar always knew. That was the point of him: the help you never asked for, arriving exactly when you were too desperate to refuse it.
“It’s temporary. A month at most.”
“Of course. These things usually are.” A pause. Calculated, like everything Malachar did. “But I’m concerned, Alessandro. You went to Sweetwater Cove to find the original contract. To break the curse. And instead you’ve gotten yourself tangled up with a selkie baker.”
“The situations are unrelated.”
“Are they?” Malachar’s voice dropped, taking on that particular quality that always made Alessandro feel like prey. “The Pearls were there when the curse was cast. Did you know that? Their family has been in Sweetwater Cove as long as yours has been suffering.”
Alessandro’s hand tightened on the phone. He knew. The journal entry he’d read on the jet had named them: a thin lead, the only one he’d had.
“What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything. I’m offering information. If you’d let me help…”
“I don’t need your help.”
“Don’t you?” The warmth was gone now. Something older looked out through Malachar’s voice, something that smelled like smoke and copper and very old blood.
“You’ve been searching for ten years, Alessandro.
Your grandfather searched for forty. Your great-grandfather for sixty.
None of you have found the answer. And here I am, offering it freely, and you keep refusing. ”
“Because I don’t trust you.”
Silence. When Malachar spoke again, his voice was perfectly pleasant. That was the worst part. The pleasantness never cracked.
“That hurts, Alessandro. After everything I’ve done for your family.”
“What exactly have you done? Besides watch us suffer for two centuries?”
The line went dead.
Alessandro stood in the kitchen, phone in hand, pulse racing. Marina’s concern reached across the room to him; she couldn’t have heard the call, but his fear came through plain as a struck bell.
She appeared in the doorway a moment later, wiping flour from her hands. Her expression was careful. Not pushing. Just… present.
“Alessandro?”
“It’s nothing.”
“That wasn’t nothing. I felt…” She stopped. Took a breath. “You felt terrified.”
He should lie. Should deflect. Should maintain the walls he’d spent a lifetime building. But she’d already felt the truth. That was the problem with this bond: it made hiding impossible.
“There’s a demon,” he said slowly. “Malachar. He’s been… involved with my family for generations. Helping us, supposedly. But I’ve never trusted him, and lately—”
He broke off. How could he explain the creeping certainty that Malachar wasn’t helping at all? That the demon’s assistance had some purpose Alessandro couldn’t see?
“You think he’s dangerous,” Marina said.
“I think he’s something. I just don’t know what.”
She processed this, weighing his words, measuring his fear. Her deliberation came through clear, the careful way she weighed whether to push or let it go.
“You don’t have to tell me more.” She met his eyes. “But if you want to… I’ll listen.”
She turned and went back to the counter.
Alessandro stood alone in the kitchen, surrounded by the smell of bread and sugar, and felt a crack form in his defenses. Not much. Just a fissure where there’d been solid wall.
At closing time, she brought him coffee.
Black, with two sugars. Exactly how he liked it.
He stared at the cup like it was a foreign artifact. “How did you know?”
“I pay attention.” She shrugged, but a faint blush colored her cheeks. “You make a face when there’s too much milk.”
“I don’t make faces.”
“You make many faces. You just don’t know you’re making them.” She nodded toward the coffee. “Drink it before it gets cold.”
He took the cup. The first sip was perfect: strong and sweet and exactly right.
“Thank you,” he said, and meant it in a way he hadn’t meant anything in a very long time.
They closed the shop together. He stacked chairs while she wiped down tables.
She swept while he counted the register; not because she’d asked, but because he’d noticed the receipts piling up and the way her shoulders slumped when she looked at them.
Her surprise at the help rolled over him.
Then gratitude. Then confusion about why he was suddenly acting like a person instead of a natural disaster in a designer suit.
He couldn’t explain it either.
They worked in silence, but it wasn’t hostile anymore. It was almost comfortable.
When the last light was switched off and the door was locked, Marina turned to look at him. Flour still dusted her hair. Exhaustion lined her face. But she was smiling, small and private, like she didn’t quite mean for him to see it.
“You did better today,” she said. “After the Mrs. Thornberry incident.”
“The bar was low.”
“It was. You still cleared it.”
Warmth reached him from her side of the connection. Appreciation. The beginning of respect.
They stood there in the darkened bakery, surrounded by the smell of bread and the silence of evening. She looked at him. He looked at her.
And for just a moment, twenty-five days didn’t seem like nearly enough.
They both looked away at the same time.
“Goodnight, Alessandro.”
“Goodnight, Marina.”
She headed for the stairs. He settled onto the too-small couch, still feeling the warmth of her smile through the connection between them.
Outside, his phone sat dark and silent in his pocket. Malachar’s number, deleted without reading. But the demon’s words echoed anyway, circling like vultures in his mind.
The Pearls were there when the curse was cast.
He looked toward the ceiling, toward where Marina was probably brushing her teeth, humming something off-key, completely unaware of the history tangled between their families.
Tomorrow, he’d think about what that meant.
Tonight, he was just tired.
The couch was still too small. His feet still hung over the armrest. But the apartment smelled like cinnamon and seaweed, and somewhere above him the water pipes groaned as Marina turned off the faucet.
He was asleep before she finished.