Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
Alessandro caught himself smiling at a customer.
Not the polite, professional smile he’d perfected in boardrooms. An actual smile—lopsided and startled and completely unauthorized by the rest of his face.
Mrs. Thornberry had told him a joke about her niece’s herb garden. Something about rosemary and a grumpy gnome. But Marina had laughed, and the sound had done something to Alessandro’s face without his permission.
He retreated to the kitchen immediately.
“You’re spiraling,” Marina said, not looking up from her bread dough. “I can feel it.”
“I smiled at a customer.”
“The horror.”
“Marina.” He gripped the counter edge. “I smiled at Mrs. Thornberry. Voluntarily. Without strategic motivation.”
She did look up then, flour dusting her nose. Her amusement curled around him, warm and fond in a way that made him forget what he’d been worried about.
“You’re becoming a local fixture,” she said. “It happens.”
“It does not happen. I don’t become fixtures. I am temporary. I am passing through.”
“You’ve been here ten days. That’s barely passing through anymore.
” She shaped the dough with sure hands, a rhythm she could probably do in her sleep.
“Mr. Callahan waved at you from across the street yesterday. Mrs. Whitmore saved you the last cinnamon scone. The twins from the potion shop asked if you’d be joining the town’s Yule celebration. ”
“I’m not joining any Yule celebration.”
“They’ve already added your name to the planning committee.” She smiled at his expression of horror. “Also, Mrs. Thornberry stopped trying to set you up. She told me this morning that you’re ‘clearly spoken for.’”
“Spoken for?”
“Her words.” Marina’s lips twitched. “Apparently the whole town has decided you belong to me now. It’s very inconvenient for the single supernaturals who were hoping you’d stick around.”
Alessandro opened his mouth to protest. He didn’t belong to anyone, he was here under duress, this was temporary. And nothing came out.
Because he felt more than Marina’s amusement. Her hope. Fragile and quickly suppressed, but there.
She wanted him to belong to her.
Eighteen days left, he reminded himself. This ends in eighteen days.
But the reminder felt different now. Less like relief and more like a countdown to something he was beginning to dread.
His phone buzzed. David’s name flashed on the screen, the fourth call this morning.
“I should take this.”
Marina nodded, and he stepped out the back door into the alley.
“David.”
“Sir.” His assistant’s voice was tight with barely concealed frustration. “The board meeting you postponed has been rescheduled. Again. They’re asking questions.”
“Let them ask.”
“Sir, with respect, you’ve postponed three meetings and cancelled two client dinners. The partners are concerned.”
Alessandro leaned against the brick wall, salt air filling his lungs. Two weeks ago, those meetings would have been the center of his universe. The firm was his legacy, his proof that the Draven name still meant something despite the curse.
Now they felt like interruptions.
“Tell them I’m handling a personal matter.”
“I’ve been telling them that. They want to know when you’re coming back.”
When. The question Alessandro had been avoiding.
“Soon,” he said, and ended the call before David could press further.
Inside, Marina was waiting with a mixing bowl and an expression that suggested she knew exactly what that conversation had been about.
“Your Manhattan life is calling?”
“My Manhattan life can wait.”
She studied him. He could tell she was reading him (the stress, the guilt, the strange relief at having an excuse to stay) all of it plain on his face, or somewhere deeper.
“I’m making honey cakes today,” she said. “My grandmother’s recipe. If you want to help.”
It wasn’t a question. It was an offering.
Alessandro had learned, over ten days, that Marina communicated through baking. Stress meant cinnamon rolls. Happiness meant elaborate decorated cookies. And grief, the grief she still carried for her grandmother, meant honey cakes.
“I’m a terrible baker.”
“I know. I’ve seen you with fondant. And with croissant dough.
And with that unfortunate incident involving the mixer and the meringue.
” She handed him an apron, the simple blue one she kept for guests, not her grandmother’s embroidered one.
“But honey cakes don’t require delicacy. They require patience.”
“I don’t have patience.”
“I noticed.” She smiled, and his dragon rumbled approval before he could stop it. “I’ll teach you.”
Two hours later, Alessandro understood why dragons historically avoided kitchens.
“You’re over-mixing again,” Marina said, gently removing the bowl from his grip. “Honey cake batter needs a light hand. You’re attacking it like a hostile acquisition.”
“I’m stirring.”
“You’re murdering.” She demonstrated the proper technique: slow, circular motions that incorporated air into the batter. “Like this. Pretend you actually like the batter.”
“I have complicated feelings about the batter.”
She laughed. That sound again, the one that made his dragon stir with something other than the usual restlessness. Her amusement wrapped around him like warm honey.
“Here.” She moved behind him, reaching around to guide his hands on the wooden spoon. The contact sent a jolt through him: her warmth against his back, her hands over his, the scent of vanilla and sea salt that was uniquely Marina.
He stopped breathing.
“Slowly,” she said, her voice closer to his ear than it needed to be. “Let the batter do the work.”
He focused on the bowl. On the movement. On anything except the heat building in his chest.
“Why honey cakes?” he asked, his voice rougher than intended.
Her hands stilled on his.
“They were Nana’s specialty. She made them every Sunday.” Her grief rose between them, the ache she carried always, just beneath the surface. “The recipe’s been in our family for generations. Selkie tradition says the honey sweetens whatever sadness you’re carrying.”
“Does it work?”
“Sometimes.” She stepped away, and he immediately missed the warmth. “Sometimes it just means you cry while you bake.”
She turned to check the oven, and Alessandro watched her: the way she moved through the kitchen like it was an extension of herself, the flour dusting her hair, the ease that hid so much pain.
“The curse,” he said suddenly. The words came out before he could stop them. “It’s like that. The sadness that never quite goes away.”
She turned back, waiting.
“My father pretends it isn’t happening,” he continued.
“Loses money every quarter and acts like everything is fine. My mother watches him pretend and says nothing.” Alessandro’s dragon stirred, and he had to breathe carefully to keep it contained.
“I grew up watching the search swallow the people I loved, one by one. I told myself I’d be the one who finally solved it instead of being solved by it. ”
“That sounds exhausting.”
“It is.” He stared at the batter. “I’ve been searching for ten years. I don’t know if I’m getting closer or just running in circles. And the curse keeps accelerating, keeps taking more, and I can’t—”
He stopped, swallowing hard.
Marina crossed the kitchen and pressed a cookie into his hand. Chocolate chip. Still warm from an earlier batch.
“Eat this,” she said.
“I don’t—”
“Eat it.”
He ate it. It was perfect: chewy in the middle, crisp at the edges, the chocolate still melted.
“Better?” she asked.
“How is a cookie supposed to fix…”
“It’s not fixing anything. It’s just a moment where you don’t have to fix anything.” She leaned against the counter beside him. “You can’t solve the curse by being miserable every second. Sometimes you just need a cookie.”
His defenses gave way. Not his control; he’d felt that break before, in boardrooms and courtrooms, always followed by fire and regret. This was softer.
“Your grandmother sounds wise,” he said.
“She was. Is.” Marina caught herself. “That’s the strange thing about grief. Sometimes I forget she’s gone. I’ll see something funny and think, ‘Nana would love that.’ And then I remember.”
Alessandro nodded slowly. He knew that feeling: the phantom presence of someone who should still be there.
His grandfather’s voice in his head, offering advice about contracts.
The way he sometimes reached for his phone to call and share news before remembering there was no one on the other end anymore.
“The recipe book,” he said. “The one you opened yesterday. She wrote that?”
“Every recipe in it. Some are generations old, passed down through the family. Others she created herself.” Marina’s hand went to her grandmother’s locket, a gesture Alessandro had noticed she made whenever she talked about the past. “She always said baking was a form of magic. That you put love into the food and it feeds more than just bodies.”
“That sounds like something my grandfather would have understood. He believed in things too.” Alessandro paused. “Before the curse took that from him.”
“What happened? If you don’t mind me asking.”
It was a fair question. She’d shared her grief with him. Now it was his turn.
“He spent his whole life searching for a cure. Traveled the world. Consulted every specialist, every curse-breaker, every ancient text he could find. And in the end he died broke in a rented walk-up, pawning the last of the family’s heirlooms to keep the lights on.
Nothing but regrets.” Alessandro lowered his voice.
“The last time I saw him, he told me not to make his mistakes. To live my life instead of chasing something that might not exist. And then he asked me to promise I’d break the curse. ”
“That’s contradictory.”
“I know. I’ve spent ten years trying to honor both requests and failing at both.” He laughed, but there was no humor in it. “I don’t know how to live and search at the same time. I don’t know how to stop searching when my whole family is counting on me.”
Marina was quiet. Then, lower: “I told you about my pelt. On the dock. The trunk in my closet, two years untouched.”
He nodded. He remembered every word.
“What I didn’t tell you,” she said, “is that some mornings I stand at that closet with my hand on the latch and still can’t open it.
The sea’s right there. My own skin is right there.
And I just… don’t.” She wrapped her arms around herself.
“So. You, pouring your whole life into a search you can’t stop.
Me, a closet door I can’t open. Different shapes of the same thing.
We’re both experts at avoiding what might actually help. ”
“That sounds exhausting too.”
The corner of her mouth lifted. “Someone told me you just need a cookie.”
He laughed before he could stop himself. Real, surprised, completely unauthorized.
And something between them sang.
Not a metaphor. An actual vibration in his sternum, like a tuning fork struck against bone.
Marina’s eyes widened.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know.”
They stood there, inches apart, the kitchen full of honey cake batter and morning light. He couldn’t stop noticing things: the flour on her nose, her parted lips, the charge in the air between them.
He should step back. Maintain distance. Remember that this was temporary.
Instead, he reached out and brushed a strand of hair from her face.
The touch sparked like lightning between them. She gasped. Her surprise jolted through him, and underneath it, desire that matched his own.
She wants this too.
“Alessandro—”
The timer went off.
They jerked apart like teenagers caught by parents. Marina turned to the oven, face flushed, movements unsteady. Alessandro gripped the counter and tried to remember how to breathe normally.
“The cakes,” she said, her voice too high. “I should check the cakes.”
“Yes. The cakes. Important.”
She pulled the honey cakes from the oven, perfectly golden, filling the kitchen with sweetness, and they spent the next hour decorating in careful silence.
But the bond hummed between them, carrying everything they weren’t saying. Every accidental brush of fingers. Every moment when they stood too close and neither moved away.
That night, Alessandro lay on the couch and stared at the ceiling.
The honey cakes had been delivered to their customer, a selkie family celebrating a daughter’s graduation, who’d looked at Alessandro with knowing smiles that made him uncomfortable.
The bakery had been closed, every surface wiped down, every tray put away in the order Marina had taught him.
She’d gone upstairs with a quiet “goodnight” and a look that said more than words could.
He should be thinking about the curse. About the calls from David he’d ignored, five more since this morning, each voicemail more urgent than the last. About the quarterly projections that would show another catastrophic loss.
About Malachar’s silence, which was somehow more unsettling than his calls.
Instead, he was thinking about Marina’s laugh.
The way it had transformed her face. The way it had made his dragon rumble with something that felt dangerously like contentment. The way the bond had sung when they’d laughed together, really laughed, for the first time.
Eighteen days, he thought.
But this time, the number didn’t bring relief.
He closed his eyes and realized he hadn’t thought about the curse in three hours.
Three hours. The longest stretch in ten years. He’d spent every waking moment, and most of his sleeping ones, focused on breaking the curse, on saving his family, on solving the unsolvable problem that had defined his entire adult life.
And today he’d spent three hours thinking about a cookie. The cookie Marina had pressed into his hand and told him to chew.
This is dangerous, the rational part of his brain insisted. This is exactly what you can’t afford.
And somewhere in the apartment above him, he knew she was doing the same thing.
The cursor on his laptop blinked at him. He closed it.
“You’re in trouble,” he told the empty room.
The empty room did not disagree.