Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Marina woke to the smell of bread rising.
For a disoriented moment, she thought she was back in her childhood: Nana already at work in the kitchen below, the rhythm of early morning baking as steady as a heartbeat.
Then the present reassembled itself: her apartment, her bakery, day twelve of her accidental bond with a dragon who had apparently learned her schedule.
The ovens were already warming. She could hear them through the floor, the particular hum they made when heating to the right temperature, a sound she knew as intimately as her own breathing.
Alessandro had started the ovens.
She found him in the kitchen, laptop open on the counter but forgotten, his attention on the sourdough starter she’d been nurturing for three years.
“You fed it,” she said.
He looked up. In the grey pre-dawn light, he looked softer somehow, less polished, more human. “You were running late. The starter needed attention at four.”
“I wasn’t running late. I woke at four-oh-three.”
“That’s three minutes late.”
“That’s a perfectly reasonable variation.”
“Your schedule said four. It’s now four-fifteen. The starter needed feeding at four.” He gestured to the starter, now bubbling happily in its jar. “I followed your notes.”
Marina stared at the jar, then at him.
“You read my notes.”
“They were detailed. I appreciate detailed notes.”
His satisfaction at having done something right came through the bond, warm and unguarded.
Marina filed the discovery away with a kind of dread: somewhere under all that Italian tailoring lived a man who got sincerely happy about a well-annotated sourdough schedule.
It was the most dangerous thing she’d learned about him yet.
Sixteen days, she thought. Only sixteen more days.
The countdown was supposed to be a railing, an exit clearly marked.
But the reminder felt hollow now, and instead of relief it dredged up something inconvenient.
She’d caught herself that morning thinking about her pelt, folded in its cedar trunk under sweaters she never wore, and how long sealskin kept before it forgot the shape of you.
She moved to the counter, acutely conscious of the space between them. Two feet. Less, as she reached past him for the flour bin. Close enough to feel the heat radiating from his skin, the warmth that never quite banked even at rest.
He turned toward her at the same moment she looked up.
Their eyes met.
The bond hummed between them, not with words, but with want. Awareness. The kind of desire that had been building for twelve days and no longer pretended to be anything else.
Neither of them looked away.
Through the connection, his hunger pressed against her: carefully controlled, rigidly contained, but unmistakable. He wanted her. Had wanted her for days. Maybe longer.
And her wanting echoed his own.
The moment stretched.
“Marina—” he started.
The bell over the door chimed.
“GOOD MORNING, LOVEBIRDS!”
Bea’s voice cut through like a knife. Marina jerked back, nearly knocking over the flour bin. Alessandro’s expression shuttered so fast she might have imagined the vulnerability beneath.
“You have the worst timing,” Marina muttered as Bea swept into the kitchen.
“On the contrary, my timing is excellent. I prevented something you’d regret.”
“I wouldn’t have…”
“Your aura was so pink it was practically fuchsia.” Bea helped herself to yesterday’s leftover scones. “And his was gold. Do you know how rare gold is? It means he’s completely besotted.”
“Besotted isn’t a real…”
“It’s absolutely a real word and a real condition and you’re both suffering from it.” Bea bit into a scone with pointed satisfaction. “Speaking of which, you’re falling for him.”
“I am not.”
“Babe. Your aura is literally pink right now. It’s been pink for days. You’re about thirty seconds from full-on magenta.”
Alessandro, wisely, had retreated to the far side of the kitchen with his laptop. His acute discomfort radiated across the kitchen, tangled with a genuine curiosity about where this conversation was going.
“The bond is affecting my aura,” Marina tried. “It’s not me. It’s the magic.”
“Sure.” Bea didn’t sound convinced. “And the way you look at him when he’s not watching? That’s magic too?”
“I don’t look at him.”
“You look at him constantly. Estelle has a running tally. She’s up to forty-seven longing glances since Tuesday.”
“Estelle doesn’t even…”
“She has sources everywhere. You know this.” Bea polished off the scone. “Just admit you have feelings. It’s not a crime. He clearly has feelings too.”
A tug behind her sternum. Alessandro’s reaction: the emotional equivalent of leaning forward in his chair.
“Even if I did,” she said slowly, “this ends in sixteen days. The bond breaks. He goes back to Manhattan. I stay here. That’s how this works.”
“That’s how it has to work,” Bea corrected. “Not how it works. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“Of course. One is fate. The other is choice.” Bea patted her cheek. “Something to think about. I’ll see you tonight for wine. We have much to discuss.”
She swept out as dramatically as she’d arrived.
In the silence that followed, Marina didn’t look at Alessandro.
But she felt him looking at her.
The curse lead came that afternoon, nestled between a rush order for wedding cupcakes and Mrs. Whitmore’s daily scone.
Alessandro had been researching again. He was always researching, laptop open on every surface, papers spreading like kudzu across her kitchen table. She’d learned to work around it, stepping over stacks of printed documents like furniture.
“Marina.” His voice was careful. “Your grandmother’s recipe book. How old is it?”
She looked up from the cupcake batter. “Three generations, at least. Maybe more. Why?”
“Selkie magic is hereditary, yes? Passed down through bloodlines.”
“Yes.”
“And your grandmother was particularly powerful.” It wasn’t a question. He’d done his research. “I’ve found references to selkie families embedding magical knowledge in domestic objects. Recipes. Songs. Quilts.”
“That sounds like folklore.”
“Most folklore has roots in truth.” He turned his laptop to show her a scan of an ancient text. “This scholar documented several cases of selkie magic hidden in recipe books. Counter-spells disguised as cooking instructions. Curse-breaking rituals written as kitchen wisdom.”
Marina set down her piping bag. His excitement hummed against her ribs, the energy of someone who’d finally found a promising lead after years of dead ends.
“You think my grandmother’s recipe book might have something about the curse.”
“I think it’s possible. Your family was in Sweetwater Cove when the curse was cast. Your grandmother knew things; you’ve said so yourself. She believed in magic, in fate, in solutions that weren’t obvious.”
The recipe book sat on its shelf, leather cover worn smooth by generations of hands. Marina had opened it twice now: once for the Hendersons’ order, once when teaching Alessandro the honey cakes.
Both times had felt like visiting a grave. Like disturbing something that should be left to rest.
But here was Alessandro, watching her with an intensity that made her skin prickle, and she could feel how much this mattered. Not just to him, but to his whole family. Generations of Dravens, living under a curse they’d never asked for, paying for sins they hadn’t committed.
How could she say no to that?
“That book is private.” But her resolve was already crumbling.
“I know.” He stood, crossing to her side of the kitchen with that predator’s grace she’d learned to expect. “I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it might matter. But Marina—if there’s anything in there about breaking the curse, it could save my family.”
The bond tightened like a fist in her chest, his desperation, carefully controlled but undeniable.
“We’d look together,” she said. “I’m not just handing it over.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to.”
She retrieved the book from its shelf. The leather was warm under her fingers, familiar as her own skin.
They sat at the kitchen table, shoulders almost touching, and began to read.
The recipes were exactly as Marina remembered: honey cakes, sourdough bread, the elaborate Sunday roast her grandmother had made for special occasions.
Notes in the margins about substitutions and improvements.
Drawings of flowers and herbs that weren’t quite realistic but weren’t quite fantastical either.
“These measurements don’t make sense,” Alessandro said, pointing to a recipe for “Heartbreak Bread.” “A cup of moonlight. Three drops of dragon’s tears. One verse of selkie song.”
Marina stared at the page. She’d seen this recipe before, had flipped past it dozens of times as a child, assuming it was one of her grandmother’s eccentricities.
“Moonlight isn’t an ingredient.”
“No.” Alessandro lowered his voice. “It’s a magical component. So are dragon’s tears. And selkie song.”
“You’re saying this is a spell.”
“I’m saying this is a spell disguised as a recipe.” His finger traced the instructions. “Look at the method. ‘Mix under the waning moon. Speak the words three times. Let rest until the heart releases what it holds.’”
Marina read the words again, her grandmother’s handwriting suddenly unfamiliar.
“My grandmother was eccentric,” she said slowly. “But this is…”
“Deliberate.” Alessandro met her eyes. “Marina, this isn’t folklore. This is practical magic. Hidden in a cookbook because no one would think to look for it there.”
They turned more pages. Found more recipes that didn’t quite make sense: “Forgetting Soup” that called for bitter memories, “Healing Honey” that required tears of joy, “Promise Bread” that needed to be blessed by someone who’d broken their word.
And then, near the back of the book, a recipe that made Alessandro’s hand freeze on the page.
“Curse-Breaking Cake,” Marina read aloud. “Ingredients: the blood of the cursed, the tears of the innocent, the song of a seal-woman, the flame of a dragon who loves without claiming.”
Alessandro’s hand was shaking.
“She knew,” he whispered. “Your grandmother knew about the curse.”
“She never said anything to me.”
“Would you have believed her?” His words came out raw, unsteady. “If she’d told you, as a child, that someday you’d meet a dragon who needed your help to break a two-century curse, would you have believed her?”
Marina thought about her grandmother. The knowing looks. The cryptic comments about fate and timing. The way she’d always talked about dragons with a particular warmth that Marina had never understood.
When the dragon comes, she’d written in the book Marina had found after her death, remember what matters.
“She was preparing me,” Marina said. “She knew this would happen.”
“She knew something would happen.” Alessandro’s hand found hers, fingers interlacing with the ease of long practice. “She left you the tools to help when it did.”
They sat there in the evening light, the recipe book open between them, hands clasped over centuries of accumulated magic.
“We need to research this more,” Alessandro said. “Understand what each ingredient actually means. Figure out if it’s really a curse-breaker or just…”
“Hope,” Marina finished. “Something she wrote because she wanted to believe it was possible.”
“Either way, we need to know.”
She nodded. “Together.”
The research went late into the night.
Alessandro pulled books from his luggage: actual physical volumes he’d collected over years of searching, texts on curse-breaking and dragon magic and selkie tradition.
Marina contributed what she knew, the oral history her grandmother had passed down, the songs she remembered from childhood that might have been more than lullabies.
They spread papers across the kitchen table, the living room floor, every flat surface in the small apartment. Coffee cups accumulated.
At one point, Marina looked up from a passage about selkie magic to find Alessandro watching her instead of the book.
“What?”
“Nothing.” But he didn’t look away. “You have flour in your hair.”
“I always have flour in my hair.”
“I know.” His gaze held hers. “I’ve gotten used to it.”
She turned back to the book. Felt him do the same. But the awareness didn’t fade.
Every time their shoulders brushed as they reached for the same reference, the bond sparked. Every time their fingers touched exchanging papers, the connection deepened. The small apartment had never felt smaller, the proximity never more charged.
Sometime around midnight, Marina’s eyes started to close.
“You should sleep,” Alessandro said.
“I’m fine. Keep reading.”
“You’ve been yawning for twenty minutes.”
“I’m interested.”
But her head was heavy, and the couch was soft, and Alessandro’s shoulder was right there…
She didn’t mean to fall asleep. One moment she was listening to him read a passage about the magical properties of selkie song, and the next she was drifting, her head against his arm, the bond humming with contentment.
Alessandro didn’t move.
She surfaced once, sometime later, to the slow realization that she was being carried.
The world tipped gently—his arms under her knees and her shoulders, the cramped couch giving way to the cool dark of the hall.
She could have said put me down. She was a grown woman with functioning legs and a strict no-feelings clause she’d written herself.
She kept her eyes shut and let him carry her anyway. Just this once, she told the part of her that was keeping score.
He laid her on the unmade bed, pulled the blanket to her shoulders, and stood in the doorway longer than a houseguest had any business standing. Through the bond she could feel him not-leaving, his thoughts circling back over the same dark water.
Fifteen days. The number drifted across the tether, his and not hers. And under it, for the first time, something that wasn’t relief. Something that felt like loss. She should have found that alarming. Half-asleep, she filed it under deal with tomorrow and didn’t.
Something else was snagged and circling in him too, worn smooth from handling.
The curse-breaking cake, she was fairly sure; she’d read it aloud herself that afternoon.
The flame of a dragon who loves without claiming.
Dragons claimed, he’d told her once. Dragons hoarded.
She could feel him turning the phrase over and over, baffled, like a man holding a key to a door he couldn’t find.
Marina, unguarded and nearly under, thought she might know where the door was. She just wasn’t ready to say so. Not tonight.
The floor creaked as he finally retreated. She listened to him settle onto the too-small couch, felt him lie awake the way she was lying awake—two people pretending the wall between them meant something.
Fifteen days, she thought. Hers, now. And reached, traitorously, for the warmth on the other side of the bond before she let herself sleep.