Chapter 13 #2
The bell chimed again as Malachar left twenty minutes later, but the chill didn’t fade.
“You’re overreacting.”
Marina spun from the kitchen window, where she’d been watching Malachar’s rental car disappear down Main Street. “I’m not overreacting. Didn’t you feel that? The way he looked at the recipe book? The way he talked about selkie magic?”
Alessandro set down the mixing bowl he’d been pretending to clean. His frustration pressed against her like a wall: frustration at her, at the situation, at his own inability to reconcile what he knew with what he’d felt.
“Malachar has been helping my family for generations. He’s advised us on investments, legal matters, the curse—”
“The curse that hasn’t been broken in two hundred years? That help?”
“He’s trying. Not everyone who fails is a villain.”
“I’m not saying he’s failing. I’m saying he doesn’t want to succeed.
” Marina crossed to him, lowering her voice even though they were alone.
“Alessandro. He looked at my grandmother’s book like it was something he wanted to destroy.
He talked about selkie magic like it was a threat to him. Didn’t that feel wrong to you?”
He was wrestling with it. The instinctive part of him agreed with her, the dragon-sense that registered danger even when logic said otherwise. But the part that had trusted Malachar for a decade pushed back.
“He’s odd. He’s always been odd. That doesn’t make him dangerous.”
“He said ‘before this curse business started.’ Like he was there. Like he remembers.”
“Figure of speech.”
“Alessandro—”
“Marina.” His hands found her shoulders, warmth radiating through his palms as he tried to calm her. It didn’t work. “I understand you’re concerned. But Malachar has been in my life since I was a child. If he wanted to hurt my family, he’s had countless opportunities.”
“Maybe hurting your family wasn’t the goal. Maybe keeping the curse going was.”
Neither of them spoke.
She felt him flinch. Not because he disagreed, but because some part of him, deep down, had wondered the same thing. But acknowledging that would mean acknowledging that he’d been wrong.
“You don’t know him,” Alessandro said. “You met him once.”
“And you’ve known him for decades without seeing clearly. I’m not the one with complicated feelings about him. I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“What you interpreted.”
“What I know.” She pulled away from his hands. “My grandmother taught me to trust my instincts. And my instincts say that man is dangerous.”
“Your grandmother never met him.”
“No. But she knew something.” Marina’s eyes went to the recipe book. “The Curse-Breaking Cake recipe. The counter-spell hidden in a cookbook. She knew about the curse, Alessandro. She prepared for it. Why would she do that unless she knew something about what, or who, was keeping it in place?”
He had no answer.
The words they needed were too tangled to voice.
“I should check on the afternoon prep,” Marina said.
“Marina…”
“It’s fine. We disagree. It happens.” She turned toward the kitchen, then stopped. “But I’m moving the recipe book tonight. Somewhere he can’t find it.”
“That seems…”
“Necessary.” She met his eyes. “You can trust him if you want. I choose to trust myself.”
She walked away before he could respond.
His hurt reached her anyway. His confusion. His desperate wish that she would just believe him.
But she also felt a small, frightened part of him whispering: What if she’s right?
The evening passed in strained silence. They moved around each other in the kitchen like strangers, the easy rhythm they’d developed over three weeks suddenly fractured. When their hands brushed reaching for the same towel, neither of them smiled.
Alessandro tried twice to restart the conversation. Both times, Marina shook her head.
“Not now. I need to think.”
“About what?”
“About everything.”
His frustration spiked, sharp as a slap, and beneath it, fear. He was scared of losing her. Scared that this disagreement might be the crack that broke them.
Good, she thought grimly. He should be scared. She was terrified.
Not of losing him. Of what might happen if she stayed with someone who couldn’t see the danger right in front of his face.
When the bakery closed, Marina went upstairs alone. Alessandro stayed on the couch, laptop open, pretending to work. She didn’t need the bond to know he’d been not-reading the same document for twenty minutes; his attention circled back to her like a compass needle that wouldn’t settle.
She lay in bed and stared at the ceiling and tried to make the pieces fit.
Malachar knew about her family. He’d researched the Pearls specifically. He’d found connections between selkie magic and curse-breaking.
Her grandmother had hidden a counter-spell in a recipe book, using code that only someone who understood selkie traditions could read.
And Malachar had been “helping” the Dravens for exactly as long as the curse had existed.
There were no coincidences in magic. Her grandmother had taught her that.
Which meant Malachar’s interest in her was strategic. He hadn’t wandered into her bakery; he’d come hunting.
He saw her as a threat.
And Alessandro couldn’t see it because seeing it would mean accepting that he’d trusted the wrong person for a decade. That he’d let a monster into his family’s inner circle. That all his careful research, all his determined independence, had been exactly what the enemy wanted.
Marina understood the impulse to deny. She’d denied her own grief for years, hidden from the sea, locked away her pelt rather than face what swimming without her grandmother would feel like.
That night, after Alessandro had fallen into restless sleep on the couch, Marina crept downstairs with her grandmother’s recipe book clutched to her chest.
She hid it in the flour storage closet, behind the emergency supplies she never used, wrapped in plastic and tucked inside a container marked “EXPIRED - DO NOT USE.”
Malachar could search the apartment all he wanted. He wouldn’t think to look in a baker’s boring pantry supplies.
As she climbed back upstairs, Marina thought about the way Malachar had smiled at her. Patient. Certain. A predator who knew his prey wasn’t going anywhere.
She thought about Alessandro’s blind spot: decades of trust that had hardened into something he couldn’t see past.
And she thought about her grandmother’s warning, scrawled in the margins of a recipe that wasn’t quite a recipe: When the dragon comes, remember what matters.
The dragon part she could handle. She’d been handling him for two weeks.
She pulled the closet door shut and pressed her ear against it. Nothing. Just flour and silence and the small, unconvincing sound of her own breathing.