Chapter 17 #2
Bea’s voice cut through Marina’s concentration. The purple-haired witch had materialized behind the counter sometime during the morning rush, and now she stood with her arms crossed and her expression murderous.
“Not now, Bea.”
“Yes, now. Because you’ve been freezing him out for three days, and he’s been walking around like a kicked puppy, and neither of you is talking about the fact that you’re in love and miserable and too stubborn to fix it.”
“He didn’t trust me.” She kept her eyes on the dough. “When it mattered, he chose to believe a demon over me.”
“And then he believed you.”
“After. After I had proof. After Malachar admitted everything. After…”
“After he had time to process something that shattered his entire worldview?” Bea’s voice softened. “Marina. I’m not saying he didn’t screw up. He absolutely did. But people are allowed to be wrong. People are allowed to take time to accept difficult truths.”
“I didn’t have time. I had to convince him while a demon was actively threatening my life.”
“And that was terrible. Unfair. Traumatic.” Bea touched her arm. “But punishing him forever doesn’t undo it. It just means you both suffer more.”
Marina looked away. “I know.”
“Do you?”
“I know I should forgive him completely. I know he’s sorry. I know he’s trying.” Her throat ached. “But every time I look at him, I remember standing in this kitchen, alone, knowing something was wrong and being told I was paranoid. And I can’t make that feeling go away.”
Bea was quiet.
“Maybe you need time,” she said. “Real time, not just days of awkward silence. Time to figure out if you can rebuild trust or if the damage is too deep.”
“We have four days until the full moon. After that, the bond breaks.”
“Unless you choose to keep it.”
“Right.” Marina laughed bitterly. “Unless I choose to tie myself to someone who might dismiss me again the next time things get hard.”
Before Bea could respond, the world exploded.
The fire started in the storage room.
Later, Marina would learn that Malachar had waited until she and Alessandro were both in the front of the shop, distracted by customers, emotionally exhausted.
He’d slipped in through the back alley, the same back door he’d been examining days before, and set a spark among the flour and paper supplies.
Flour dust was explosive. Malachar knew exactly what he was doing.
The first warning was the smell: smoke, acrid and wrong, cutting through the familiar scent of bread and sugar. Then the alarm shrieked, and the customers started screaming, and everything dissolved into chaos.
“Everyone out!” Alessandro’s voice cut through the panic. “Now! Move!”
He was shepherding people toward the door, his body between them and the spreading flames. Marina saw Bea throw her hands up and shout something, chaos magic, wild and instinctive, trying to contain the fire before it consumed the building.
Dante appeared from nowhere, sprinting through the front door with fear on his face. “I saw smoke from the hotel! Is everyone…”
“Get them out!” Alessandro shouted. “Help Bea!”
Marina started toward the stairs. Her apartment. Her grandmother’s things. The recipe book…
Alessandro caught her arm. “No. It’s not safe.”
“My pelt is up there. My grandmother’s locket. Everything I…”
“You can’t save things if you’re dead.”
She struggled against his grip, but he was stronger. And his terror bled through, even past the dampened bond. Not for himself. For her.
He pulled her toward the door, and she let him.
Outside, the street had erupted into organized chaos.
Sweetwater Cove’s supernatural community was mobilizing: a nixie directing water from the nearby fountain toward the flames, brownies ferrying possessions out of neighboring buildings, Estelle’s ancient voice cutting over everything like she’d done this drill before. Maybe she had.
The fire trucks arrived, regular human ones from the next town over, but the supernatural response was already containing the blaze. This was what community meant in Sweetwater Cove. When one of their own was in trouble, everyone came running.
Marina watched her bakery burn and felt herself shatter.
Three generations of her family had worked in that kitchen.
Her grandmother had taught her to bake in that kitchen.
The counter where Alessandro had learned to roll fondant, badly, was probably ash by now.
The dent in the wall from when she’d dropped the KitchenAid mixer at seventeen.
The window seat where Mrs. Thornberry told her terrible jokes.
The storage closet where she’d hidden the recipe book.
All of it, burning.
Alessandro stood beside her, close but not touching. Scales flickered across his forearms, barely visible in the firelight. Smoke curled from his nostrils with each breath. He was fighting to stay human when every dragon instinct screamed at him to shift and hunt.
“Don’t,” she said, her voice hollow. “Not in front of the fire trucks.”
“He did this.” The words came out guttural, barely human. “He burned your home to steal your pelt. I’m going to—”
“What? Kill him? Right now, in front of witnesses, when we still need to break the curse?”
The logic penetrated his fury. Barely.
Bea and Dante worked together at the fire’s edge, magic and dragon-heat combining in ways that shouldn’t work but somehow did.
Dante breathed fire, controlled and precise, to consume the most damaged sections faster, denying the flames fuel to spread.
Bea threw chaos magic at the edges, disrupting the fire’s patterns, making it easier for the nixie’s water to extinguish what remained.
They argued constantly about technique, about positioning, about whose approach was more effective.
“Your fire is too hot!”
“Your magic is too chaotic!”
“That’s literally what it’s called!”
“That’s literally the problem!”
But their movements were perfectly synchronized. Every time one of them stumbled, the other was there to catch them. Every gap in defense was covered before it could become dangerous.
“They’re good together,” Alessandro said beside her, low.
“They hate each other.”
“That’s what they think.”
Marina didn’t respond. Her eyes were on the second-floor windows, where flames now danced behind glass. Her bedroom. Her memories. Her grandmother’s recipe book.
Wait.
She’d moved it. After they got it back from Malachar, she’d hidden it somewhere safer.
But her pelt. The realization struck.
Her pelt was still up there. In the trunk in her closet. The part of herself she’d been slowly learning to reclaim.
And Malachar had known exactly where she kept it.
“He planned this,” she breathed. “This wasn’t about the bakery. This was about getting to my apartment while we were distracted.”
Alessandro’s expression shifted to horror. “Your pelt…”
“He has it. He has to have it.” Marina’s legs gave out. She would have fallen if Alessandro hadn’t caught her. “He said he’d skin me. He said he’d use my pelt as a rug. And now—”
“We’ll get it back.” Alessandro’s arms were around her, dragon-heat radiating from his skin. His control was slipping. “Whatever it takes. We’ll get it back.”
“You shield me in danger.” She met his eyes. “You’d die for me. I know that.”
“Of course I would.”
“But dying for someone isn’t the same as listening to them.” She pulled away from his arms. “I told you he was planning something. I told you we needed to prepare. And you said we’d handle it, and then we went back to awkward silence instead of making actual plans.”
“Marina…”
“I can’t do this anymore.” The words came out broken. “I can’t be with someone who only sees me when I’m in danger. Who only hears me when I’m screaming. I need someone who sees me when I’m just… me. Quiet and careful and concerned about things that haven’t exploded yet.”
He had no answer.
She was right, and they both knew it.
“The crystal shop,” she said. “Bea’s apartment shares a wall with mine. The bond will hold at that distance.”
“You’re leaving?”
“I’m creating space.” She looked at him, really looked, and saw the man she loved crumbling under the weight of everything he’d done wrong. “Four days until the full moon. Maybe that’s enough time for both of us to figure out what we actually want.”
She walked toward Bea’s shop, where purple crystals gleamed in windows and chaos magic still lingered in the air.
Behind her, the bakery burned. Alessandro stood alone in the ashes of everything they’d built.
And somewhere in the town, Malachar had her pelt.
Marina climbed the stairs to Bea’s apartment and closed the door behind her.
The space was small but warm: crystals on every surface, herbs drying from the ceiling, the particular chaos that was pure Bea. A spare bedroom with a narrow bed and purple sheets waited for her, already made up.
Bea must have known this was coming. Of course she had. She always knew.
Marina sat on the edge of the bed and pressed her hands to her face.
Her pelt was gone. Her bakery was damaged. And the man she loved was forty-seven feet away, close enough to satisfy the bond, far enough to feel like a different world.
She lay down and stared at the ceiling. Through the dampened bond, she felt Alessandro finally settle. His grief. His guilt. And underneath it all, a quiet resolution that hadn’t been there before.
She reached back, just for a moment. Just enough to let him know she was still there.
Somewhere in the night, Malachar held her pelt and smiled.