5. Scarlet Sage
Scarlet Sage
Sheriff Tom Bentley enters my house like he already owns the verdict.
Two deputies follow him, their heavy boots thudding across the old hardwood while the screen door bangs shut hard enough to rattle the drying chives near the kitchen window. Humid air laced with swamp water and engine fumes drifts in with them.
Tom removes his sunglasses slowly. “Scarlet.”
I fold my arms beneath my oversized sweater. “Tom.”
He studies me looking for confirmation of a conclusion he’d reached before the conversation began.
The worst part is that he used to smile at me normally, before enough people started connecting my name to bad things happening in Sweetheart Haven. Now he looks at me the way people look at weather damage during festival season: unfortunate, poorly timed, and a problem to be managed.
Behind me, Wes has gone tense in a deeply alpha way that changes the pressure inside a room without anyone speaking.
Roman remains at the kitchen table, one arm resting loosely over the chair back, his posture softening the edges of the moment by sheer force of temperament. He has placed himself between me and the deputies without announcing it. My nerves settle a notch before my pride can object.
Tom’s eyes move between the three of us. “You didn’t mention company.”
“You didn’t ask.”
He reaches into his jacket and unfolds paperwork onto the table. “Judge signed the warrant thirty minutes ago. We’re searching the property in connection with the theft of the Love Stone.”
I look at the papers without touching them. “Efficient.”
“Your name was on the visitor log.”
“My name is on the visitor log every other week.”
“You were there this morning.”
“So were thirty tourists and Myrtle Vane.”
Tom’s mouth tightens. “Myrtle’s accounted for.”
The implication lands exactly where he intended it to.
One deputy starts toward the hallway while the other lingers near the bookshelves.
The old floorboards complain under the deputy’s boots in places they never creak for me.
They move through the space with the careless authority of people who have been given permission to touch things that are not theirs, and the violation of it prickles beneath my skin.
Their unfamiliar scents will cling to my grandmother’s quilts folded over the old chairs and settle into the pages of my research stacked in careful towers beside the sofa.
A deputy moves the little carved owl Honey made me when we were twelve, still sitting in the window above my herb rack.
They comb through all of it with official hands and impersonal eyes, and my scent sharpens before I can fully suppress it.
Wes’s head turns slightly toward me, his attention narrowing with the focus of an alpha cueing into a distressed omega.
I look away before he can act on his instincts.
“Sheriff, Wes Osprey,” Wes says when Tom’s gaze finally moves to him. “We didn’t get to officially meet, with all the trouble coming in at the station.”
Recognition crosses Tom’s face. “The investigators, correct?”
“That’s right.”
Tom looks toward Roman. “Both of you with the task force?”
“Unfortunately for everyone involved,” Roman says pleasantly.
One of the deputies makes a sound that may be a laugh before quickly becoming professional again.
Tom ignores him. “Then you know how this works.”
“I do,” Wes says. “The theft is yours unless the evidence ties it to GatorX. Which is why I know you moved quickly on a circumstantial lead.”
Tom’s eyes narrow enough to tense the room.
Wes’s alpha keeps pulling toward me while his professional judgment digs in behind it, and the friction between the two has been sitting in his posture since he walked through my door.
He apparently dislikes sloppy investigation more than he dislikes uncertainty, and right now, Tom’s certainty is the sloppiest thing in the room.
Tom turns back toward me. “Multiple people reported you near the fountain this morning.”
“Because I walked through town.”
“You caused a scene.”
“I leaned against architecture, Tom.”
“Mrs. Delaney said you looked upset.”
“She also thinks oat milk is the causes for all of society’s problems.”
Roman coughs into his hand.
Tom exhales, his patience visibly thinning. “People saw you examining the offerings near the fountain.”
Those damn swamp lilies.
Pressure curls beneath my breastbone, lower and sharper than it was this morning.
The stress layers over the familiar ache in my chest until they are difficult to separate.
My fingers find the inside of my opposite wrist beneath the sweater and press lightly, an old habit.
It is the closest thing to steadying contact I have available most of the time.
Wes’s hands curl once at his sides.
I release my wrist and stand straighter.
A crash comes from the back bedroom. The deputy reappears, carrying one of my storage boxes and apologizing without sounding particularly sorry. Inside sit stacks of handwritten notes, old maps, and several wrapped bundles of dried flowers.
Tom’s eyes go to the bundles. “Ritual bundles?”
My stomach drops, though I keep my expression even. “Sample drying. For my books.”
He walks toward the box but his eyes narrow in on me. “Funny coincidence to have ritual bundles on a day when a ritual stone goes missing.”
“It’s botany.”
Wes steps forward before Tom can respond. “Sheriff, unless possession of regional plant life recently became illegal–”
“You don’t know this town.” Tom’s voice cuts quiet and final across the room. He looks between all three of us. “You didn’t grow up watching what happens around this girl.”
My pulse slows into the familiar rhythm of an old hurt. I’ve heard versions of that sentence for most of my adult life. It doesn’t get easier. It becomes expected, which is its own category of worse.
Wes folds his arms across his chest, broad shoulders tightening beneath his black shirt. “Meaning what, exactly?”
Tom looks at him steadily. “Every major bond collapse in the last five years connects to Scarlet Sage. Her warnings and predictions, never proven but always rumored. She tells people a bond feels wrong, and three days later, someone is moving out of a pack’s house.”
I hate the word predictions. I never tell anyone what will happen. I only know when what I’m looking at has already stopped being true.
“That doesn’t mean she caused anything,” Roman says.
“No,” Tom agrees, and the restraint in his voice is almost worse than the accusation. “But people remember.”
The whole house feels exposed, every private coping mechanism of my life laid out for strangers to interpret however serves them.
I keep my hands loose at my sides and my breathing even, my gaze fixed on a point between Tom and the hallway, my expression carefully blank.
I’ve been perfecting it since age nine, when I learned composure was the only armor I was going to get.
Tom rubs a hand across his mouth. “The festival starts soon. If word gets out that the original Love Stone is missing while bonds are already destabilizing during sweetheart season—”
“The town loses money,” I say.
He meets my eyes. “The town loses control.”
Nobody in Sweetheart Haven fears broken hearts half as much as they fear broken mythology. The entire town survives on the belief that bonds hold stronger here than anywhere else, and right now, I’m the most available explanation for why that belief might be failing.
The first deputy appears from the hallway. “Nothing in the bedrooms.”
The second shakes his head from the back door. “Property’s clear.”
Tom’s mouth flattens. He folds the warrant papers and returns them to his jacket pocket. “Don’t leave town.”
I stare at him. “Tom, I live here.”
“That wasn’t a joke, Scarlet.”
“No,” I admit. “I noticed.”
Regret moves briefly across his face, genuine enough to be painful. Then duty closes over it, and he nods toward the investigators, his voice sharpening when he looks at them. “You two be careful who you trust around here.”
The screen door bangs shut behind him. Truck doors slam outside, engines turn over, and tires grind across the dirt until the swamp swallows the noise.
I look at the tarot deck sitting at the edge of the kitchen table and focus on breathing.
My instincts scream at me to close the bedroom door, keep every window latched, and to scrub the strangers’ scents from the rooms they entered.
I crave the security of a familiar body blocking the rest of the world from reaching me.
My knees protest and the panic swells, but I refuse to give in to the collapse.
Keeping my face neutral requires more effort than usual with two men in my kitchen who can apparently read distress signals I didn’t know I was sending.
The cards had shown a binding path. Three lives caught in the same current, oriented toward the same fixed point, and pushed toward a choice with consequences.
I put both cards away before either man could see the reading clearly, and I’m not going to think about the implications of the three of us right now.
Roman moves first, but he doesn’t come closer. Instead, he lowers himself onto the edge of a chair and turns one hand palm up between us. “Can I?”
His question catches me unprepared. No one has asked permission to comfort me. They avoid me, advise me, or tell me I should be used to the way things are by now. I stare at his palm. He has long fingers, faint graphite marks near the side of his hand, and a shallow scar crossing one knuckle.
My instincts move before the rest of me agrees.
Roman closes his fingers around mine carefully, firm enough to feel real.
My breath leaves in a rush. Warm cardamom and cinnamon settles around me, grounded by the cedar scent moving closer from the other side of the room.
My omega latches onto both, orienting toward the stable rhythm between them with an embarrassing eagerness.
Roman’s thumb strokes once over the place on my wrist where I had been pressing. The tenderness of it nearly undoes me.