1. Sakura #3
After she leaves—with promises of wine and the kind of female friendship I still don’t quite trust is going to stick—I clean up the evidence of my meltdown. Wipe down the counters. Straighten the crystals. Right the fallen rose quartz, which immediately tilts crooked again.
“Fine.” I glare at it. “Be that way.”
The storm has passed completely. Late afternoon sun slants through the glass walls, painting everything in shades of amber and gold. The mist outside has returned to its normal soft silver, swirling lazily around the cobblestones of Moonthread Square.
I should close up. Go home. Crawl into bed and pretend this day never happened.
Instead, I linger. Walking through my treatment rooms, touching the massage tables, adjusting displays that don’t need adjusting. This is mine. This space I built with my own hands and my own magic and my own stubborn refusal to give up.
I’m locking the front door, keys jingling in hands that have finally stopped shaking, when I feel it.
Eyes on me.
The sensation is so sudden, so intense, that my breath catches in my throat. My magic stirs—but not in warning. Not in alarm.
Recognition.
I turn slowly.
Across the square, half-hidden by the evening mist, stands Torin Weylin.
I know him, in the loose, careful way you know the shifter your alpha quietly assigned to keep half an eye on you—the one who fixed my porch step without being asked, who has a talent for showing up right when a delivery gets too heavy to carry alone and brings me blueberry muffins. Familiar. Steady. Safe.
He does not feel safe tonight.
Even from here, even with twenty meters of cobblestone and swirling fog between us, I can sense it.
The otherness coiled beneath human skin.
The wildness barely contained. The power humming in the air around him like a bass note I feel in my bones—sharper, closer, than I’ve ever let myself notice before.
Shifter.
Dark hair, broad shoulders that could block out the setting sun. He’s wearing the same flannel and boots he always wears, but the expression on his face is one I’ve never seen there.
He’s standing absolutely still, watching me with an intensity that should be threatening.
It isn’t.
My magic reaches toward him without permission. Curious. Hungry. Straining against my skin like it wants to close the distance between us.
Our eyes meet across the mist.
My heart stutters. Actually stutters, skipping a beat before pounding back to life with a rhythm that doesn’t feel entirely mine.
I can see them clearly even from here—crinkled at the corners like he smiles often, even if he’s not smiling now. A neatly trimmed beard frames a strong jaw.
And he’s watching me like... like I’m a revelation. A discovery. A question he’s been asking his whole life.
No one has ever looked at me like that.
Heat rushes through me. Not embarrassment—desire, raw and unexpected. My skin prickles with awareness. My stomach tightens. My breath comes faster, and I can feel my pulse in places I certainly should not be thinking about while standing in a public square.
What is happening?
The mist coils around him, almost protective, and I notice how it seems to part for him rather than obscure him. Like even the magic of this place wants me to see him clearly.
For a long moment, neither of us moves. The mist curls between us, golden and strange, and I swear it’s pushing me forward. Encouraging a pull I don’t understand and never asked for. My magic is practically vibrating, reaching toward him with an intensity that borders on embarrassing.
Then he inclines his head. The smallest acknowledgment. Somehow both a promise and a warning at the same time.
And disappears into the fog.
I stand frozen outside my shop, hand still on the lock, trying to remember how to breathe. My magic is restless in a way it’s never been. Not anxious. Not chaotic.
Reaching.
“What the hell was that?” The whisper escapes into the empty square.
The mist doesn’t answer. But it seems smug somehow. Satisfied, like a matchmaker watching her schemes unfold.
I finally get my legs working and head out for dinner through streets silver with twilight and fog. But I can’t shake the feeling of being watched. Can’t forget that intent gaze, that massive frame, the way my magic had nearly tried to leap out of my body and crawl across the square to him.
A bear. Patient, but not infinitely so.
That night, curled in my bed with the window cracked to let in the mist, I dream of forests and fur and a warmth I’ve never known. Of strong arms wrapped around me through a storm. Of a low voice like distant thunder saying words I can’t quite hear.
I tell myself it doesn’t mean anything. Tell myself I’m not going to obsess about the shifter who’s watched over my block for weeks and chose tonight, of all nights, to actually let me see it. Tell myself this is not going to complicate my already complicated life.
The storm that rumbles through my dreams—gentle this time, almost sweet, nothing like the chaos of earlier—suggests otherwise.
When I wake, hours later, there’s frost on my window in patterns I didn’t make.
And outside, somewhere in the darkness, I swear I hear a bear’s distant call.