Chapter 7
Elias stood near the edge of the upstairs lounge with the bar phone pressed to his ear and the noise of the San Jacinto moving around him.
Leena’s voice came through clear and dry, laying out moonstone and sterling, then ruby, then emerald, before turning the question back on him with that thin edge of challenge.
What would the great Elias give.
He did not answer right away.
The corner of his mouth lifted before he could stop it.
The smile arrived without permission, small and real, the kind that had no business showing up in the middle of a work night while he was still on the clock.
He turned slightly toward the wall as if that might keep it private.
It did not.
His boss, seated at the usual table with a glass in hand, caught the change in Elias’s face from across the short distance.
The older man watched him for a second, took in the unguarded expression, and gave a slow shake of his head.
There was no heat in it.
Just the resigned recognition of someone who had known Elias long enough to notice when something unexpected got through the usual controlled surface.
He did not call out.
He simply shook his head once more and turned back to the conversation at the table, leaving Elias to the call.
Elias brought his focus back to the phone.
The smile faded as quickly as it had come, but the warmth of it lingered under the tiredness in his voice.
He kept his back partly to the room and spoke low enough that the words stayed between him and the woman on the other end of the line.
The question she had asked still sat there waiting. Moonstone. Ruby. Emerald. Or something else entirely.
He considered it the same way he considered most things that mattered, carefully and without rush, while the lounge continued its ordinary business behind him and his boss pretended not to have seen the smile at all.
So it began.
What started as a single careful call from the upstairs line at the San Jacinto settled into a steady, private rhythm that neither of them named out loud.
Months of gifts.
Months of readings.
The packages arrived at irregular intervals, never with a card that explained too much.
Sometimes it was a simple sterling cuff set with a clean piece of moonstone.
Sometimes a smaller parcel containing a deep red stone that caught the light like banked fire.
Once an emerald arrived wrapped so carefully it took her longer to open than usual.
Elias never asked which one she preferred.
He simply sent what he sent and left the rest unspoken.
In return Leena pulled the cards.
One at a time or in short spreads, depending on the question he put in front of her.
She kept the work exact and unsoftened.
If the cards were hard she said so.
If they refused to give a clean answer she told him that too. He never complained.
He took whatever she gave him and went quiet for a few days afterward, as if he needed the extra time to sit with it.
The exchange never quite became ordinary.
There was always a slight charge left in the space after a package arrived or a reading was delivered.
Leena would find herself turning a new stone over in her fingers while the rest of the Sacramento house moved through its usual complicated routine.
Elias would stand in the Austin heat or in the relative quiet of his truck and read her latest message more than once before locking the phone again.
Weeks stacked into months this way.
Gifts traveling one direction.
Cards and careful words traveling the other.
No grand declarations.
No attempt to define what any of it meant.
Just the ongoing, deliberate trade of one thing for another, held between a woman who signed herself the Sorceress and a man who still asked for clarity in the most guarded way he knew how.
The package arrived on an ordinary morning.
Leena sat in her wheelchair at the small table near the window with a mug of coffee cooling beside her and the usual scatter of cards from an unfinished reading.
She turned the box over once, checked the return label out of habit, and opened it without ceremony.
Inside, beneath the careful packing, she found the tickets first.
A celebrity fan expo in Chicago.
She had mentioned once, almost in passing during one of their exchanges, that she had never been to one.
The comment had not been a request.
It had simply been a fact offered in the middle of some longer stretch of conversation.
Elias had apparently filed it away.
A short note sat on top of the rest of the contents.
The handwriting was plain and controlled.
Airline tickets too.
First class.
Hotel paid.
She stared at the words for a long moment while the coffee sat untouched.
First class.
A hotel already arranged.
The expo tickets themselves looked legitimate, the kind that required either money or the right connections or both.
Elias had the money.
His boss had the connections.
Between the two of them it would have been a clean arrangement, the kind of quiet favor that never needed to be explained out loud.
Leena set the note down carefully and lifted the tickets again.
Chicago.
A city she had never bothered to visit.
An event she had only ever watched other people attend from a distance.
The rest of the Sacramento house moved through its ordinary morning sounds beyond her door, but the small table in front of her had suddenly become the center of something far less ordinary.
She picked up the coffee, took a slow sip, and looked at the contents of the box again.
No grand language.
No attempt to make the gift into a larger declaration.
Just the practical pieces of a trip she had never expected to take, sent by a man who still preferred to speak through actions when the words felt too exposed.
Leena leaned back in the chair and let the reality of it settle.
Chicago.
First class.
A hotel already waiting.
The next decision, whether she would actually go, sat quietly in front of her alongside the tickets and the short, unsigned note.