Chapter 3
CLARA
The bell above Dee’s café door sings a high, offended chime when I push through it too hard, a puff of icy air chasing in behind me like a second opinion I didn’t ask for.
My boots are soaked up to the ankles, snow packed into the worn seams, and I can still feel the sting of wind on my cheeks from the walk down from the hall.
I don’t stop moving, don’t greet the two retirees nursing bottomless mugs of coffee near the window, and I definitely don’t make eye contact with the orc couple sitting in the back corner who look like they’re trying very hard not to pretend they just saw me on the evening’s most ridiculous local drama.
“Coffee,” I bark, already shoving off my coat.
Dee doesn’t even blink. She just slides a full mug across the counter without breaking her rhythm with the milk steamer and raises one arched brow like she’s waiting for me to perform the second act of my breakdown.
“You throw the mayor off the ridge or just verbally disembowel him?” she asks, blowing a kiss of foam onto a latte.
“I didn’t kill anyone. Unfortunately,” I mutter into the rim of the mug, taking a gulp that sears the roof of my mouth. “But I did tell a billionaire orc he could follow me to hell.”
Dee whistles low. “And it’s only Tuesday.”
I collapse onto one of the stools at the counter and drop my head into my hands, letting the warmth from the mug seep into my fingers.
My bones feel brittle, like someone’s taken a hammer to all the places that held me together this long and finally cracked through.
I don’t cry. I won’t give this town the pleasure of another public outburst.
“He really bought the land?” I ask, voice muffled through my fingers. “Like, actually owns it?”
Dee sighs and leans on the counter, elbows out, chin in one palm. “Looks like it. Thomas Calhoun handled the paperwork. You know, that greasy little bastard who used to date Maris Bloom? The one with the teeth too white for a human?”
“Yeah. Gran hated him.”
“Everyone hated him. He’s a snake in a tailored tie.”
“Well, now he’s a snake with my property deed,” I snap, sitting up. “Or at least the land under it. Which is, effectively, the same damn thing when you’re trying to stop a demolition.”
Dee slides a scone my way, not because she thinks I’m hungry, but because she knows it’s something to put between my hands. Her eyes, behind the sarcasm, are soft and steady.
“So what’s the plan, General Wynn?” she asks. “You organizing the militia? Building barricades out of sleds and pinecones?”
“I’m not letting him tear that place down.
Not before the festival. Not ever, if I can help it.
” I rip the scone in half and shove a piece in my mouth like I’m absorbing its determination.
“Gran wanted one last winter at the lodge. She didn’t know the paperwork was being shifted out from under her, I’m sure of it.
There’s no way she’d have signed that over knowingly. ”
“Alright,” Dee says, nodding. “Then we make it public. Stir the pot. Remind people what that place meant. Get the whole town on your side.”
“That’ll piss off the orc.”
She grins. “And?”
I finish the coffee in three gulps, slam the mug down, and stand up.
The exhaustion’s still there, but underneath it now is a familiar spark.
The same one I get when a parent tries to argue with me about their kid not needing extra help reading, or when the school board threatens to cut the library budget again.
“Then let’s start a war,” I say, and Dee laughs like I just handed her the best early Christmas present of her life.
We put up the first flyer that afternoon, smack in the middle of the grocery store bulletin board, right between a lost cat and a coupon for half-off axe sharpening. Bright red letters, bold and loud: Keep Silverpine Lodge Standing – Winter Festival Belongs to Us.
Dee and I make the rounds like we’re canvassing for a cause, which I guess we are.
She hands out little hand-cut paper snowflakes stamped with SAVE THE LODGE on them, like propaganda wrapped in charm, and I talk to anyone who’ll stop long enough to listen.
The butcher nods grimly and tells me his parents met at a Winter Festival back in the sixties.
The florist cries into her apron and promises to donate wreaths.
Even grumpy old Martin with the snowplow agrees to clear the lodge’s drive himself, just this once, just for Margaret’s memory.
I get home that night to find two covered dishes on the porch and a note from Mrs. Lindh offering to help clean up the guest rooms if I need it. There’s a kind of magic in this town when it wants to be kind, and right now, it wants to be kind to me. That’s something I don’t take for granted.
The lodge, however, is a less enthusiastic partner in my crusade.
I spend two hours trying to get the old furnace to cough out something besides rusted curses.
It clicks, rattles, groans, then dies again with a pitiful sigh.
I’ve got two space heaters running in the parlor, one of them buzzing like it’s developing a personality disorder, and I keep stomping my feet every few minutes just to remind my toes they still have blood in them.
“You’d better appreciate this,” I mutter at the ceiling as I hammer a loose nail back into the staircase railing. “I could be in a heated apartment right now, watching trash television and eating leftover funeral casserole.”
A gust of wind slams into the side of the lodge like a disapproving aunt, and I laugh, tired and fraying at the edges.
The next morning, the orc shows up in town again.
I spot him as I’m coming out of Pippa’s craft shop, arms full of battery-operated fairy lights and a gallon of glitter.
He’s standing across the street outside the mayor’s office, talking with that slimeball lawyer, looking like he just stepped out of a noir novel.
Dark coat, dark scowl, skin the color of pine bark and tusks so polished they catch the sun.
He doesn’t see me. Or if he does, he doesn’t let on. Which somehow pisses me off more than if he’d waved.
I shove the lights into Dee’s arms as she rounds the corner. “He’s here.”
She looks. Whistles. “That is a lot of broad-shouldered irritation in one place.”
“He smells like money and moral bankruptcy.”
She laughs. “I bet he smells like cedar and cold steel. And I bet you noticed because you got closer than you want to admit.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m just saying. You’re not immune to a well-tailored villain.”
“He’s not a villain,” I say, glowering. “He’s an orc-shaped wrecking ball with a clipboard.”
“Same thing.”
“I hate him.”
“You’re aware you keep saying that in ways that suggest you’re trying to convince yourself.”
I don’t answer. Because she’s not wrong.
But she’s not right either. I don’t want to want anything from that man except his signature on a surrender form.
I don’t want to think about the way his eyes looked like stormclouds at dusk, or how his voice rumbled like snow sliding off a roof, or the fact that he didn’t seem surprised when I threatened him in public like maybe, deep down, he liked it.
That night, I write a speech.
It’s not for the council or a legal team. It’s for the festival committee, who meets every Thursday in the basement of the church, surrounded by trays of gingerbread and passive-aggressive casserole debates. I stand in front of them, hands shaking just a little, and I tell them the truth.
I tell them that my grandmother believed in Silverpine more than she believed in bank accounts. That the lodge isn’t just an old building, it’s a memory holder. A place where stories live. A place where this town finds itself again every winter.
And then I ask them, calmly, stubbornly, if they’re willing to let a stranger come in and buy out those memories. If they’re okay trading tradition for a resort spa and a gift shop that smells like imported pine.
The room stays quiet for a breath longer than I like. But then Mrs. Anders stands up and claps. One by one, they follow. Not loud, not flashy, but real. Committed.
“We’ll hold the festival at the lodge,” Mayor Thorne says afterward, voice quieter than usual. “At least until the courts tell us we can’t.”
I nod. I don’t smile. But I feel something settle in my chest, firm and unshakable.
Dralgor Veyr may own the ground beneath the lodge.
But he doesn’t own me. And he doesn’t own this town.