Chapter 11
Hazel stared at her laptop screen, refreshing her bank account for the third time in ten minutes. The Chase app loaded with its cheerful blue interface — that little swoopy logo practically smirking at her — which felt like a personal insult. The numbers didn’t change. Still red. Still terrifying.
Three suppliers had canceled this week, leaving her unable to fill half her orders.
The bills kept coming: rent on the shop, utilities, insurance.
But no money flowed in to cover them. Marcus’s contacts had come through with emergency supplies, but those were for active clients, not for restocking inventory or paying overhead.
Her phone buzzed. A text from Mrs. Hollins: Jeremy’s doing so well on the stabilizer. Can we get a three-month supply? I can pay up front.
Hazel pressed her fingers against her eyes.
Three months would cost six hundred dollars in materials alone; materials she couldn’t get from any local supplier thanks to the Shadow Council’s blockade.
She could source them from Marcus’s contacts, but that meant owing the firm even more money she had no way to repay.
Jeremy Hollins’s wolf had been destabilizing for months, the moon madness creeping in earlier each cycle. Before the stabilizer, he’d shifted involuntarily during a work meeting and nearly mauled his supervisor. His wife had driven forty miles to find someone who could help.
She typed back: Let me check supply and get back to you.
Another buzz. The Castellan twins: Is our fertility charm ready? We’re running out of time before the solstice.
They’d been trying for three years. The charm wasn’t guaranteed; nothing magical ever was.
But the solstice alignment would give them their best chance.
She’d already gathered most of the components, had the spell mapped out, and now the final ingredients sat in some Shadow Council warehouse, seized from her suppliers as “contraband.”
And another. Mrs. Henderson: Lily’s tonic is almost gone. When can you make more? She’s starting to have nightmares again.
Lily was fifteen. The nightmares weren’t ordinary; they were prophetic visions too powerful for a teenager’s mind to process. Without the tonic, she’d wake screaming about deaths she couldn’t prevent. Hazel had been making that particular brew since Lily was twelve.
Hazel’s hands shook as she set down the phone. She’d built this business over twenty years since inheriting it from her grandmother, helped hundreds of people. Three generations of Wickwoods serving Willowbrook’s supernatural community, and she might be the one to watch it end.
The laptop showed her email: seventeen unread messages. She clicked through them mechanically.
Your business insurance payment is overdue.
Final notice: Utility bill for Wicked Brews is past due.
Rent payment required within 5 days to avoid late fees.
And buried among the bills, one from a regular customer: Hi Hazel! I heard you’re in some trouble with the Council. I can’t risk using your services anymore. I’m sorry. I hope you understand.
Diane Marchetti. Hazel had helped her through three miscarriages and a difficult pregnancy, had sat with her through the night when her son was born with the cord wrapped around his neck, had whispered the words that kept his tiny lungs breathing until the doctors could intervene.
That boy was seven now. Hazel got a card every year on his birthday.
She understood perfectly. The Shadow Council wasn’t just cutting off her supplies; they were driving away her customers through intimidation. Soon there wouldn’t be a business left to save.
Hazel opened a new browser tab and started searching. Alternative suppliers outside the Council’s reach. Wholesale accounts in Boston, New York, even overseas. Marcus’s contacts had helped with the emergency supplies, but she couldn’t keep relying on firm money. She needed her own solution.
Three hours later, she had a list. Eight potential suppliers who might work with her.
Four of them required minimum orders she couldn’t afford.
Two were in Europe with shipping costs that would eat her margins.
But two might actually work: a hedge witch collective in Vermont and an apothecary in Salem that had survived three centuries of supernatural politics.
She drafted emails to both, careful to mention her credentials without revealing her current situation. If the Shadow Council had reach beyond Willowbrook, she didn’t want to advertise that she was the witch causing trouble.
The Vermont collective had a reputation for helping practitioners facing institutional pressure.
They’d sheltered witches during the McCarthy-era supernatural purges, had connections that ran deep into the underground networks that existed parallel to organizations like the Shadow Council.
If anyone would take a chance on her, they would.
Salem was a longer shot. The apothecary there had relationships with every major supernatural governing body on the East Coast. They might not want to risk their neutrality for one hedge witch in Vermont.
But they also had a history of protecting individual practitioners against overreach. It was worth trying.
Two lifelines. Better than none.
She closed the laptop before the tears could start. But she wasn’t gone yet.
Her grandmother had faced down the Shadow Council twice in her lifetime: once during the territory disputes of the sixties, once when they’d tried to tax independent practitioners into oblivion. Both times, she’d won. Not by being the most powerful witch in the room, but by being the most stubborn.
Hazel came from a long line of stubborn women.
She scrubbed at her eyes and straightened her shoulders. She’d figure this out. She always did.
A soft knock at her bedroom door. “Hazel? You okay in there?”
Marcus. Of course he’d noticed she’d been hiding.
“Fine,” she called, voice only slightly wavering. “Just… checking email.”
Silence. Then: “I’m making coffee. Come out when you’re ready.”
She took a shaky breath, splashed water on her face, and opened the door. Time to pretend everything was fine. Time to not think about how her entire life was falling apart.
Hazel was brushing her teeth when she heard the controlled breathing and soft thud of flesh hitting the floor from the kitchen. Marcus was doing pushups, and from the sound of it, shirtless.
She rinsed and spat, then crept to the doorway.
Muscle moved under skin as he lowered himself down, pushed back up.
Sweat traced a line down his spine. The morning light turned his skin to bronze, picked out the shadows of muscles she hadn’t known existed.
Two days since their first kiss, and she still couldn’t look at him without remembering the taste of his mouth.
His rhythm faltered. He’d noticed her watching.
“I didn’t know you were…” she started.
“I’ll put a shirt on.”
“Don’t bother on my account.”
The words slipped out before she could stop them. Marcus went perfectly still, arms locked, staring at the floor. She could feel the tension that had been building for days.
“Hazel.” Her name came out rough.
She fled to the shower.
By afternoon, the tension had wound so tight she could barely breathe. They sat in the living room, supposedly reviewing her testimony for the hundredth time, but she couldn’t concentrate on anything except the way his fingers moved across the pages.
Marcus had retreated into his most professional mode: clipped sentences, formal posture, eyes fixed on documents he probably had memorized. She’d seen her grandmother do the same thing: burrow into work, pretend the feelings didn’t exist, hope they’d pass.
“You’re too stiff,” she said, though she was the one sitting rigid as a board.
“You’re too casual.” He frowned. “This is serious.”
“I know it’s serious. It’s my life, Marcus. My business. My testimony.”
“Then act like it matters.”
“It matters more to me than anyone.” She slammed the papers down on the coffee table. “You get to walk away after this. I have to live with whatever happens.”
“Do you? Because you keep—” He gestured vaguely at her.
“I keep what?”
“Being you.”
She bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You joke when you should be focused. You push when you should back off. You make everything complicated.”
“I make things complicated?” She shot to her feet. “You’re the one who quoted legal statutes at pixies.”
“Those pixies were violating…”
“See? You’re doing it again.” She paced to the window, whirled back. “You turn everything into regulations and procedures, then you act like I’m the problem.”
He stood slowly, that careful control she’d grown to resent written in every line of his body. “You drive me insane.”
“Good.”
Marcus took a step closer.
“Why is that good?”
“Because at least you feel something.” The words tore out of her. “Two days ago, you kissed me like the world was ending, and now you act like I’m a problem to be solved.”
“You are a problem.” Another step. “The biggest problem I’ve ever had.”
“Then stop protecting me.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because I feel everything, Hazel. And it’s wrecking me.”
They stood three feet apart, both breathing hard. The afternoon light caught the gold in his eyes, made them burn like embers.
“Tell me to stop,” he said.
She looked at his mouth, at the rigid set of his shoulders, at the careful distance he maintained even when every line of his body screamed that he wanted to close it.
“No.”
He moved so fast she barely saw it. One moment, he was across the room; the next, his hands framed her face, and his mouth crashed into hers. She gasped against his lips, and he backed her up until her shoulders hit the wall.
This kiss was nothing like the first one. His body pressed against hers, all heat and solid muscle, and she fisted her hands in his shirt to pull him closer.
Magic flared where they touched: their twined magic sparking bright across her vision. When he traced her lower lip with his tongue, she opened for him with a sound that might have been his name.
His hands slid from her face to her hair, fingers tangling in the strands. She arched against him and felt him shudder, felt the careful wall he’d built around himself crumble completely.
“Hazel,” he breathed against her mouth.
“Don’t stop,” she whispered back. “Please don’t stop.”
So he didn’t. He kissed her until she couldn’t remember why they’d been fighting, until the only thing that mattered was the heat of his mouth against hers.
The magic between them pulsed and settled, wrapping around them like a living thing.
She could feel his heartbeat through the thin fabric of his shirt, could feel the tremor in his hands where they cradled her face.
When they finally broke apart, both breathing hard, he rested his forehead against hers.
“We can’t keep doing this,” he said.
“I know.”
“It’s going to make everything harder.”
“Everything’s already hard.”
A laugh shook through him, and heat rose in her cheeks as she realized what she’d said. “Fair point.”
His fingers brushed her cheekbone. She leaned into it.
“Eleven days,” she said.
“I can count.”
“Can you?” She searched his face. “Because sometimes I think you’ve forgotten this has an expiration date.”
“Have you?”
Before she could answer, he kissed her again. Softer this time, slower, like he was savoring her, storing the taste away for later. When he pulled back, his eyes were dark.
“That’s the last one,” he said.
“Right. Absolutely the last.”
They stood there against the wall, close enough that her hand on his chest registered the unsteady rise and fall of his breathing, close enough that she could see a faint scar at his temple she’d never noticed before. Neither of them moved away.
“Eleven days,” Marcus said.
“Ten now.”
“Ten days until this is over.”
“Until I testify and we go back to our lives.”
“Right. Back to normal.”
She ducked under his arm and walked to the kitchen, legs unsteady beneath her. The cool tile under her bare feet helped. So did the familiar motion of pulling a pot from the cabinet, filling it with water, setting it on the stove.
Her laptop was still open on the counter where she’d left it that morning, the Chase app still glowing its accusatory blue. But a new email notification had popped up while she’d been busy getting kissed against walls. The Vermont hedge witch collective had already replied.
Ms. Wickwood — We know who you are. We know what’s happening in Willowbrook. The Council seized a shipment of ours last month too. We think they’re expanding beyond your territory. Call us.
The number had a 802 area code. Hazel stared at it, the heat still fading from her skin, her brain struggling to shift gears from Marcus’s mouth to supply chain logistics. If the Shadow Council was going after suppliers in other states, this wasn’t just about silencing one witness. This was bigger.
She screenshot the email and closed the laptop. That conversation could wait until her hands stopped shaking — and until she figured out whether the shaking was from the kiss or the implications of what she’d just read.
Normal things. Safe things.
“I’m making dinner,” she called over her shoulder.
“Hazel…”
“Pasta again. Hope you don’t mind.”
She heard him sigh, listened to his footsteps as he followed her.
When she glanced back, he was leaning against the door frame, watching her with an expression she couldn’t read.
His shirt was untucked where she’d grabbed it.
His hair was mussed. He looked like a man who’d just been thoroughly kissed against a wall, and she had to look away before she did something stupid like cross the kitchen and kiss him again.
“For the record,” he said, “I don’t believe you either.”
“About what?”
“That being the last kiss.”
She turned back to the stove.
“It has to be.”
“I know.”
“We agreed.”
“We did.”
“So that’s it. No more kissing.”
“None.”
“Professional distance.”
“Absolutely.”
She could hear him breathing behind her as she stirred the pot, could feel his eyes on her back. Every movement she made seemed amplified: the clink of the wooden spoon against the pot, the hiss of the gas flame, the rustle of her shirt as she reached for the salt.
“You should set the table,” she said, mostly to give him something to do that wasn’t standing there making her skin prickle with awareness.
“Right.” But he didn’t move.
She lifted the spoon, tasted the sauce, added too much salt on purpose. Anything to make her hand do something other than tremble. Behind her, a chair scraped. Cutlery clinked. Marcus, pretending to obey.
The pot bubbled. Eleven days. She added more salt anyway.