The bell chimed at nine-forty, and I thought it was Mrs. Patterson coming for her arthritis salve.
It wasn't.
Four men filled the doorway before Paulina even stepped inside. Rogues. I knew it from the way they moved—loose, hungry, no pack discipline holding them together. One of them grabbed the shelf of tinctures and swept his arm across it. Glass hit the floor and kept breaking, that high, cascading sound that doesn't stop when you want it to.
"Stop—" I started.
Another one flipped the herb cabinet onto its face. Six years of drying racks, labeled jars, the mortar my father's healer had given me when I was twelve—all of it went down at once. I heard myself make a sound I didn't recognize.
Paulina walked in behind them like she was touring a house she was thinking of buying.
"Careful," she said, not to me. To the room. "Wouldn't want anyone to get hurt."
I came around the counter without thinking, and that was my mistake, because it put me in reach. A hand closed on my arm and spun me into the wreckage of my own shelving. Wood splintered against my hip. Something sharp caught my temple—I felt the heat before the sting, then the warm line running down toward my jaw.
The crowd outside had already gathered. I could see them through the shattered front window—Walt, the baker's wife, a handful of kids on bikes who should have been in school. Watching. Nobody moved to help. Nobody in Crescent Hollow ever did. That was the whole point of the town.
Paulina crouched so we were eye level. Her cream sweater didn't have a mark on it.
"Look at you," she said, almost gently. "A rogue with a rented storefront, playing healer for humans who don't even know what you are." Her voice climbed, pitched now for the street, for the audience. "She's obsessed with my mate. Six years dead and she crawls back the second he's close, begging him to remember her. A feral wolf too broken to hold a pack, and she still thinks she's owed something."
Blood ran into the corner of my mouth. I didn't wipe it away.
Ember was a thread. Not even a growl now. Just a pulse, faint and far off, like something behind a wall three rooms over.
I said nothing. There was nothing to say that she hadn't already decided the answer to.
One of the rogues stepped closer, blocking the door. I was out of room. Out of shelves to back into. I felt the shape of the ending coming—not death, maybe, but something close enough to it that my body had already started bracing.
Then the street outside went dark with engines.
Three black SUVs came around the corner too fast for a town with one stop sign, and they didn't slow down until they were already stopped, tires screaming against the curb. Doors opened before the wheels finished turning.
And then the air changed.
I don't have better words for it. It hit like weather, like a front rolling in, pressure dropping all at once behind my eyes. Every rogue in my shop went down—not stumbled, not knelt. Dropped, knees hitting broken glass, faces turned toward the floor like something had reached inside their spines and pulled. Paulina went down with them, her hand still fisted in my collar, and even that grip loosened as her body folded under something she had no name for.
I didn't drop. My knees buckled and something inside my chest surged up to meet it instead—a warmth, sudden and violent, flooding through me like a struck match.
Ember roared awake.
He crossed the wreckage in three strides. I didn't see his face yet, only the shape of him, tall enough to block the light from the door, and then his arms were around me, and I was pulled against a chest that smelled like—
I knew that scent. I had known it for years, in fragments, in dreams I didn't let myself finish.
"I've got you," he said, low, only for me.
Then he lifted his head, and his voice changed entirely.
"Anyone who lays a hand on my marked mate answers to the Crown."
The words didn't sound like words. They landed in my bones. Out on the street, I heard glass rattling in window frames.
A man in a dark suit stepped past him, calm as a closing argument, and crouched in front of Paulina's frozen, kneeling body.
"Paulina Webb. Thiago Larson." He said it like he was reading a grocery list. "By the authority of the Eastern Dominion, I am serving formal notice of a Blood Debt. Reparations equivalent to the full holdings of the Ashford Pack, effective immediately."
I didn't hear the rest. I was too busy staring up at the face I'd only ever seen in the dark, wondering why my wolf—my silent, ember-dim wolf—was screaming his name before I even knew it.
