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Chapter 4 Neva Strand Walks Into My Tea House

Penulis: Zorahh
last update Tanggal publikasi: 2026-04-18 00:02:53

It's a Thursday afternoon. The tea house is quiet in the way it gets around four o'clock — one couple in the corner, a student with headphones, Delara restocking behind the counter — and I'm clearing a table by the window when the door opens and a woman walks in who stops my hands mid-motion.

Tall. Strawberry-blonde hair pulled back. The kind of precise, composed presence that makes a room register her without her asking it to. She looks around, finds me, and walks directly over.

"Zoya Fennel?" she asks.

"Yes." My wolf has gone alert but not hostile, which is interesting information.

"Neva Strand. I think we should talk."

Delara produces two teas without being asked and removes herself to the furthest corner of the room. She is the most discreet woman I've ever met. She is also, I suspect, collecting all of this for something.

Neva wraps both hands around her mug and looks at me with the direct, uncomplicated gaze of someone who has decided that diplomacy is less useful than honesty.

"I want to be clear about something first," she says. "I ended things with Casen. He didn't end things with me. I want you to know that because the version of events where he came to his senses and chose you after a romantic revelation is not accurate. I told him the truth about what I felt, I walked away, and then I told him he needed to deal with what he'd done."

"Why are you here?" I ask.

"Because I was part of what happened to you, even if I didn't know it at the time. He made his choice based partly on feelings that were connected to me. I didn't cause it — I couldn't have, I didn't know about the bonding ceremony until after — but I was in the chain of events." She pauses. "That matters to me."

I study her face. She means it.

"And?" I ask.

"And I think you deserve to hear from me directly that what Casen felt toward me was real but it wasn't what he thought it was. I can tell the difference between a wolf who is fated and a wolf who is drawn. He was drawn. That's not the same." A breath. "His actual bond is with you. That was obvious before I ever ended things. I just had to be honest enough to say so."

Silence sits between us.

"That must have been painful," I say. "Knowing he felt something real for you."

Her expression does something complicated. "Yes. But I'd rather have the truth than a lovely story that doesn't hold."

I feel, unexpectedly, something in my chest shift — not toward Casen, not yet. Toward her.

"You know my brother Ozzie?"

Something flickers across her composed face. "We've met."

"He works at the design studio on Vanner Street."

"I know."

"He's had opinions about you," I say, because I am curious about the flicker and I am not above a gentle prod.

"I'm aware," she says, in a voice designed to close the topic.

I let it close. For now.

We talk for another hour. It shouldn't be easy and it isn't — not exactly — but there's a bedrock honesty to Neva that makes conversation feel like solid ground. By the time she leaves, we have not become friends, but we have become something that might, given time, grow in that direction.

Delara appears beside me as I watch her go.

"Well," she says.

"Don't," I say.

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"You had a tone."

"I was about to ask if you wanted more tea."

She pours the tea. She absolutely had a tone.

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