Night Jasmine

The greenhouse was impossible.

Every hellebore on the north wall had opened wide. The chamomile I’d hung to dry was green again. Living. The foxglove had doubled in height overnight. And along the eastern windowsill, flowers I hadn’t planted were pushing through the soil. White blooms with thin petals and a scent so sweet it made my teeth ache.

Night jasmine. It bloomed only in darkness. It shouldn’t exist in this climate or this season.

But the bond didn’t care about what should and shouldn’t exist.

I closed the door behind me and pressed my back against it. Breathed. The air was thick with scent. Linden blossom. Bergamot. The sweetness of the jasmine underneath, so strong it felt like a hand on my throat. Everything in this room smelled like what I felt when he touched me, and I wanted to tear every bloom from the wall.

I didn’t. I was a healer. I worked with what grew, even when what grew terrified me.

I forced myself to the bench. Opened my journal. Wrote down everything I’d observed about the poison. The botanical compound. The staged degradation. The way his wolf’s heartbeat had reached toward mine through the bond like a drowning thing looking for air.

Clinical. Precise. The healer, not the woman.

The woman was still standing in a room that smelled like him, feeling the ghost of his pulse in her fingertips and the phantom heat of his hand hovering at her jaw.

I wrote faster.

The greenhouse door opened without warning. I was on my feet before I saw who it was.

Petra.

She stepped inside like she’d been invited. Hair perfect. She looked at the impossible blooms and her eyes narrowed for one second before her face smoothed.

“Congratulations on the Luna position,” she said.

“You came to look at my greenhouse.”

She smiled. The kind with its own agenda. “The pack is talking. About the blooms. About you in the Alpha’s quarters every evening. About the wolfless healer who became Luna overnight.” She faced me. “They don’t trust you. They never have. Right now they tolerate you because they’re afraid of Tarn. The moment they stop being afraid, they’ll remember what your mother was.”

“I’m not my mother.”

“No. Your mother was liked.” She let that sit. Then she moved toward the door. “I’m not your enemy, Linden. Not yet. But I’d keep an eye on who is.”

She left. The jasmine was too strong and my hands were still shaking from the morning and Petra’s words were sitting in my chest next to the place where Tarn’s four words had cracked me open.

By nightfall I’d given up on the journal and was repotting the night jasmine. Something to do with my hands that wasn’t reaching for a locked door.

Then the greenhouse door opened again.

I knew it was him before I looked up. Not from the sound. From the way the jasmine responded. Every bloom on the eastern sill turned toward the door like flowers turn toward sun. My body did the same thing and I hated it.

Tarn stood in the doorway. He’d changed since morning. Dark shirt, sleeves pushed to his elbows, forearms bare. The scar was silver in the candlelight.

“I have questions about the treatment,” he said.

He didn’t have questions about the treatment. The bond had pulled him here the same way it had kept me awake all night. But I wasn’t going to say that, and neither was he.

“Come in,” I said. “Don’t touch anything.”

He stepped inside. Moved through the greenhouse slowly, looking at the impossible blooms the way a man looks at something he can’t explain and isn’t sure he wants to. His fingers hovered near the night jasmine. Didn’t touch.

“These weren’t here yesterday,” he said.

“No.”

“Did you plant them?”

“No. They grew when we touched.”

Silence. He looked at me. I looked at the soil because looking at him in candlelight with his sleeves rolled up was going to cost me something I couldn’t afford.

“The flowers respond to emotional energy in the territory,” I said. “My mother documented it. When the territory is healthy, certain plants thrive. When it’s sick, the soil goes sour. And when the bond between an Alpha and his mate reaches a certain depth, things bloom that shouldn’t.”

“What does it mean that they bloomed from one touch?”

I finally looked up. His gray eyes were on me. Not the Alpha gaze. Something underneath. The same thing I’d seen that morning when his mask broke. Except this time he wasn’t hiding it.

“It means the bond is moving fast,” I said. “Faster than it should. Probably because your wolf is reaching for anything that keeps it alive, and the bond is the strongest anchor it has.”

“Is that all it is? My wolf trying to survive?”

The question sat between us like a lit match. He wasn’t asking about botany. He wasn’t asking about the wolf.

“I don’t know,” I said. Because I didn’t. And because the honest answer, the one climbing up my throat, was something I wasn’t ready to say out loud in a greenhouse full of flowers that would hear it and bloom.

He nodded. Looked at the jasmine one more time. Then he walked toward the door. He passed close to me. Close enough that the woodsmoke rolled through me like a wave. Close enough that the hellebore on the north wall leaned toward him as he passed.

He stopped. Not turning. Just stopped. His back to me. His hand on the doorframe.

“Linden.”

“Yes.”

“The flowers lean toward me when I walk by.”

“I know.”

“Do they do that for everyone?”

“No,” I said. “Just you.”

He left. The door closed. The greenhouse settled back into its impossible bloom, jasmine and hellebore and flowers I hadn’t planted breathing in the dark.

I sat on the floor with dirt on my knees and my heart in my throat and knew with absolute certainty that the most dangerous thing happening in Brackenmoor was not the poison.

It was this.