Chapter Nine: What the Night Hides

Daniel came back the next evening with a notebook of his own, thicker than mine, filled with names and numbers in handwriting too neat to belong to a man who claimed to be careless about most things.

"Hale Holdings has bought six properties in the last two years," he said, spreading the pages across my counter after I had closed for the night. "Three in Millbrook. Two in Ashford. One in a town I had never heard of before I started looking."

"What happens to them after he buys them?"

"Nothing. That is what makes it strange. A man does not spend that kind of money on buildings only to let them sit empty and rot." He tapped one of the pages. "Unless the buildings themselves are not really what he wants."

"Then what does he want?"

Daniel looked up at me, and for once his easy confidence had nothing behind it but honest uncertainty. "I do not know yet. But I intend to find out before he finds a way to make you regret saying no to him."

I studied the list of names in front of me, ordinary shopkeepers and landowners from towns I had never visited, people who had likely never imagined their small, ordinary lives would end up written down in a stranger's notebook because of a man with too much money and no clear reason for wanting what he wanted.

"Thank you," I said. "For caring about this as much as you do."

He held my gaze a moment longer than was comfortable. "I care about you," he said simply. "The shop is only part of it."

I did not know what to say to that, so I busied myself gathering the pages back into a neat pile, the way I always did when a conversation edged toward something I was not ready to look at directly.

The trouble came on a Wednesday, three weeks later, in the deep hours of the night when Pine Street was empty and even the tavern at its far end had gone quiet.

I woke to the smell of smoke.

It took a moment for my sleeping mind to understand what my body already knew, and then I was up and moving before I had fully thought it through, pulling on whatever clothes were nearest and running down the narrow stairs from my room above the bakery.

The glow came from two buildings down. Not the bakery. Not, I realized with a rush of relief that shamed me even as I felt it, my own shop.

It was the tailor's shop beside mine. An old man named Mr. Finch owned it, a kind, quiet man who had sold me thread on credit during my first hard months in Millbrook, before Rose Haven had earned enough to pay for itself.

By the time I reached the street, half the town was already there, throwing buckets of water drawn from the well at the corner, though the fire had already eaten too much of the roof to be stopped by buckets alone. Mr. Finch stood in the street in his nightclothes, an old man watching everything he had built over forty years disappear into smoke, and nobody could do anything but watch it with him.

I found Daniel in the crowd, his face lit orange by the flames, his jaw set in the same tight line it had worn the day he warned me about Hale Holdings.

"This was not an accident," he said quietly, close enough that only I could hear him.

"You cannot know that."

"I can, and I do." He nodded toward the alley beside the tailor's shop, where the fire had clearly started, away from any stove or lamp that might have been left burning by mistake. "Mr. Finch turned down an offer from Hale Holdings two months ago. I only found out this morning, when I was asking around about who else on this street had been approached."

The cold feeling from three weeks earlier returned to my stomach, heavier this time.

"Rose Haven is two doors down," I said.

"I know."

We stood together and watched the fire burn until there was nothing left of forty years to save, and I understood, standing there in the smoke and the ash, that Daniel had not been exaggerating when he warned me that men like Hale did not need to say a threat out loud.

Mr. Finch did not rebuild. He was too old, he said, and too tired, and within the month he had sold what remained of the burned lot to a buyer nobody in town had ever met, for a price everyone agreed was too low to be anything but desperate.

I never learned for certain if Hale Holdings was the buyer. Daniel believed it was, though the sale had gone through a company with a different name, one more layer folded over the truth to keep it hidden.

I did not sleep well for weeks after the fire. Every creak of the old building above the bakery woke me, certain for one terrified moment that I would smell smoke again. Ruth noticed the shadows under my eyes and asked, gently, if something was wrong, and I told her only that I had not been sleeping, which was true enough without being the whole truth.

Daniel began coming by more often after that, not just on Thursdays, and I found I did not mind it the way I once might have. He walked me home in the evenings when the shop closed late. He arranged, without asking my permission first, for a man he trusted to fit a stronger lock to my door.

"You do not have to do this," I told him one evening, watching him test the new lock with his own hand before he would let himself leave.

"I know I do not have to." He turned to face me, and in the lamplight from the window his expression was more serious than I had seen it before. "I want to, Elena. There is a difference."

I thought about Adrian then, though I tried not to, the way his rejection had taught me that wanting someone and choosing them were not always the same thing, no matter how much the wanting hurt on its own.

Daniel was choosing me. Quietly, patiently, without asking for anything in return.

I did not know yet what to do with that. But standing in the doorway of the shop I had built entirely on my own, watching a man test a lock he had installed simply because he did not want me to be afraid, I found myself, for the first time in a very long while, glad that I was not carrying everything alone anymore.

I did not know that somewhere north of Millbrook, in a pack I had not thought about in months, an Alpha had just heard a rumor about a girl who owned a shop that Hale Holdings could not seem to take, and had gone very still when he heard her name.