Semua Bab Marked By Mistake: The Baker's Secret: Bab 11 - Bab 20

(Roman's POV)"I think something is wrong with her." Marcus did not look up from the paperwork spread across his desk, though the flat, certain way I said it seemed to be enough to get his attention anyway."With Ivy?, why did you think so?""She has not returned three of my calls this week. She changed the pickup routine for Hazel without telling me why. And yesterday, when I stopped by, she flinched when the bell over the door rang, before she even saw who it was."Marcus set down his pen slowly. "You have been keeping count I see""That is not the point Marcus" I retorted "It is a little bit the point." He smiles, he leaned back, studying me with the particular patience he reserved for moments he suspected I would not appreciate being questioned. "What do you think is going on?" He asked That was, unfortunately, the exact question I had been turning over for days without landing on an answer I liked."I do not know. Something has her scared. More scared than the general unease a

(Ivy's POV)Saturday mornings smelled like cinnamon and burnt toast in our apartment, an unglamorous ritual that had become, somewhere over the past five years, one of my favorite hours of the week, sunlight slanting gold and low through the kitchen window, dust motes drifting lazy over the small round table where Hazel sat swinging her feet, waiting for pancakes she had already declared, twice, were taking too long. The radiator ticked and groaned in the corner the way it always did once the mornings turned properly cold, and somewhere below us I could hear Denise's sister's dog barking at the mail carrier, the whole small, familiar soundtrack of our life playing out exactly the way it did every Saturday."Mommy, can Roman come to my birthday?"The spatula slipped clean out of my hand."Your birthday is not for four months, baby.""I know. I am asking early." She said this with the particular, devastating logic of a five year old who had clearly given the matter serious thought. "Gra

(Roman's POV)The invitation had been sitting on my desk for three days, cream cardstock with Darkwood's crest embossed in gold, and I had read Ivy's name written in Theresa's careful hand more times than I was willing to admit to anyone, including myself."You could just call her," Marcus said, watching me turn the card over for what was probably the tenth time that afternoon. "Instead of staring at her name like it might rearrange itself into something more interesting.""I am not staring." I shot back"You are absolutely staring." He plucked the invitation out of my hand, examining it with exaggerated seriousness. "Cream cardstock. Gold foil. Theresa's handwriting. This is, without question, the most effort anyone in this family has put into a piece of paper in a decade.""Give that back.""Do you remember when Ivy came to see me, weeks ago now, the night my man first spotted Bloodmoon scouts near her father's house?"I set the card down, mostly to stop him from pointing it out aga

(Roman's POV)The party had thinned considerably by the time I walked Ivy out to her car, the string lights dimmed to a low golden glow, most of the guests gone, the band packed up, only the faint hum of insects and the distant murmur of staff still cleaning up on the terrace breaking the quiet. Somewhere beyond the low stone wall marking the edge of the grounds, the tree line stood black and still against a sky gone thick with cloud, the moon little more than a pale smear behind it, the air carrying the damp, mineral smell of a fog that had not quite decided whether to roll back in. Our footsteps crunched softly over gravel still faintly damp from earlier in the day, the whole world gone hushed and private the way it always did once a party finally emptied out."Thank you," Ivy said, keys already in hand, though she made no move to actually unlock her car. "For tonight. It was not nearly as terrifying as I expected.""High praise, I’ll take it." I said smiling "I contain multitudes.

(Roman's POV)The temperature had dropped hard enough by the second week of the guard rotation that my breath fogged thick in front of me every time I stepped out onto Ivy's front stoop, streetlights haloed in the cold, the whole town gone quiet and white under a fresh layer of snow that had not yet been trampled into slush.I had assigned three separate teams to rotate through the watch. I had taken the majority of the night shifts myself.I don’t have a clear thought ever since I opened the box, could Mari actually be alive?, or is this just a plot to have me shaken? And why did it look so much like a threatening letter, what could be linked Ivy and the ghost of Mari at this point, the thoughts kept circulating around me."You know that defeats the purpose of having a rotation," Marcus said, arriving to relieve me at two in the morning, breath clouding as he studied me with open, exhausted amusement. "The whole point is that you sleep sometimes.""I sleep.""You sleep for four hours