Page 86 of Divine Temptations

I took a sip of my own and set the glass down with deliberate calm.

“I’m doing a ritual tonight,” I said carefully. “Smaller than the last one. More intimate. But still… real. If you’re curious—if you want to see what this is all about—I’d like you to come.”

His head snapped up.

Those eyes. Wide. Searching. Vulnerable.

For a long moment, he said nothing.

And then he nodded.

Just once.

But it was enough to make my pulse race.

“I’ll be there,” Julian murmured, then he reached in his pocket, and with a shaky hand he tossed a few bills on the bar. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

The clearing behind the healing center buzzed with laughter and the scent of burning sage. Someone was strumming a mandolin. Someone else had brought their dog, which was wearing a flower crown and had been anointed with lavender oil. Zephyr had set up a low altar out of an overturned milk crate, draped in silk scarves and dotted with tea lights, crystals, and a half-empty bottle of rosé.

It was beautiful in a very specific Riverbend way—chaotic, earnest, and softly glowing with intention.

And I couldn’t feel a single goddamn thing except for the pounding of my heart.

He was coming. Julian.

I kept scanning the treeline like a deer about to bolt. Everyone else laughed and chatted like this was any other gathering, but I was wound tight as a coil, half-convinced I’d imagined his blush at the bar, his whispered confession, that moment when our legs had touched and something electric passed between us like a spark too bold to ignore.

What was I doing?

“Stop vibrating like a broken tuning fork,” Zephyr said beside me, slipping her arm through mine.

I jumped slightly, and she rolled her eyes in that affectionate, vaguely cosmic way of hers.

She tugged me gently away from the others, down a short slope toward the edge of the woods. There under a young sycamore, she took both of my hands in hers and shut her eyes.

“I’m reading your vibes,” she murmured.

“You don’t have to—”

“Shh.”

I closed my mouth. Zephyr might’ve dressed like Stevie Nicks’s art teacher and burned mugwort during Mercury retrograde, but her intuition had never failed me. Not once.

After a moment, her brows furrowed.

“There’s a duality to him,” she said, her voice low. “Like two wolves. One of them really wants to know you, Jude. Deeply. Fully. Like he’s starving for something real. But the other one… I don’t know. The other wolf is pacing in circles. Guarded. Afraid. Maybe angry. I can’t quite reach it.”

I swallowed hard. “So what does that mean?”

“It means be careful,” she said, opening her eyes. “I couldn’t stand to see you hurt. Not by someone like him. He’s got a storm inside, that one.”

I nodded slowly, heart heavy. “I know.”

Zephyr rubbed her thumbs across my palms. “What’s tonight about, really?” She asked, her tone lightening. “You’ve got that ‘I’m planning something slightly unhinged’ look in your eye.”

I laughed under my breath, grateful for the shift. “I want us all to walk down to the river.”

She blinked. “The Shenandoah?”