Page 10 of Scarlett’s Wicked Wolf (Filthy Fairy-tales #1)

Scarlett

The dream slides on like silk. I move, but the body isn’t mine.

It’s thinner and lighter, honey-scented with lavender and woodsmoke. The room around me tilts, blurs, and resolves into Ruby Cottage. I can hear the clock’s soft tick, the hearth’s slow sigh. The wards hum in the walls like nervous bees.

Grandma?

The question barely forms before it answers itself. I’m inside her. Riding her breath. Wearing her worry as she wakes from a nap in the armchair, the blanket slipping from her knees.

Where is she?

Her fear and worry for my safety slip through me like smoke. Rising calmly, she presses a palm to the doorframe, feeling for thin places. The wood hums back: not broken but not as robust as it should be.

Her head whips around at a tap on the window.

Black as spilled ink, the crow perches on the sill and cocks his head. Moving quickly, she unlatches the window, her fingers deft as she unties the ribbon from his leg. A scrap of paper falls into her palm.

Safe. Her thoughts sigh through me as she reads the note. Scarlett is safe.

Relief loosens Grandma’s chest so sharply that I feel it in my ribs.

“Thank you, boy,” she whispers, stroking the crow’s throat. He blinks as if he understands.

Grandma scribbles a note on the back of an old shopping list—Scarlett is safe. Call off the search. My thanks, E—and uses the ribbon to re-tie it to the crow’s leg.

She presses the crow to her cheek for one second, then lifts him to the open pane. “To Xander and Galina,” she tells him, voice firming. “Straight there. Then back to me. Don’t dawdle.”

Through our connection, I learn that Grandma asked Xander and Galina for their help when I didn’t return.

The crow launches into the air, a slip of shadow quickly swallowed by the trees.

Grandma closes the window, sets the original note on the mantlepiece, and places both palms on the spiral stone passed down through the women in our family to focus her Sight. The stone answers with a steady hum like a heartbeat. She breathes with it until her hands stop shaking.

And then, like sunlight striking a mirror, her Sight tilts.

It isn’t a picture at first. It’s a feeling: smoke-warm air, pine sap, and the low cadence of a man’s voice counting breath. The room swings open around us: logs, a banked fire, a bed I know by its creak. Reid’s cabin.

The vision clears as I blink. I see me, sweat-damp and shivering, curled in Reid’s arms while he steadies my breath and supports my weight. He tips water to my lips, wipes my brow, hides nothing of his fear, nothing of his tenderness.

Grandma inhales, and her relief holds a sense of rightness.

Part of me knew, her thought unfurls, warm and certain. She was meant for something larger than this cottage, larger than my hands. I could never see the shape. Now I do. She’s exactly where and with whom she’s meant to be.

The words resonate inside me. Any remaining uncertainties settle. The bond hums, low and sure. Reid’s steadiness is like a palm between my shoulder blades, even here, even dreaming.

Grandma blinks, returning to awareness and the cottage.

She moves through her afternoon with a new, quiet certainty stitched into her heart, knowing I’m safe.

Her actions are practiced and purposeful as she places bread and salt on the windowsill, a coal nursed back to a bright flame in the hearth, and fresh salt with a pinch of thyme along the east baseboard.

She eats apple slices and a heel of yesterday’s bread dipped in honey, standing at the kitchen counter.

The crow returns a short time later. Grandma pays him in walnuts, scribbles another note, and ties it to his leg. “Take this back to Scarlett.”

The crow dips his head in what looks like a nod and takes off again.

Sunlight slides along the floorboards in thin ladders before giving way to the shadows of night and then repeating. The clock clears its throat every hour. Gran crochets in her chair by the fire. She pauses more than once to listen to nothing at all.

Her father played with dark magic, the thought comes, heavy as a lodestone. Old laws do not forget their sums.

My father? Dark magic? What does she mean? But her subsequent thoughts provide me with no answers.

Xander and Galina visit with Gregor and Arya on the second day, asking if there’s been any news of me.

Arya’s pregnancy gives her red hair and green eyes an extra glow as she stands beside her hulking ogre husband, Gregor, whose tusks gleam faintly in the firelight.

Concern sharpens Xander’s handsome, battered features—Griffin strength wrapped in human kindness.

He’s the quiet anchor of the room, his gaze often drawn to the window.

Beside him, Galina’s hair shines like frost in sunlight.

Her eyes are the exact blue of a winter sky before snow, and her faint iridescent scales catch the light, hinting at the dragon that lives beneath her skin.

They stay for nearly an hour. Long enough for them to finish their tea and for Grandma to press jars of honeyed plums into their hands. Long enough for the silence between words to fill with a deeper worry.

Dusk thins the daylight on the third day, and that’s when the air changes.

First, it’s the temperature—a slow leak of cold under the door.

Then the beesong of the wards flattens, like a choir trying to hold a note too long.

Gran sets her crocheting aside and rises, palm to the lintel. The hum shivers beneath her skin.

“Not now,” she murmurs to the wood. “Not here.”

Wet breath huffs at the keyhole. Claws scrape against the door.

Gran doesn’t flinch. She steps to the hearth, feeds the fire, and sets the iron knife on the mantle with the blade turned down. She does not open the door.

The presence drifts to the window, sniffs along the seam. Frost webs the glass in a breath, then writes itself into a shape that isn’t a word: it’s a tally mark, a circle pricked with thorns.

“Counting,” Gran says softly.

Counting what?

Silence stretches.

Then the wards buck.

A hairline crack of cold sprints along the east wall, quick as a mouse through wainscot. The spiral stone on the mantle tings like cooling iron. Gran’s head snaps toward the kitchen window as the frost there flares white and fractures.

Something has found a seam and put its weight on it.

“Enough,” Gran says, no longer the woman who crochets and bakes bread; she is Eloise of Ruby Cottage, she’s the guardian, the shield between me and what waits in the woods.

The gray wolf steps into view through the window, wearing night like a borrowed coat. He lifts his head and looks at her through the glass. The wards vibrate, steady, then dip again as he leans his weight a fraction more into the seam he’s found.

Stay away, Scarlet.

The dream hears Grandma. It tightens around that thought until it is the only thing I can hold. Truth crystallizes cold and absolute: he’s gone to Ruby Cottage to draw me out.

He isn’t hunting her.

He’s baiting me.

He wants me to run straight into his teeth.

“No,” I breathe.

The dream flinches as the wards shatter. The gray wolf doesn’t hurry. He prowls around the cottage to the front door, which explodes seconds later to admit his mangled form.

Gran moves toward the pantry, toward the salt jar and the hawthorn pins. I see the angles of the room the wolf will use as he prowls toward her; the edge of the table that will bruise her, the corner that will catch her, the soft vulnerability of her throat...

The dream tightens… and snaps, sending me lurching back into my body.

“Grandma!”

Reid lifts his head as her name dies in my throat, his palm warm at my waist. “Scarlett? What is it?”

I swallow past my dry throat. “The gray wolf is at Ruby Cottage. He’s going to hurt Grandma to draw me out.”

His gaze sharpens. The wolf in him listens for a threat; the man in him goes still.

“We can’t leave her vulnerable.” My voice cracks on the last word. “We have to help her.”

He nods immediately. “We will.” Strategy clicks into place behind his eyes. “But we do it together. No splitting up.”

His words settle in my bones, knowing I’m not alone. “Let’s go.”