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The day started with a burnt scone, an uncooperative kettle, and Mottle threatening to unionize.

So really, Rowan should have known something was coming. Something worse than under-sugared tea and another charmed batch of sleep tonic deciding it was sentient, fabulous, and ready to detonate.

She stood behind the warped counter of the Blackthorn Apothecary, still faintly glittery from yesterday’s glitter-based chemical betrayal, and stared into her chipped mug of tea. It was cold. Possibly sentient. Smelled vaguely like despair, licorice root, and regret.

She hadn’t even meant to brew the “Comforting & Grounding” blend. Her fingers had just wandered to it while she’d been pretending not to spiral. The label on the tin promised “emotional equilibrium and a smooth finish,” which, frankly, was false advertising on the level of felony .

Outside, Briar’s Hollow pulsed with high-strung magical tension.

The cobblestones gleamed a little too brightly, as if freshly licked.

The wind stirred the lavender bushes in her window boxes with the conspiratorial hush of a gossipy aunt.

Somewhere in the distance, the bells at the shrine of the Maiden of Milk and Ash gave a nervous little chime, despite there being no wind strong enough to move them.

The veil between wild magic and domestic peace was thinning , and all Rowan could do was pretend her ex-boyfriend from a decade ago wasn’t currently haunting her frontal lobe like a sexy poltergeist.

Even the tea leaves in her infuser had formed the unmistakable shape of a middle finger. She tried to tell herself it was a spade. Or a pine tree. Something rustic and seasonal. But no. It was clearly flipping her off.

Mottle, her toad familiar and the only creature in her life less emotionally available than she was, gave a long, soul-deep sigh from his perch atop the brass scale beside the till.

“You’re pacing,” he announced in his usual gravel-slicked drawl, eyelids heavy with disdain. “You only pace when your anxiety is doing a can-can in your spleen.”

“I am not pacing,” Rowan snapped, just as she took another tight turn from the crooked front window to the scorched workbench and back again. Her spine was stiff with denial. Her hair crackled like dry thatch. “I’m... circulation-enhancing.”

“You’re brooding with cardio.”

“I’m ignoring you with intention ,” she said through gritted teeth, resisting the urge to hex the toad into a decorative soap.

But he was right, damn him. Something was off .

She could feel it beneath her skin, under her tongue, in the place just behind her sternum where the ley lines used to hum in harmony.

Now they itched. They prickled. They twitched like a freshly plucked nerve or a particularly annoyed cat.

The Hollow was off-balance , and she could feel it like a second heartbeat.

And on the counter, taunting her with its authoritative calligraphy and the arrogant swoop of the Council’s wax seal, lay the scroll that had ruined her mood since yesterday.

Its presence was like a slap in cursive.

The Witch Council of the Nine Grove had written to inform her, with all the grim cheer of a funeral notice, that the town’s wards were collapsing, the ley threads were coming undone, and in an act of absolute and irrevocable desperation, they’d decided to call in outside help .

Rowan’s teeth ground together. Outside help .

As if Briar’s Hollow wasn’t already teetering on the edge of a magical identity crisis. As if a decade of chaotic, unanchored ley magic wasn’t her cross to bear. As if she hadn’t spent ten years trying to clean up the ruins of the very ritual that had broken it… broken her.

She rolled her shoulders, cracked her knuckles, and stormed over to the window again, fully prepared to spot some smug stranger with too many credentials and not enough sense.

And then she dropped her teacup.

Not metaphorically. Literally . The mug shattered against the wide-plank floorboards, herbal sludge splashing across her boots and the baseboards with a hiss like wounded pride.

Because, of course , it wasn’t a stranger.

It was him .

He arrived like something out of a fever dream that had been left in a meadow too long.

A moss-covered cart rumbled down the cobbled main lane of Briar’s Hollow, pulled by two drowsy, speckled oxen who looked like they’d achieved nirvana through the medium of cud.

The cart jingled faintly with the sound of glass bottles and dried herbs, like a traveling apothecary or a very committed druid had crashed headfirst into an antique shop.

Perched lazily on the edge of it, one leg dangling, the other tucked up with obscene, barefoot ease, was a man.

Not just a man.

That man.

Linden Thorn.

Tall and annoyingly graceful, as if he’d been woven together by moonlight and moss, dressed in the soft, fraying hues of a woodland fairy who could absolutely still break your heart and write poetry about it.

His homespun shirt was unlaced at the throat in a way that felt deeply illegal before noon.

His trousers clung to his thighs with the effortless sensuality of someone who did not own a mirror and had therefore never developed shame.

His hair, still too long, still braided with wildflowers, was flaxen gold, loose at the temples where a few curls had slipped free to kiss his cheeks.

And the worst part?

He looked happy .

Not the smug, self-satisfied happiness of someone who’d finally figured out the correct balance of goat’s milk and lavender in their moisturizer, but the quiet, sun-drenched kind. The kind of happiness that wrapped around your ribs and squeezed until you couldn’t quite breathe right.

Bees orbited him like familiars. One landed on his finger, dainty and golden. He whispered to it, lips barely moving, and the bee nodded . Nodded. Then zipped off like it had urgent pollination business and was late for a brunch meeting.

Rowan’s stomach dropped into her boots. Her jaw followed shortly after, unhinging with the grace of a woman whose past was quite literally riding back into town in slow motion, smelling like pine needles and mistakes she wasn’t over.

“No,” she said, decisively, to absolutely no one. “Absolutely not. I refuse.”

And then she ducked behind the counter like the act of not looking would rewrite time.

Mottle, unhelpfully regal atop the scale, didn’t even twitch. “So. I see the cinnamon roll has returned.”

“Don’t,” Rowan muttered, pressing her palms to the cool wood. “Just… don’t.”

But the sound was already coming. The footsteps.

Measured. Familiar. Deeply, deeply irritating.

Wooden stairs creaked. The old bell above the apothecary door jingled with its usual infernal cheer.

Rowan considered, genuinely considered, immolating the entire shop. She could blame it on spontaneous combustion. Or the ley lines. Or excessive sexual tension.

She stood instead. Slowly. With the reluctant grace of someone rising to meet a ghost. A golden, forest-scented, ex-boyfriend ghost.

And there he was.

Standing in the doorway of her crooked little apothecary like he’d never left. Like he belonged in the Hollow. Like the Hollow had simply paused without him.

Older now, yes. But not diminished. Like time had ripened him into some sort of ancient, benevolent chaos god with a honey laugh and tree bark for bones. His eyes were the same: hazel, tilted, laugh-lined at the corners, and they broke , just slightly, when they landed on her.

“Hey, Rowan,” he said, soft and warm and unbearable. “You look like hell.”

Her fist connected with his shoulder before her brain had the chance to stage an intervention.

It wasn’t a hard punch. But it was satisfying . He barely flinched. Just rocked a little, his moss-green shirt soft under her knuckles, the line of his mouth twitching.

“Ow,” he said mildly. “You’ve gotten stronger.”

“And you,” Rowan spat, voice sharp with memory and caffeine withdrawal, “have no right to walk into my shop looking like the poster boy for rustic sensuality and insult me like it’s 1012 when we still do courtship rituals involving public humiliation .”

His brows went up a little. “I said you looked like hell, not bad. There’s a difference.”

“I swear to all nine realms, if you start talking in riddles again, I will weaponize this tea kettle.”

He had the audacity to smile. Just the corners of his mouth. Just enough to feel like being grazed by sunlight.

“Still sharp-tongued,” he murmured. Almost fondly.

“Still alive, somehow,” she replied.

They stared at each other. The air thickened, slow and golden and heavy with everything they hadn’t said in ten years. Rowan’s hand itched. Her mouth burned. She didn’t know whether she wanted to scream into his pecs or bite him.

Possibly both. In reverse order.

Linden tilted his head, looking around the shop like it was a museum exhibit he’d once loved. “Smells like mugwort and repressed emotion in here.”

“Thank you,” Rowan said sweetly. “It’s called branding .”

Outside, the bees had massed on the window boxes in quiet, supportive formation. A squirrel sat beside them on the ledge, staring at Linden with silent, feral judgment. The ley threads gave another twitch. Tense, like a string drawn too tight.

“I’m staying across the lane,” Linden said, casual as anything. “The old ivy cottage. The Council wanted me close to the source.”

Rowan’s eye twitched. “The source ? I am not a source. I am a private citizen with an apothecary license and a tax record. I just happen to have a fully dysfunctional relationship with the ley lines .”

“You’re the person with the most experience touching the Hollow’s deep magic,” he said gently. “Even if it bit back.”

She flinched. Just slightly. But he saw it. Of course he saw it.

And then he looked past her. To the sigils burned into the walls, the jars carefully arranged in wild, protective order. The kettle still spitting sparks. The raw, warded life of the place.

He looked at it the way he’d once looked at her.

Like she was worth loving. Even broken. Even sharp-edged.

Rowan’s throat tightened like a noose.

“I didn’t come to fight,” he said finally. “I came to help.”

She exhaled through her nose, hot and sharp and possibly containing traces of steam. “Fine,” she said. “But you stay out of my apothecary. Got it?”

Linden gave her a smile so soft and devastating it might as well have been a slow-burn sex scene. “No promises.”

Rowan slammed the door in his face.

And then promptly opened it again because she’d forgotten Mottle on the stoop.

The toad blinked up at her with dry amusement. “He’s still hot.”

“I will enchant you into a footstool.”

“You tried that once,” Mottle said. “I ended up with a throw pillow fetish.”

Rowan hissed like an enraged kettle, snatched him up under one arm, and stomped back inside.

But she could still feel him.

Linden. Like a storm just waiting to come back in season. Like sun-warmed stone and rosemary and every memory she’d ever shoved into a drawer and padlocked shut.