Page 117 of Nash
"Tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow I'm fixing the ink stain on your supply closet floor."
"Worth it."
His hand traces lazy circles on my back. My eyes grow heavy. The quiet doesn't scare me. For the first time in twenty-two years of filling every silence I've ever encountered, the quiet feels like exactly where I'm supposed to be.
His lips press against the top of my head.
"My girl," he murmurs.
My fingers find the headband on his wrist and hold on.
Chapter 27
Ruby
Thesageisdifferenttoday.
There are three fully lit sticks, the smoke thick enough that Amaranth smells like a forest floor after a rainstorm. On Frankie's altar shelf, the candles are burning taller than I've ever seen them. The flames are steady and bright in the way that used to make me pause but now makes me pay attention.
Frankie is standing barefoot on the hardwood in the center of the shop floor. Her dark hair is loose. Hands at her sides. She looks like a woman who has been standing in this exact spot for a while, gathering herself before something that requires all of her.
"Hey." I lock the door behind me and set my bag at my station.
The shop is empty except for Frankie and the smoke, and the emptiness is deliberate. Nash dropped me at the curb and kept the engine running. "War room," he said when I asked why he wasn't coming in. "Malachi called a meeting." But the way he said it, flat, no detail, told me Frankie had already arranged this. She texted him. He agreed. A prospect is posted outside the front window, visible through the glass. Backup detail Nash would never leave me without.
"You got Nash to leave," I say.
"I asked him for the morning. He understood."
"He understood. You texted my boyfriend, the man who hasn't let me out of his sightline in months, and he just rode off to a war room meeting that conveniently materialized this morning?"
"The meeting is real. The timing was mine."
"Of course it was. Because Frankie Devereaux orchestrates everything, including the Sergeant-at-Arms's schedule. The Sergeant-at-Arms allows it because even Nash knows better than to argue with a woman whose candles light themselves."
"Sit down, Ruby."
I pull the client chair to the center of the floor and sit. Whatever is happening requires a front-row seat. If Frankie is standing in the middle of her shop with three sticks of sage and bare feet at eight in the morning, I want to be close enough to see every detail.
She crosses to the altar shelf on the wall behind her station. Touches the base of the center candle with her fingertip. The flame responds. It doesn't flicker. It grows. Taller, brighter, pushing shadows back from the shelf's corner. She holds her finger there for three seconds, then lifts it. The flame settles back to its original height. The other two candles hold their size.
"You've seen me do that before," she says.
"I've seen you do that a hundred times. I've been telling myself it's a draft."
"There's no draft." She turns. The flat, factual register carries more weight than anyone else's emotion. "My grandmother was a witch. So was my mother. My sister is. I am."
"I know," I say. "Frankie, I've known for months. I watched a candle light itself while you were in the bathroom. I've seen plants lean toward you when you walk past them. The temperature in this shop drops two degrees every time you're upset, and I've been pretending it's the HVAC because the alternative was admitting that my boss controls the weather with her mood."
Frankie's mouth does the complicated thing. The almost-smile.
"But we haven't actually talked about it," I say. "Not really. You told me to keep Leo's secret, and I kept it. You told me the candles are tools, and I believed you. We've been dancing around the full conversation for months like two people who both know the other one knows but neither one wants to be the first to say 'so about the witchcraft.'"
"So about the witchcraft," Frankie says.
"Yeah. About that."
