Page 39 of Mate Night Snack
Ashwin had seen her. And worse? He’d spoken her name.
She didn’t sleep after that.
She stayed up and traced every word she could remember from the dream into her notebook. She drew the way his eyes had looked. The shape of his stance. The corners of the square where the lanterns had gone dark. She circled the phrase “You see too much” over and over until the pen tore through the paper.
Her brain spun.
Why her?
Whynow?
It wasn’t just the missing girls anymore. It wasn’t even just the Veil. There was a pattern forming, and her name was part of it whether she wanted it or not.
The charm hadn’t failed because it was weak. It had failed because whatever reached herknew how to find her anyway.
Katniss stood and paced the length of the room, heart pounding in her ears.
She thought about going to Emmett. But what would she even say?
Hey, so I had a dream where your psychotic former pack leader whispered my name like a curse and then made the world flicker out around me. Yeah, fun stuff. Also, your protective fur charm got fried like kindling.
He already looked at her as if she was breakable. If she told him this, he’d cage her. Out of love, maybe, but a cage still locked. And she couldn’t afford to be locked away. Not now.
She needed more.
More answers. More clues. More leverage. Because whatever this town had buried, it was crawling back to the surface. And Katniss Greaves wasn’t going to end up another body in the woods. She was going to drag the truth into the daylight if it burned her fingers doing it.
That morning, she tucked the scorched charm into her bag, nestled between her notebook and her recorder.
She didn’t tell Twyla.
Didn’t tell Miriam.
Didn’t tell Emmett.
Not yet.
She needed to understand what this meant before she said it out loud because once it was spoken, it was real.
And once it was real… she’d never be able to look away again.
16
EMMETT
The hinges on the back door of the Hollow Oak Book Nook squeaked just slightly when Emmett stepped out, a smear of sawdust still clinging to his forearms. He’d been replacing the threshold beneath the storage room since the old one had warped from last winter’s freeze.
Easy job. His hands were busy. His mind wasn’t.
And now, with the task done and the tools packed up, he had nothing left to distract him from Maeve’s voice echoing in his head.
You can’t outrun who you were… but maybe you can stop punishing yourself for it.
He wasn’t sure he knew how.
But he did know one thing. Katniss was unraveling. Slowly. Quietly. Like a thread tugged one inch at a time until the whole damn thing fell apart in your hands. And after what Maeve said, after what he’dseenin her lately, he couldn’t keep standing on the sidelines pretending that letting her walk this road alone was the same thing as keeping her safe.
He walked straight to the Hearth & Hollow.
