Page 5 of Mate Night Snack
Keep her close. Keep her quiet.
The beer did nothing to quiet his thoughts.
The woods whispered. They always did this time of year. Veil ran thinner when the moon turned waning. Trees leaned in, trails shifted underfoot. It wasn’t dangerous unless something called it forward.
Problem was, people like her? They called things. Without even knowing.
His wolf paced inside him. Restless. Hadn’t stirred this much in months.
“She’s not for you,” he said out loud, as if that might settle it.
The wolf didn’t agree.
It didn’t make sense. She was human. Mortal. Fragile in the way humans always were. Her skin too soft, bones too breakable. Except she hadn’t looked fragile, not really. She looked like trouble with a flashlight and a notebook. She looked like a question with no easy answer.
And her scent… it still clung to his memory, just beneath the sharpness of pine and firewood.
Emmett stared into the trees. If she kept pushing, she'd find things no one wanted to talk about. Things that hadn’t healed right. Not for the town. Not for him. Things that were better to stay buried, not for convenience, but for safety.
The wind shifted. Cold. Carrying the faintest echo of something old.
He set the beer down and stood.
The trail toward the inn cut through a thicket that only locals used. The Veil usually didn’t let outsiders find it. But if she had seer blood…
He shook the thought loose. No point in chasing shadows. Not yet.
Still, he’d be at the Glade in the morning. He’d tell Varric about the interaction. He’d make sure someone stayed ahead of whatever storm she was about to bring with her.
Because if Katniss Greaves kept nosing around Hollow Oak’s secrets, it wasn’t just her that’d end up broken.
It might be all of them.
3
KATNISS
The Griddle & Grind smelled like cinnamon sugar and secrets.
Katniss sank into a corner booth with her mic clipped to the neckline of her faded Zeppelin tee, her satchel open beside her and her notebook already filled with half-legible scrawl. She’d interviewed three townsfolk this morning, each more charmingly evasive than the last.
The butcher had smiled like she was a puppy asking about taxes. The woman at the quilting shop claimed to have moved hereafterthe nineties and wasn’t “one for gossip.” And the local librarian had mysteriously “stepped out for a spell” the moment Katniss mentioned the nameMabel Dorsey, the missing girl from the old article.
Hollow Oak was tight-lipped. Polite, too, which made it harder. Folks here didn’t slam doors or raise voices. They just… shifted the subject. Smiled around corners. Changed directions like wind over water. And unfortunately, Katniss hadn’t had to work this hard in a while due to everyone wanting their piece to be heard or five minutes of fame.
But Katniss had been digging into cold cases for years. And if this town thought it could out-charm her, it didn’t know who it was dealing with.
A delicate clink of porcelain snapped her from her thoughts. A tea cup—blue and gold-rimmed, with steam curling like ribbon—appeared in front of her.
“I call this one Moonshadow Blend,” the woman said, sliding into the booth opposite Katniss. “Good for clarity. And making people just talk a little more than they meant to.”
Twyla.
Up close, the woman looked like a storybook come to life. Her wheat-blond hair was braided over one shoulder, wild bits tucked with sprigs of dried lavender. Her eyes, soft brown with flecks of something brighter, twinkled like they knew the punchline to a joke the rest of the world hadn’t caught up to.
Katniss raised a brow. “You drugged this?”
Twyla grinned. “Only with intention. Nothing illegal. Just persuasion in plant form.”
