Stormhaven’s Rejected Baker

Chapter 2: The Night the Rope Was Cut

“You can hate me tomorrow,” Gideon said. “Tonight, just promise you won’t tell anyone about the bread.”

I stood in the freezer with a loaf in my arms and my breath turning to smoke.

“Who would I tell?” My voice cracked. “Who would believe the Alpha of Stormhaven buys bread from a woman he threw away?”

“Nia.”

“Don’t say my name like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like it hurts.”

He flinched. It was small. If I had not spent years watching his face, I would have missed it.

“Take what you need for the morning,” he said, very low. “Butter is on the left.”

“I don’t need butter.”

“Then take bread.” He almost smiled. It broke before it reached his mouth. “It’s the best on the coast.”

He turned and went. I heard his bare feet cross the stone floor and fade down the hall.

I stood in the cold for a long time with two hundred and sixty loaves of my own life around me.

I picked up one more loaf and held it to my face. Honey, salt, yeast. It smelled exactly like my kitchen at five in the morning, which was ridiculous. Nothing about this house should have smelled like home. I set it back in its neat row and closed the freezer door as gently as if a child were sleeping behind it.

* * *

I lay awake until the window turned gray. And because I was too tired to stop it, I let myself remember Rope Night.

Every year, on the highest tide of autumn, the Stormhaven Pack gathered on the sea wall. Lanterns hung from the posts. The sea slapped the stones below. Couples who felt the Pull stepped forward and tied a rope of braided salt-grass around their wrists, and the pack watched and cheered.

The Pull isn’t magic. My father told me that when I was small, in his gruff, gentle voice. It’s just how our bodies know. A smell like home. A heartbeat that skips for one person. I had felt it at sixteen the first time Gideon Vance walked into my father’s boat shop with a broken oar. My whole body said: him.

At twenty, I stood on that wall in my mother’s old blue dress with the rope in my hands. My father stood in the front row in his Sunday jacket, his white beard combed, his blue watch cap held against his chest. He was grinning so hard I thought his face would crack.

Gideon walked toward me through the lantern light. He was twenty-six and tall as a mast. The whole pack held its breath.

He stopped an arm’s length away.

He took the rope from my hands. For one second, I thought he would tie it.

Then he pulled a knife from his belt.

“I cut this tie,” Gideon said.

The blade went through the braided grass like it was nothing. Two pieces fell onto the stones.

A noise came out of the crowd, like wind in a net.

“She’s a fisherman’s daughter.” His voice was steady. Dead. “She will never be Luna of Stormhaven. This was a mistake, and it ends here.”

It felt as though someone had reached inside my chest and yanked out the keel. I dropped to my knees on the wet stones. I heard someone laugh. I heard my father’s voice break in the crowd: “Gideon. Son. What are you doing?”

I looked up and found Magnus Vance at the front of the crowd, in his tweed coat, with a small, calm smile on his face.

I looked at Callum Reed, Gideon’s oldest friend. He would not meet my eyes.

I looked at Gideon. He stared at a point above my head, with his jaw locked and his hands shaking.

“Why?” I whispered.

He did not answer.

My father pushed through the crowd. He wrapped his coat around my shoulders, put his big rough hand under my arm, and lifted me to my feet.

“Come home, Nia,” he said. “Come home.”

I walked down that sea wall with three hundred people watching, and I swore I would never cry in front of any of them.

I made it to the truck before I broke.

Three weeks later, in a bathroom in Pellam Cove, I held a small white stick and watched two pink lines appear. I told my father I was fine. I told him the baby was mine alone. I made him promise never to tell Gideon.

He said, “You’re making a mistake, girl.”

He was right. I just wasn’t ready to hear it yet.

A year and a half after that, his boat went down in a storm, and I buried an empty coffin.

* * *

At seven, I was kneading dough in the east kitchen with my sleeves rolled up and my face scrubbed raw.

I made myself loosen my fingers one at a time, the way my father taught me to work a stubborn knot. Slow. Patient. Nothing to see here.

“You’re up early.”

A man stood in the doorway holding a book of poems. Silver-streaked beard. Tweed jacket. Warm brown eyes with deep crinkles at the corners. He looked like the kind of uncle who brings you a peppermint and tells you a story.

“Magnus Vance,” he said, with a small bow. “Regent of Stormhaven. And you must be the famous baker.”

“Nia Brennan.”

“Brennan.” He rolled the name around his mouth like a sweet. “Captain Dale’s girl. I was so sorry about your father. A terrible loss. The sea takes the best of us.”

“Thank you.”

“The cake will be the heart of the wedding, you know.” He strolled around the counter, trailing one finger along the flour. “A wedding without a good cake is like a poem without an ending. Everyone remembers how it finished.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“I’m sure you will.” He stopped beside me, much closer than politeness allowed. “My nephew is a sentimental man, Ms. Brennan. It is his only weakness.”

I kept my hands moving.

“Is that so?”

“A man like that can be very easily hurt.” He smiled. “I take great care to see that he isn’t.”

He tipped an imaginary hat and left.

I saw that I had squeezed the dough into a tight, hard ball.

* * *

“Taste.”

Seraphine slid a spoon of buttercream between my lips before I could argue. She had come in at nine in a pair of old jeans, hair tied back, and set herself up on a stool like it was her own kitchen.

“Too sweet?” I asked.

“Perfect. I hate sweet things. That’s how I know it’s good.” She licked the spoon. “Do you know what I want on my cake?”

“Flowers? Gold leaf?”

“A trapdoor.”

I laughed. I laughed before I could stop myself. “A what?”

“A trapdoor. So the whole thing can sink out of sight and nobody ever has to look at it again.” Her smile faded. She turned the spoon between her fingers. “I’m sorry. That was a bad joke.”

“Was it a joke?”

She looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were the palest blue I had ever seen. Clear, tired, a little afraid.

“I don’t know,” she said softly.

Then she slid off the stool and left, and I stood there with a bowl in my hands and a funny feeling in my chest.

* * *

It rained all afternoon. I baked tester layers and burned my wrist twice and checked my phone every half hour. Nothing from Marta. That was good. No news was good.

At six, Bryn knocked on my door with a pile of fresh towels.

“Dinner’s at seven. You’ll eat in the kitchen with Toby.” She hesitated. “Something came for you. Found it on the floor outside your room.”

“Thank you.”

She left. I turned the envelope over.

Plain white. No name. No stamp.

Inside lay a single glossy photograph.

My daughter sat on the front step of Salt & Honey in her yellow raincoat, drawing a chalk heart on the wet stone. Her tongue stuck out the side of her mouth. Her copper curls blew in the wind. She had no idea she was being watched.

I could not breathe.

I turned the picture over.

Four neat words, in black ink.

Sweet girl. Be a shame if the cake were late.