Rival Hearts

Chapter Six: Sabotage

The community square smelled like woodsmoke and citrus by the time I arrived, strings of amber lights looped between the old oak trees that had stood over Aldermere's harvest celebration for as long as I could remember. Long tables ran the length of the cobblestones, draped in white cloth that already had a few wine stains blooming across it, and somewhere past the crowd a string quartet was tuning up, the notes drifting thin and uneven over the noise of a hundred conversations. The air had that particular late-September chill that made people stand closer together than they needed to, breath fogging faintly under the lantern light, and for the first time in days my shoulders came down from where they had been sitting near my ears.

This was the Aldermere I remembered. Not boardrooms, not marriage contracts. Just this — a city that still knew how to gather.

Ivy found me near the entrance, clipboard in hand, already flushed with the particular stress of someone who had been running on coffee since six that morning.

"Thank god." She grabbed my arm and pulled me toward the food tables set up along the eastern edge of the square. "Okay, everything's mostly under control, but I need you to double-check the setup before people start really flooding in. The catering trays came in an hour ago, I had them stored in the cooling tent behind the stage so nothing spoils before serving."

"On it." I fell into the rhythm easily, grateful for something to do with my hands that had nothing to do with weddings. I walked the length of the tent, checking trays, counting serving dishes, making a mental list of what still needed setting out. It felt good, being useful in a way that was entirely mine.

I was halfway through counting the dessert trays when I spotted him.

Kael was near the back of the cooling tent, crouched beside one of the large catering containers, lifting the lid slightly like he was checking something inside. He wasn't in a suit tonight, just a dark sweater that made him look younger, more like someone who might genuinely belong at a town celebration than a man about to inherit a company. He glanced up, saw me watching, and his expression tightened into caution — the particular wariness of a man who knew exactly how our last few conversations had gone.

"What are you doing back here?" I asked, more sharply than I meant to.

"Someone asked me to check the seal on this one." He nodded at the container, straightening up. "Said it looked like it might not be sitting right."

"Who asked you?"

He hesitated, just slightly. "One of the event staff. I didn't catch his name."

It struck me as strange even then, a flicker of unease I didn't have time to examine, because Ivy's voice cut across the tent a moment later, sharp with panic.

"Wren! We have a problem."

I found her at the head table, staring down into an open serving dish with an expression I didn't like at all. The smell hit me before I even looked — something sour and wrong beneath the roasted vegetables, a chemical sharpness that had no business being anywhere near food.

"Oh, no." I leaned closer, and my stomach turned. Half the dishes on the table looked fine. The other half had gone visibly, unmistakably bad — discolored, reeking, clearly contaminated with something that had nothing to do with poor refrigeration.

"This isn't spoilage." Ivy's voice had dropped low, urgent. "Someone did this on purpose."

The words landed like ice water down my spine. I thought immediately, instinctively, of the man I had just found crouched beside the containers, lid lifted, alone with the food less than ten minutes before this exact discovery.

"Kael." I said his name before I had fully decided to, already turning toward the back of the tent where I had left him.

He was still there, watching the growing commotion with an expression I couldn't read, and every ounce of exhaustion and humiliation from the last five days — my entire life rearranged without my consent — came up in my throat at once.

"You." I crossed the tent fast, loud enough that heads were already turning, the string quartet faltering somewhere behind me. "You were back here. Alone. With the food. Ten minutes before this happened."

"Wren, I was checking a seal, I told you—"

"You told me a story about an event staffer nobody can name." My voice climbed, raw and furious, months of tension finding an outlet that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with him all at once. "This is exactly the kind of thing your family would do. Sabotage the one event my family's actually trusted to run, make us look incompetent right before the wedding, give your father one more reason to hold this over mine—"

"That is insane." His voice had gone hard, defensive. "I didn't touch anything except the one container I was asked to check. You can ask anyone—"

"I don't need to ask anyone. I saw you." The crowd had fully turned toward us now, dozens of faces I half-recognized from a childhood I had left behind, all of them watching the Ashcombe daughter unravel in public. I didn't care. "You ruined this. You ruined the one thing I actually wanted to do right since I got back to this city, and I am done pretending I don't know exactly what kind of person you are."

"You don't know anything about what kind of person I am." Something raw cracked through his composure for the first time since the coffee shop, real anger finally breaking through the careful control he had kept wrapped around himself. "You've decided who I am since the night we met, and nothing I say is going to change your mind, so why don't you just say what you actually think and get it over with."

"Fine. I think you're exactly what I assumed you were that first night." My voice shook, but I didn't stop. "Careless. Cruel when it's convenient. And apparently willing to ruin an entire community event just to make my family look bad."

He didn't answer. He just looked at me for a long, silent moment, something shutting down behind his eyes, and then he turned and walked out of the tent without another word, leaving me standing there in front of half the city, breathing hard, humiliated, and, though I wouldn't understand it until much later, entirely wrong.

Near the edge of the square, half-hidden by the shadow of one of the old oak trees, someone watched the whole scene unfold with quiet, careful satisfaction — a small, private smile that no one thought to notice, because no one had any reason yet to be looking.