Secretly Married to the Lycan Tycoon

Dusk, Neighbors, and a Thread

By midmorning the clinic smells like soap and oatmeal instead of wolfsbane and fear.

Pip sits on the cot with a cartoon playing low, cradling a mug that’s too big for his hands. When the generator on Noor Street hums to life across the block, Mrs. Bennett sends a voice message that’s seventy percent weeping and thirty percent threats to knit Arden Walcott a thank-you scarf he’ll be legally required to wear.

“Don’t,” I text back. “He has a face allergy.”

“Then I’ll knit it for you, Doctor Mouth,” she replies, and I deserve that.

A delivery shows up—four cartons stamped HALE FOUNDATION in tasteful silver. The labels say blankets; the blankets are cashmere that hates washing machines.

“Send them back,” I tell the courier.

He blinks. “Ma’am?”

“Send a note,” I add. “Cotton washes. Thanks in advance.”

Pip giggles into his mug. It sounds like a future deciding to keep itself.

⸻

At noon, Rhea pings me a location pin and a photo taken from a distance—GREYROOT HERBARIUM etched into frosted glass, a sign that pretends it’s a poem. greyroot buys: aconitum shipments ×3 / last mile driver overlaps with “wellness” shell she writes. also a council aide paid their invoice from a personal account. spicy.

“Do not get arrested,” I reply.

pls who do u think i am she answers, and attaches a cat gif for legal protection.

⸻

At three, Arden texts Downstairs, and when I step outside, Noah is already there, the SUV idling like a calm animal. I lock the clinic twice, set the kettle to remind me the day will continue later, and let them fold me into a plan.

“You’re not obligated to submit to any ritual,” Ashford says the minute we’re in the conference room outside the garage. He sets a crisp folder between us. “If they try to bind you, we walk. I have an injunction template ready to file at the courthouse two blocks from the Stone Court. The judge on rotation is allergic to theatrics.”

“I’m not obligated,” I echo. It helps to hear it out loud.

Arden studies my face. “We go because not going is a message bullies like,” he says, borrowing my line from the morning, and something under my ribs recognizes the shape of a shared language.

“What do I wear to informal ritual lawfare?” I ask.

“Something you can run in,” Noah says, and hands me a pair of flat boots I didn’t know I’d left on the clinic’s back step last winter. The laces are new.

I change into dark pants, a clean white shirt, the rain jacket that knows my shoulders, and the steel band Arden offered last night. In the window reflection the faint silver crescent on my wrist looks like a password.

“Rules,” I say, before the SUV door closes. “No binding circle. No cuts. No vow. We film everything. If my bones say stop, we stop.”

“Agreed,” Arden says, and Ashford nods like a notary.

⸻

Dusk bruises the ridgeline purple as we pull off the city road. The neutral Stone Court crouches between pines like a secret everyone keeps with different excuses. The amphitheater is cut into rock; an onyx disk holds the center; silver basins wait like patient mouths. The air tastes like sage and iron and old promises.

They are already here.

Council aides in gray. A pack of donors pretending to be hikers. Media—allowed at the rim and pretending they are not. Veronica in a coat that glows like mercury. Clay, bare-headed, jaw set like the choice it made him. Elder Celes, immaculate, eyes winter-still.

“Mr. Walcott. Dr. Xi.” His voice carries, cool as a blade washed in a stream. “Neighbors appreciate punctuality.”

“Neighbors also appreciate specificity,” Ashford says mildly, stepping up with a smile that has receipts folded inside. “State your purpose.”

“Safety,” Celes says. “An informal demonstration. There are whispers of… creativity. We would see whether Dr. Xi’s methods are stabilizing or destabilizing.”

“Define demonstration,” I say, because words like to hide knives.

Celes gestures. An aide brings forward a coil of silver so fine it looks like a spill of moonlight. Even at three paces my wrist tingles like someone said my old name.

“We will place this wire over a neutral stone,” Celes says. “No circle. No blood. Dr. Xi may attempt to unwind it with… whatever she claims to be able to do. We observe. If she declines, we will assume her methods endanger order and proceed accordingly with recommendations to packs and… civic partners.”

“Civic partners,” Ashford repeats, smiling like a man reading a budget line aloud to shame it. “Noted.”

Veronica glides to the edge of the dais, flawless. “We can all agree we prefer transparency,” she says to the crowd, and subtly to the cameras.

Arden’s presence warms the air beside me without touching. “Only if the rules are written down,” he says.

A city notary in a windbreaker appears as if Ashford summoned him from a pocket. “We’re writing,” she says, pen ready, the last boundary between rituals and rights.

Clay’s gaze hooks mine. A thousand messages try to climb out of that one look: I’m sorry; I learned something; you’re still— No. I put my attention where it belongs. On the wire. On the weight of dusk.

“We do it my way,” I tell Celes. “No circle. No vow. Time-limited. You keep your men back. The notary records. And if anything feels like a trap, I walk.”

“Doctors and their conditions,” he murmurs, and gestures to his aide. “Very well.”

Noah and two Walcott security fan at my back like a wall built out of air and intention. The crowd hushes the way crowds hush when they suspect they are about to see something they will later pretend not to have seen.

The wire goes on the onyx. It lies there like nothing, like hair, like the idea of a river.

I kneel.

The smell hits first—silver and sage, and under it the specific metallic note of the Stone Court armory. My fingers hover. The scar on my wrist warms until it almost doesn’t hurt. The moon shoulders free of the cloud, a slow reveal like it wants to see where I will put my hands.

I put them down.

Touch is always a decision. Skin to stone, skin to wire. The spark snaps—the small, clean kind that makes your teeth ache. The hum climbs into my bones; the world narrows into a tone and a thread and a memory of glass hotel light on rain.

“Breathe,” Arden’s voice says, close and even. Not command. Context.

I breathe.

The wire answers me. I don’t pull; I invite. The silver shifts, not as metal shifts but as logic does—unwinding because the premise changed. My palm burns and then steadies. The coil loosens, loops melting apart like spilled ink crawling away from itself.

Someone inhales. Someone else remembers they have something to pray to. Celes does not move.

The last loop lifts.

And then it happens.

Not the thing I’m doing; the thing I’m not.

A hair-thin arc flicks from my warmed wrist to the steel band on Arden’s hand and kisses it—no more than a breath, a tchk of light like frost deciding to be lightning and thinking better of it. The ring warms. Arden goes very still.

The arc is gone as soon as it exists. If you blinked, you missed it. I didn’t blink. Neither did Celes.

“Interesting,” he says, and the single word is a file opened and a war declared.

Noah’s weight shifts behind me. Veronica’s mouth moves half a millimeter. Clay looks like gravity changed under his shoes.

I lift my hands off the stone and the crowd exhales. My palm is unburned. The coil lies unwound, harmless, proof that harming is a choice and so is stopping.

“You saw what you came to see,” I say, getting to my feet. “Stabilization. No spectacle. No loss of control. No risk to your precious order.”

Celes considers the onyx as if it left a stain on him. “What I saw,” he says softly, “is that creativity travels in pairs.”

Ashford steps between words and consequences. “Are we finished? Or shall I file the injunction we drafted for hypothetical coercive experimentation under public pretext?”

Celes’s eyes return to me. There is history in them that does not belong to me, and I’m suddenly, ferociously grateful for the notary’s windbreaker and the cameras at the rim, for modern inconveniences that make old rituals behave.

“Dr. Xi,” he says. “You are young. Young things burn bright and then they burn. Be… efficient.”

“I am,” I say. “Ask your wire.”

We turn to go.

“Ms. Hale,” Celes says without looking, and his voice makes a command out of a courtesy. “Do send blankets the doctor can wash.”

Veronica’s laugh is perfect. “Of course.”

Clay takes one step like he means to speak. Arden’s hand opens, not to touch me, but to offer proximity. I choose where to stand. Not with the man who chose stability over me. With the one who watched a wire unwind and didn’t tell me to stop breathing.

We make it three strides down the steps before a runner in council gray bursts from the pines, breath smoking, eyes wide. He skids to a stop at Celes’s side and whispers too urgently to be nothing.

For the first time tonight, Celes’s expression changes. Not anger. Math.

He looks at me, at Arden, at my wrist, at the ring, at the onyx that remembers touch. “Change of plan,” he says, voice carrying across stone and air, and the way he says it makes my bones feel very empty.

“What plan,” Ashford asks, already reaching for a legal word that can cage whatever this is.

Celes lifts a hand. The aides shift like pieces finding new squares. The notary squares her shoulders. The moon leans in.

“The Council will convene now,” Celes says, “not at dawn. There has been another incident.”

Noah’s radio crackles. Arden’s phone vibrates. Mine does too.

A message from Rhea sits on my screen, two words and a pin.

Greyroot. Burning.