Page 2 of Wild Thorns

He found you, some panicked voice whispered. He's here, he followed you, he's—

I turned, heart hammering, already calculating escape routes.

There was a man in the backyard.

Not Marcus.

The relief hit me so hard my knees nearly buckled. Not Marcus. Wrong build, wrong posture, wrong everything. This man was taller, broader, built like someone who did physical labor for reasons beyond vanity. His shoulders strained against a worn gray t-shirt, arms roped with muscle that looked functional rather than decorative. Dark hair. Darker eyes that I could somehow feel even from thirty feet away, though that should have been impossible.

He was chopping wood.

The axe hung suspended above his head, frozen mid-swing, because he'd stopped what he was doing to stare at me. And he wasn't just looking. He was unabashedly staring. Taking stock of every detail with an intensity that should have felt threatening and somehow didn't.

The axe lowered slowly, deliberately. He stood there holding it with an ease that suggested he could do terrible things with it and was choosing not to. His posture held the coiled readiness of a predator: stillness that could detonate into motion without warning.

He was very deliberately not approaching.

Which was its own form of approach.

We stared at each other across the yard. The air between us felt strange, charged with that same electricity I'd noticed earlier. Heat unfurled in my chest—not fear. Not quite anything I could name. Recognition, maybe, though that made no sense. I'd never seen this man before in my life.

His eyes caught the light, and for just a moment, just a fraction of a second, they seemed to flash gold.

Then he blinked, and they were dark again, and I was clearly losing my mind from exhaustion.

The landlord, I thought, filing him away with deliberate effort. Small-town curiosity. Possibly dangerous. Definitely distracting. I turned and climbed, moving at a normal pace even as some animal part of me wanted to flee.

My hands were steadier than they should have been.

That bothered me almost more than the staring. After Marcus, after everything, my hands should have been shaking. A strange man watching me from a backyard with an axe should have sent me into a full panic spiral. Instead, I felt... calm. Settled. Like whatever was happening here was supposed to happen.

Which was insane. I was insane. Sleep deprivation was making me insane.

The apartment was exactly what I needed.

One main room with good bones: hardwood floors worn smooth by decades of footsteps, crown molding that someone had painted white over what was probably beautiful original wood, windows on three walls that let in so much light the space practically glowed. A small kitchen with vintage appliances that might actually work. A claw-foot tub in the bathroom that I was already planning to fill with hot water and epsom salts and never leave.

The kind of space that felt like possibility.

I set the lamp on the kitchen counter and looked around. The listing had said "furnished," which apparently meant a bed frame, a mattress that looked newer than the building, and a single wooden chair by the window that had the worn patina of something someone had sat in for years. Good enough. I'd sleep on the floor if I had to. I'd slept in worse places during the last six months.

Through the windows, I could see the magnolia tree, its crown spreading below me like a green-and-white sea. Beyond it, the preserve stretched toward the horizon, all tangled trees and shadows and Spanish moss and whatever was making those howling sounds I wasn't going to think about.

I was heading back down for boxes when a voice called up: "You must be Serena!"

The woman climbing toward me was somewhere in her sixties, silver-streaked hair swept back from a face that had probably been stunning thirty years ago and was still striking now. High cheekbones. Eyes that were a peculiar shade of amber, almost gold in the afternoon light. She moved with an easy grace that didn't match her age, taking the stairs like they were nothing.

She carried a casserole dish like an offering to some domestic god.

"I'm Rowena," she said, slightly breathless, smiling wide. "I live in the main house with my boys. Well, they're men now, but they'll always be my babies. There's three of 'em. Nothing prepares you for having triplets."

"Triplets," I repeated, thinking of the man with the axe. Of the face I'd glimpsed in an upstairs window. Three of them.

"Excessive, I know." She pressed the casserole dish into my hands, and when her fingers brushed mine, I felt a strange warmth spread through my palms. Not uncomfortable. Not quite. But knowing, somehow. Like she was reading something in my skin that I didn't know was written there. "Chicken and rice. It reheats well. Welcome to Magnolia Creek."

Her eyes lingered on my face a beat too long. Something shifted in her expression, a flicker of surprise, of recognition, of something deeper I couldn't read. Her nostrils flared slightly, almost like she was scenting the air, and for a moment her pupils seemed to dilate in a way that wasn't quite human.

Then she smiled, warm and welcoming, and the moment passed.