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She notices. Of course she notices. When the embrace ends, her gaze briefly meets mine. The look lasts only a moment before it's gone, and then she smiles at Juniper. "I'll see you soon."

"Okay."

The bakery door closes behind her. Silence settles over the room. Juniper turns toward me immediately. "What was that?"

I remain standing, watching the door, letting the thought finish forming.

Then I look back at her. "We're getting close."

Her expression shifts, the lightness leaving it. "What do you mean?"

"Answers. Which means things might get messy."

Juniper doesn't hesitate. "I don't care."

"You should."

"No." She replies sharply. "I'm not backing down." The determination in her voice is unmistakable. So is the stubbornness. Neither surprises me anymore. She steps closer. "I've come this far."

I don't answer, mostly because she isn't wrong. The investigation has already consumed too much of her life — too much time, too much energy, too much of the certainty she deserves to feel inside her own business. Arguing against her involvement at this point would be pointless and, more honestly, unfair.

She studies my face, and then her expression softens unexpectedly. "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For staying."

The words tighten something in my chest. Juniper reaches for my hand — the gesture appears simple, almost unconscious, the way someone reaches toward something familiar. Then her fingers wrap around mine, and everything changes.

A jolt moves through me. Sharp, immediate, impossible to misread. My breath catches before I can process it. Heat follows, then awareness, then something considerably more dangerous than either. The mate bond stirs beneath it all — not quietly this time, not the subtle persistent pull I've been managing to set aside. This time it rises fully, certain and unmistakable, and the sensation is enough to make rational thought significantly more difficult than it should be.

I stare at her. Juniper's hand remains wrapped around mine. Her expression softens further, and something in her eyes shifts — a recognition she may not have words for yet, but that her instincts are already beginning to understand.

The bakery goes quiet around us. Not the comfortable quiet of hours spent working side by side, but something else entirely. Something weighted. Something that has been building across every argument, every shared file, every moment I told myself was strictly professional and never quite believed it.

My pulse quickens and she notices. Her gaze lifts to meet mine, and the moment stretches — quiet, warm, dangerous — because I stop trying to explain it away. I stop filing it under the investigation, under proximity, under circumstance.

And when I stop doing that, the truth becomes entirely clear.

I'm falling for her. I have been for a while. And standing here in her bakery with her hand in mine and the investigation closing in around us, I'm no longer certain that's something I want to stop.

17

JUNIPER

Ihate waste. Always have. Maybe it comes from growing up with very little, or maybe from spending years building Sweetbell one order at a time. Either way, seeing perfectly good food thrown away feels wrong in a way I can't reason myself out of.

The box in my hands isn't large, and that somehow makes it worse. A custom order, decorated and packaged and prepared carefully, never collected. I watch it for a moment before lowering it into the waste container behind the bakery, and my chest tightens at the sound the lid makes when I close it.

Hours of work. Gone.

I close the lid harder than necessary, the sound echoing through the alley. Wonderful. Now I'm angry too.

The back door bursts open and I turn. Ollie practically runs outside, and the expression on his face sets off alarms immediately. Ollie rarely panics — he complains, he argues, he dramatizes with impressive commitment — but panic is different, and this is panic. My stomach drops. "What happened?"

He slows only long enough to hand me an envelope. I look at it, then at him, then back at it, and his expression tells me everything. I open it anyway.

The words blur together at first. Then my eyes focus, and my heart sinks.