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The raccoon turned toward her. Held her gaze for one long, serious moment, then knocked a second cork onto the counter and went back to work. Fiora nodded seriously once, satisfied. “That’s a yes.”

She heard the bell above the door and didn’t raise her head, because customers had been coming and going all morning. She was deep in a conversation with Bexley about how the creatures multiplied and, to her surprise, genuinely interested. Then the room’s ambient temperature changed.

Mirelle looked up.

Tor Waryn. Dark jacket, the same controlled physicality she’d spent an unreasonable amount of time yesterday not thinking about, doing the room sweep she could already recite — exits, variables, raccoon location, her. That last one lingered slightly longer than the rest.

Her stomach flipped.

Low blood sugar. Obviously. She’d only had one piece of toast.

Pike came in behind him, and behind Pike, Drayce, unhurried, already clocking the room. Tor crossed the floor. Not to the counter, but to Mirelle. He stopped at her table, close enough that the warmth she had been not-thinking-about arrived in full force, and pulled out the chair across from her.

He sat down.

Without asking. Not inconsiderately, but decidedly. From behind the counter, Valene produced a second mug before Tor fully settled in and set it in front of him, as if she had expected this exact visit and prepared accordingly. His gaze dropped to the mug, then up to Valene, already doing something else. In the morning light, his eyes held a shade of gray that made gray feel like an underperforming word. The low-grade hum of magical pressure Mirelle had carried since she woke up dropped at once, as if someone had turned a dial.

Thirty percent. At minimum.

She was going to need to think about that. Later, in the garden, with wine.

“How are you holding up with the creatures?” Direct. No preamble. She was starting to understand how Tor operated: he asked a question and waited for the real answer instead of the social one. “I made four yesterday,” she said. “Which I’m told is extraordinary. Bexley’s been mapping it.”

“Five,” Bexley said without raising her head. “One duplicated somewhere on the walk here. The small one by the cold case wasn’t one of the original four.” Mirelle glanced at the creature by the cold case. It blinked at her with enormous amber eyes.

Five. There are five of them, and I duplicated one without noticing.

“This happens when you hold it in,” Tor said, eyes on her. Level and unhurried, both steadying and unsettling. “Your magic’s being pushed from the outside. Until we find the source, expect more.”

“So, more raccoons are possible.”

“More of whatever your emotional state produces.”

“Right.” She eyed Rowan, currently investigating whether the steam wand was structural or decorative. “That is genuinely concerning.”

“Yes.” Flat. Lid firmly on.

Across the table, Pike had his phone out, timing an interval. Tor did not spare him a glance. Drayce stood at the counter with his coffee. Mirelle decided not to examine any of that either.

The conversation shifted: Bexley on duplication, Drayce’s clipped ward summary, and Garnet asking Mirelle three questions that seemed unrelated and were not. Mirelle answered all of them while staying keenly aware of Tor across the table, something she would need to think about later, somewhere quieter than this. “You’re doing it again,” Fiora murmured from her left.

“What?”

“The tucking-away face. You get it when you are putting a feeling somewhere safe for later.” Fiora refilled her coffee without being asked to. “You do it with conversations. You do it —” a glance across the table, precise and pointed “— with things that deserve better than being tucked away.”

Tor’s attention stayed on the ward map Drayce had spread across the table. She was not watching the line of his shoulders in the morning light. She was not memorizing the way he moved his hands when he pointed at the map — precise, economical, as if he’d never once wasted a motion in his life. She was not, under any circumstances, thinking about the thirty percent.

“I’m fine,” Mirelle said.

“Of course,” Fiora said pleasantly, and managed not to smile for almost two full seconds.

Rowan shifted. Not dramatically. Not with the cork-related energy that characterized most of Rowan’s activities. The raccoon went still at the espresso machine. Not the cork-assessment kind of still, but the watchful kind. The raccoon’s gaze drifted to the window. Mirelle followed it.

Far side of the square. The vendor stalls bustled with the usual midmorning traffic — the herb seller, the produce tables, the woman who sold handmade soap and always had a queue. And there, at the edge of it, standing in it without belonging: dark hair, pale skin, facing the café.

She’d seen him yesterday, or thought she had: a glimpse through the window, gone before she could process it, though Tor had locked on at once. Now, in the ordinary morning light of a busy square, nothing seemed obviously wrong with him. He stood there. People stood in places. He looked at the café. People looked at cafés. His eyes found hers across the distance and did the thing she remembered from the square — attention practiced rather than learned, a kind of recognition she had not consented to. As if he already had her on file and was checking his inventory.

He smiled.