TOBIAS’ POV

Evelyn stepped into view, arms folded tightly across her chest.

Her pale blue attendant’s uniform was perfectly arranged, not a single auburn hair out of place beneath the cap she wore as part of her disguise.

Anyone might have seen only a senior medical attendant with a severe expression.

I saw the witch beneath it.

“If you act on your own like that again,” she said, her voice low enough that it would not carry beyond the door, “I won’t be able to protect you.”

I reached up and loosened the scarf tied beneath my chin.

“But you make me feel so safe.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Now is not the time for jokes.”

“I wasn’t joking.”

Evelyn’s mouth tightened, and the air around her shifted.

The overhead light flickered once. The room cooled by degrees. A faint pressure curled through the room, brushing against my skin like the edge of a blade.

I had learned long ago—in the margins of old texts and stranger places than any respectable wolf would admit to visiting—that pure witch blood was a literal force of nature.

Evelyn’s power had always been like that—strong enough that, even when she tried to restrain it, the room seemed aware of her mood.

I had known witches like her before—strong and dangerous women who could bend reality just enough to make you doubt it was ever stable to begin with.

Catherine wasn’t even a full-blooded witch, and she was proof enough of that.

Evelyn, on the other hand...

I had never seen anything like her before.

Three years ago, in a rotting boatyard bar in Fog Harbor that leaned toward the sea as if waiting to fall, she walked in through the fog and set my life on a new course.

At first glance, I thought it was Catherine.

Not because Evelyn looked exactly like her. Except for her silver hair, there was no resemblance.

Catherine’s beauty had always carried polish and calculation, every expression arranged for effect, every smile measured against the reaction it would produce.

Evelyn was younger, less sharp around the edges, her features less practiced and more alive.

But there was something in the set of her shoulders, the careful precision of her movements, the faint whisper of magic that entered with her and made the old bar suddenly too small, that struck a chord I did not like.

Then her gaze landed on mine.

And I paused.

Her eyes were guarded, yes. Suspicious, certainly. 𝓯𝙧𝙚𝒆𝙬𝙚𝒃𝙣𝙤𝒗𝓮𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

But beneath the wariness was hunger.

Not greed. Not Catherine’s cold, consuming thirst for dominion.

This was different—a restless yearning to understand, to test boundaries, to find the true shape of herself in a cookie-cutter world.

It reminded me, painfully, of Seraphina when she was young.

She had looked at me like that once, years ago in Frostbane, when I had asked her to breathe instead of clenching her hands, to listen to the pulse of her own power instead of trying to bury it.

She had been small then, too young to understand why everyone flinched when she entered a room or why tears slipped down Margaret’s face when she thought no one was looking.

A question had burned in her eyes.

What is wrong with me?

Nothing. Nothing had been wrong with that precious little girl.

But I had not saved her from others’ choices that defined her life.

That regret had followed me across oceans.

So when Evelyn stood in that boatyard bar, looking like yet another of Catherine’s victims, I saw a second chance.

“You’re late,” I said.

Evelyn’s brow lifted. “I beg your pardon?”

“If you’re here to kill me, you’re several years too late.”

Irritation flickered across her face.

“I see Mother was right about one thing,” she said coolly, settling herself into the seat opposite mine. “You are insufferable.”

Hearing someone refer to Catherine as ‘Mother’ sent a shiver down my spine.

I smiled despite myself. “I am. Care to find out just how much?”

Evelyn rolled her eyes. “Not really. Just shut up and come with me.”

I leaned back and folded my arms, regarding her. “And if I don’t want to go with you?”

Her eyes narrowed. “I’ll spell you, easy.”

I grinned. “I guarantee you, dear, it will be anything but easy.”

Her other brow lifted. “Is that...a challenge?”

“Why? Do you like challenges?”

She lifted a shoulder. “I usually win, so they’re quite boring.”

I chuckled. “Then how about this? Don’t report that you’ve found me yet, so it doesn’t start a clock. If you can cast a strong enough spell to subdue me, you win.”

She tilted her head. “And how do I lose?”

The mirth fell off my face. “If I can convince you you’re working for a monster.”

She flinched. “Excuse me?”

I leaned forward and trapped her gaze with mine. “Your. Mother. Is. A. Monster.”

In a flash, a small, wicked-looking knife appeared in her hands, pointed at my throat.

Her eyes narrowed. “I should cut your tongue out just for saying that.”

I eyed the weapon as if it were a rubber ball. “Do it, and prove yourself a monster too.”

Tense silence fell between us, both of us evaluating the other.

Evelyn had not trusted me. She suspected I had ulterior motives, and she was correct.

I suspected she had come with Catherine’s scent clinging to her soul, and I was not entirely wrong either.

“Deal,” she whispered after a while, not lowering the knife. “Mother wants you back alive, but she said nothing about whole.”

That first conversation ended with a glass cracking between us, not from my temper, but from hers.

Our second ended with a small fire in the storage room of the lighthouse.

By the third, she tried to trap me in a salt circle.

That one almost worked.

Evelyn had been furious when I broke the binding with a countermark I had learned from a half-blind witch in Lisbon.

“You shouldn’t know that,” she snapped, her eyes flashing silver around the edges as the failed spell dispersed into harmless smoke.

“And you shouldn’t cast with your shoulders tense,” I replied. “It slows the release through the wrist.”

Her mouth fell open for half a second before she remembered to glare.

“Are you correcting my form?”

“I assumed you preferred constructive criticism to flattery.”

“I prefer not being lectured by a glorified dog.”

I smirked. “Then cast better, Fairy Godmother.”

The look she gave me should have set my coat on fire.

Evelyn and I clashed more times than I could count in those early weeks.

I realized quickly that she was a brilliant witch—but sorely lacking in many aspects.

There were spells she shaped with instinct so clean it would have taken most witches decades to match, and there were others she had learned incorrectly because Catherine had taught her around the truth rather than through it. Entire branches of craft Evelyn had never been allowed to explore.

I didn’t know how the two had ended up as a mother-daughter pair, and I was too smart to ask.

Either way, Catherine had raised and trained her, but only along the paths that served Catherine.

For someone as naturally gifted as Evelyn, it was a gilded cage.

And perhaps that was why she kept returning.

At first, she told herself she came because of the challenge. To test me, to expose my lies, to prove that Catherine’s warnings about me had merit.

Then she came because I knew things Catherine had never taught her. Then, because I would spar with her without turning every lesson into an experiment or a demand.

Aside from Catherine, Evelyn didn’t have anyone strong or knowledgeable enough to challenge her, and even the sessions she shared with her adoptive mother were never truly hers.

Catherine used practice as measurement. Turned exercises into data. Corrected Evelyn not to help her grow, but to refine her usefulness.

The first time Evelyn beat one of my countermeasures cleanly, she laughed. It startled her, as though joy had caught her unprepared.

It was over quickly. She smoothed her expression, lifted her chin, and pretended it had not happened.

It had been the first time I saw what she might have been without Catherine’s shadow hanging over her.

“You know,” I told her weeks later, as we stood beneath the sagging roof of an abandoned sail-repair shed, surrounded by chalk marks and broken spell anchors, “if fate hadn’t cruelly handed you to Catherine, you might have become a great witch.”

Evelyn’s expression cooled instantly.

“You know nothing about what she has done for me.”

“I know enough.”

Her hand lifted, and the chalk lines around us trembled.

“Why does she make you wear a wig and that infernal green dress when you run her little errands?” I asked. “Why does she keep your existence hidden from the world? Why does she keep the real you hidden from yourself?”

“She saved my life,” Evelyn snapped, her eyes burning. “She took me in and raised me. She gave me purpose.”

“Purpose that serves her.”

The first spell hit hard enough to drive me back three steps.

The second would have put me through the wall if I had not shifted my weight and cut the binding thread before it tightened.

We did not speak again for twelve days.

On the thirteenth, Evelyn returned to the boatyard with rain in her hair and shadows beneath her eyes.

She did not apologize.

Neither did I.

She only said, “Show me the countermark again.”

So I did.

That was how trust grew between us—if trust was even the right word for it.

It came through arguments, withheld truths, reluctant confessions, and the steady accumulation of facts neither of us could ignore forever.

Because Evelyn was no fool.

At first, she could not accept my suspicions about Catherine. She called them bitterness, the resentments of a man who had been overruled and never forgiven the world for moving on without him.

Some of that may even have been true.

But facts remained facts.

One night, she stumbled into the bar, her eyes wide and face pale like she’d seen several ghosts.

I listened patiently as she shakily explained what she’d seen.

When she finished, I took a long drink of my whiskey before setting it down.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

She swallowed hard, and I saw the moment Evelyn stopped being Catherine’s daughter and became a woman frightened by the shape of the truth and furious at herself for taking so long to recognize it.

“Help me stop her.”