Chapter 6 The Bottle With His Name On It

Hazel's POV

Osric still hadn't said a word.

I gave up waiting for him to fill the silence and went looking for the powdered root myself, since apparently getting burned once wasn't enough to teach me patience. The recipe called for a second dose near the end, and I wasn't about to ask him for directions to another shelf after the mess he'd made of the last one.

The back room was smaller than the main shop, crowded with crates and hanging bundles of dried plants that brushed the top of my head when I walked through. Everything smelled like dust and something sharper underneath it, metal maybe, or old rain. I ran my fingers along a row of labeled jars, none of them the right one, and kept going deeper than I probably should have.

That's when I found the shelf of bottles.

They were lined up neat as soldiers, each one capped and sealed with wax, each one labeled in Beatrix's loose, looping handwriting , the real kind, nothing like the fake note folded in my pocket. Names, dates, a short note under each about dosage or effect. My aunt's whole secret business, sitting there in plain glass.

I almost didn't look closely enough to notice the third one from the left.

O. VANE, the label read, in Beatrix's careful hand. Below it, smaller: Happiness Draught , standard dose , for regular use. And below that, a date.

Five months ago.

I picked the bottle up like it might burn me the way the cauldron had, turning it slow under the dim light, waiting for the date to rearrange itself into something that made sense. It didn't. Five months. Osric had told me, straight to my face, less than an hour ago, that tonight was the first time he'd ever set foot in this shop.

My stomach dropped somewhere near my shoes.

I carried the bottle back out to the main room without deciding to, my feet moving faster than my thoughts, and found him exactly where I'd left him, staring into the cauldron like it had personally wronged him.

"You lied to me."

He looked up. Whatever he saw on my face made him go very still, the particular stillness of someone bracing for impact.

"About what," he said, careful, too careful.

I held up the bottle instead of answering. His eyes dropped to it, then to the label, then , for just a second , somewhere else entirely, somewhere that wasn't the room we were standing in.

"You said tonight was the first time you'd been here," I said. "This has your name on it. Beatrix's handwriting. Five months old."

"Hazel,"

"Don't." My voice cracked in a way I hated. "Don't say my name like that's supposed to fix it. Just tell me the truth. Have you been coming here this whole time?"

The silence stretched again, but it was a different kind than before , not him deciding how much to give away, but him deciding whether giving anything away at all was worth what it might cost.

"Yes," he said finally.

One word. Flat as everything else he'd said all night, and somehow it landed harder than a whole speech would have.

"How long?"

"Longer than five months."

"How long, Osric?"

He set down the stirring rod, careful, precise, the same way he did everything, and finally looked at me straight on instead of at the cauldron or the shelves or anywhere else that wasn't my face. "Does the exact number matter? You already know it's longer than I let you believe."

"It matters because you looked me in the eye and lied about it. It matters because I've been standing here for the last hour thinking I was the only person who's ever seen this place turned inside out, and you knew every shelf, every drawer, every ingredient before I even reached for it, and you let me think I was showing you something new."

"I didn't lie because it was fun."

"Then why?"

His jaw worked once, that same small motion, chewing over truth like it cost something to spend. "Because the second you knew I'd been coming here for years, you'd start asking why. And I wasn't ready to answer that question tonight."

"You still haven't answered it."

"No," he agreed. "I haven't."

I set the bottle down on the counter between us, hard enough that the glass rang against the wood. "I don't understand you. Ten minutes ago you told me this potion is the only thing that makes your life bearable, and I thought , I don't know what I thought. That you'd trust me with a little more than that. And instead I find out you've been lying since the second you walked through that door."

"I haven't lied about everything."

"You've lied about the parts that matter."

He didn't argue that. That was almost worse than if he had , some flat, easy denial I could push back against. Instead he just stood there, hands loose at his sides, letting the accusation sit in the room without trying to soften it.

"Ask me something else," he said quietly. "Something I can actually answer tonight. I'll give you that much."

"Why does my aunt know your name well enough to label a bottle with it? Why does she treat you like a regular customer instead of a stranger? What is it you're not telling me about her?"

Something flickered across his face , not quite fear, but close enough that my chest went tight watching it happen. He opened his mouth like he might actually answer, really answer, the way he almost had before the cauldron interrupted us.

Then his whole body changed.

He went rigid, head turning sharp toward the front window, every line of him suddenly alert in a way that had nothing to do with our conversation at all. I followed his gaze without meaning to and saw nothing , just the dark street outside, the same empty sidewalk that had been there all night.

"What is it," I said. "What did you,"

"Someone's coming."

"I don't see anyone."

"You wouldn't. Not yet." He was already moving, sweeping the finished ingredients off the table into a drawer, shoving the unfinished potion out of sight behind the counter with hands that had gone fast and certain in a way that scared me more than his silence had. "Hazel, listen to me. Whatever happens in the next minute, you need to let me do the talking."

"You still haven't told me anything about my aunt,"

"I know."

"Osric,"

"I promise I'll explain. Just not right now." He grabbed the bottle with his own name on it off the counter and shoved it into his coat, out of sight, like it was evidence of something he couldn't afford anyone else finding. "Right now I need you to trust me for exactly sixty seconds."

"After what you just admitted to me?"

"Yes," he said. "After that. Especially after that."

The bell above the door , the one that had screamed and snapped off its hook hours ago , didn't ring, because there was nothing left of it to ring. But the door opened anyway, slow and deliberate, cold air sliding in ahead of whoever stood on the other side, and Osric moved to put himself between me and the entrance before I even saw who it was.