Chapter 4 What The Coin Buys

Ryan’s POV

The silver coin was with Riley Brooks, which meant I had a reason to return. I told myself the reason was a book, although that explanation would have been more convincing if I had not spent the walk from Silverbrook rehearsing the title of a class text I did not particularly need.

The Remedy & Ruin looked different in the late afternoon than it had the day before. Sunlight came through the front windows in slanted gold bands, catching the glass bottles and making the whole shop irritatingly pleasant.

Riley was behind the counter with a stack of labels in one hand and a pen tucked through her hair. She looked up when the bell rang, and her expression suggested she had been expecting someone more useful.

“You came back,” she said, studying me as though I had wandered in carrying a warning label. I gave her the explanation I had prepared.

“I require a text for Professor Grant’s class.”

“You require a book, then,” she said. “That is generally what text means, unless Professor Grant has started assigning dictionaries.”

“I am pleased we have reached an understanding.”

Her mouth twitched. “Second shelf, left side, and try not to reorganize anything while you are pretending to study.”

I walked toward the shelves, but I did not look at the books for long. The silver coin rested near the register beside a dish of loose buttons and two dried sprigs of lavender, as casually placed as if it belonged there.

It did not.

I had recognized enough of its shape to know I should not have recognized it at all. The coin was old silver, worn smooth around the face, but the edge carried a pattern that caught the light in three narrow cuts before disappearing beneath the metal.

Riley moved toward the back shelves to fetch a bottle, and I stepped nearer the counter. The instant I came within a few inches of the coin, a faint prickling ran across my fingertips, like the static before a storm, then vanished when I stepped back.

There it was again, the edge-mark, no clearer than before but unmistakable to me. My stomach tightened because I had seen that shape somewhere I would rather not have remembered.

I did not touch the coin. Whatever it was doing in Riley’s shop, she had no reason to know that I recognized it.

The bell over the door rang before I could retreat, and an older woman hurried inside with both hands wrapped around her handbag. Riley immediately set down the bottle she was carrying and gave the woman her full attention.

“Please tell me you can help,” the woman said after Riley offered her a chair. “I have not slept properly in three nights, and I am tired of thinking about him.”

Riley’s expression softened. “I can help with the part that is hurting, but I cannot promise to make the person disappear from your feelings.”

The woman blinked. “I do not want him gone. I just want the feeling gone.”

“That is different,” Riley said, bringing her a cup of water. “Tell me what the feeling is doing to you, and we can work from there.”

The woman glanced toward the shelves. “There is a potion for everything, though, isn’t there?”

“There are potions for many things,” Riley said, measuring her words as carefully as she measured ingredients. “Heartcraft helps me understand what kind of hurt I am working with, but it does not give me permission to decide what someone should feel.”

She uncorked a small blue bottle and added three drops to a copper brewing cup. Pale silver vapor curled above the rim, gathered into a thin spiral, and settled as Riley stirred, carrying the soft scent of lavender and rain through the shop.

“If I brewed something that simply switched off your feelings, you might wake up tomorrow without the pain,” she continued. “You would also lose the chance to understand what the pain was trying to tell you.”

The woman considered that. “That sounds inconvenient.”

“It is extremely inconvenient,” Riley said, and the certainty in her voice nearly pulled a laugh from me.

She added another ingredient, and the vapor thinned until it became almost transparent. The woman’s shoulders lowered as she breathed it in, and the tightness around her eyes eased without disappearing entirely.

“I can make the sharpness easier to carry,” Riley said. “I cannot make the feeling vanish for you.”

The woman nodded. “You would really do that instead of giving me the easy potion?”

“I do not sell easy if easy means pretending you are not hurting,” Riley said. She simply finished the mixture with the calm certainty of someone who had made that choice long before anyone asked her to defend it.

Something in me loosened.

I had expected her to be stubborn. What I had not expected was for that stubbornness to have a line behind it, something firm enough that she would rather lose a sale than cross it.

The woman eventually left with a small amber bottle and instructions in Riley’s neat handwriting. Before leaving, she thanked Riley twice, and Riley waved her toward the door as though being thanked made her uncomfortable.

When the bell settled, Riley returned to the counter and noticed where I was looking. Her gaze moved from me to the shelf.

“You have been staring at that shelf for a suspiciously long time,” she said, folding her arms.

“I was looking for the book. It is apparently an unusually difficult shelf.”

“The books are alphabetized,” she said. “I would hate to think Silverbrook had lowered its standards.”

I reached for the first book I saw and glanced at the cover before putting it back. “I was attempting to preserve my dignity.”

“That was ambitious,” she said, and this time her laugh escaped before she could stop it.

I looked at her instead of the coin, then turned toward the shelves and selected the class text I had named when I entered.

She reached behind her, pulled the same book from the shelf without checking the title, and set it on the counter. “You could have asked me.”

“I was attempting to preserve my dignity,” I repeated.

Riley shook her head as she returned to her labels. “You fae are exhausting.”

“You have known me for less than two days.”

“That is more than enough evidence to begin a preliminary assessment.”

Her eyes were bright with amusement, and for one inconvenient second the room felt less like a place I had entered for information and more like somewhere I had chosen to remain. I disliked the thought enough to open the book.

Riley went back to her work, and the shop settled around us with the soft clink of glass and the scratch of her pen. I read the same paragraph three times while my attention remained fixed on the silver coin.

Eventually Riley moved a box beside it, and the coin shifted just enough for its edge to catch the afternoon light. Three narrow cuts appeared again, arranged in a pattern I knew.

I closed the book and kept my face still. The faint prickling returned beneath my skin, stronger this time, and I knew that mark, knew that reaction, and knew better than to say either aloud.

Riley glanced up. “Find what you needed?”

“Yes,” I said, placing one finger between the pages. “Exactly what I came for.”

That was not entirely true, and the worst part was that I was no longer certain which part of the sentence I meant. I left with the class text under my arm and the coin’s edge-mark fixed in my mind, choosing very deliberately not to tell Riley that I recognized it.