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Chapter 1
Chapter One: A Return With Teeth
The clocktower looks smaller than Nora remembers, but somehow more stubborn—like a jaw set against bad news. Halcyon’s salt air has chewed the copper into a dull green, and the cracked face has stopped at 2:17, the moment a storm years ago blew out its guts. She could have left it there, a town’s paused time, if the grant hadn’t called her back. If not for the man in a navy suit leaning on the square’s low wall like it’s already his.
“Nora Renfield,” he says, sun slicing bright off his watch: Luca Voss, the developer who once offered double for her grandmother’s house and called her sentimental for refusing. Up close, he has the kind of face the town council trusts and she does not.
“Luca,” she returns, tasting iron. “Enjoying the ruin you couldn’t level?”
His smile is fast, unfriendly. “I don’t demolish landmarks. I revive them.”
“For a price.” She steps past him to run her hand along the flaking stone. It sheds powder. “The grant stipulates preservation, not a branded plaza with a chandelier on top.”
“We’re not building a chandelier,” he says. “We’re fixing a clock.”
She looks up. Even broken, it rules the skyline like a stubborn elder. “You know the grant tied us together, right? We co-lead.”
His eyes, gray as dirty ice, narrow. “Believe me, Renfield. I read the fine print.”
So did she. And nowhere did it prepare her for the electric annoyance vibrating under her skin when he stands too close, the way his aftershave catches in her throat, fresh and sharp with something like rosemary crushed between impatient fingers. The town hall bell doesn’t signal anything. The wind does. The boards creak. They are already arguing about the scaffolding before the permit office opens.
