Chapter 1: The Flat Tire
The convertible’s engine sputtered and died with a final, pathetic cough, leaving Hana in a silence so thick it buzzed in her ears. Not a graceful, elegant silence. This was a dense, country silence, punctuated by the distant shriek of some bird that definitely did not sound friendly.
She stared at the dashboard as if it might apologize. A little light, shaped like a tire with an exclamation point in it, glowed with malicious cheer.
“You have got to be kidding me,” she said to the empty car. Her voice, usually a weapon of precise dismissal, sounded small and out of place here, swallowed by the green.
Outside, the road wasn’t a road. It was a muddy, sun-dappled tunnel carved between walls of emerald hedge. They brushed against the brilliant red paint of her car like grasping fingers. The air smelled of damp earth and something green—wild thyme, maybe, not that she knew what thyme smelled like outside of a kitchen where someone else was cooking.
She stepped out. Or rather, she attempted to step out. Her Valentino rockstud pump sank three inches into chocolate-brown mud with a soft, sucking sigh.
“No.” She whispered it, then yelled it. “NO!”
This was a crime against fashion, against common decency. She hauled her foot free, leaving the shoe behind like a bejeweled tombstone. Hopping on one stockinged foot, she wrestled it from the mud’s grip, which required balancing a hand on the filthy car. The dress, a slip of ivory silk, was now speckled with disaster.
A low, diesel rumble announced another presence. Hope, stupid and fleeting, flared in her chest. A local! Someone with a phone, or a jack, or a basic understanding of internal combustion!
A tractor, older than her cosmetic chemist, rounded the bend. Atop it sat a man. Broad shoulders strained against a faded grey t-shirt, and his arms, resting on the wheel, were tanned and corded with muscle. He had the kind of jawline that looked like it was carved from granite, and short, sun-streaked brown hair. He was, she noted with immediate resentment, disgustingly handsome in a way that belonged on a lumberjack calendar.
He slowed the tractor to a crawl as he drew level with her. His eyes, a piercing green, took in the scene: the crippled car, the mud-caked shoe in her hand, the sheer, utter impossibility of her in this place.
A slow smirk spread across his face. Not a friendly smile. A smirk of deep, profound amusement.
Hana drew herself up to her full height, which was still absurdly diminutive compared to him on his mechanical throne. “Are you just going to sit there and gawk?”
He said nothing. Just let his gaze travel from her hair, which she knew was still glossy and perfect, down to her ruined stocking. The smirk didn’t waver.
Then, with a small, dismissive nod, he engaged the gear and the tractor rumbled forward, picking up speed, leaving her in a cloud of dust and diesel fumes.
“You unbelievable brute!” she shouted at the retreating vehicle. Her words did nothing. They never did out here, it seemed.
Tears of pure, incandescent rage pricked her eyes. This was her parents’ final masterpiece of cruelty. Cutting her off. Freezing the cards. Banishing her to the “ancestral home” in the middle of fungal nowhere. And now this. Stranded, mocked by a farmhand in a piece of prehistoric machinery.
She kicked the flat tire, which hurt her foot and accomplished nothing.
Ten minutes later, the diesel rumble returned. She was sitting on the closed convertible top, trying to use the limited data on her phone to search “how to change a tire when you have no tools and no idea,” and refusing to cry.
The tractor pulled up opposite her. The man cut the engine, and the quiet rushed back in, louder than before. He swung down from the seat with an easy, athletic grace that made her teeth clench. In his hands were a heavy-looking jack and a toolbox.
He walked over, his work boots making solid thunks in the mud. Without a word, he tossed a bundle at her. It was a rag, roughly the color of dirt and engine oil.
“Don’t get your dress dirty, princess,” he said, his voice a low rasp, like stones tumbling in a creek. He turned his back on her and knelt by the flat tire.
Hana clutched the filthy rag, her mouth agape. The audacity. The presumption. The… the accurate assessment of the dress situation.
“It’s Hana,” she seethed.
“Hunter,” he said, not looking up. He was already loosening the lug nuts with a brutal, efficient strength. “Your neighbor. About a mile down the lane.”
“Well, Hunter,” she said, loading his name with all the contempt she could muster. “If you’re my neighbor, then neighborly decorum would suggest you help without the condescending commentary.”
He grunted, sliding the jack under the axle. “Neighborly decorum also suggests a person has a spare tire that isn’t bald as a baby’s backside.” He glanced at the pathetic spare he’d pulled from her trunk. “And that they might own a pair of shoes suited to the terrain. This isn’t a runway.”
“I wasn’t expecting a safari!”
“This is a lane. It’s seen mud before.” He cranked the jack, the car rising with it. The muscles in his back shifted under his shirt. Hana found herself staring, then forced her eyes away, fixing them on a particularly offensive patch of nettles.
“My parents,” she said, as if that explained everything.
“Ah.” He pulled the flat off with a final tug. “The folks who own the old Bentley place. Heard they were sending someone. Didn’t realize they were sending a diplomatic envoy from the City of Soho.”
“I can hear you laughing inside. It’s not attractive.”
“Wasn’t trying to be.” He lifted the spare onto the bolts, his biceps flexing. It was, infuriatingly, a little bit attractive. He tightened the lug nuts with quick, powerful twists. “There. It’ll hold to the house. Don’t take it over thirty.”
He lowered the jack, gathered his tools, and stood. He was taller than she’d realized. He looked down at her, those green eyes scanning her face, seeing the smudged mascara she knew was there, the angry flush on her cheeks.
“The house,” he said, his tone shifting from amused to something closer to a warning. “It’s been empty a long time. The keys are under the frog-shaped rock by the blue door. The pump for the well is tricky. Switch is in the kitchen cupboard, above the sink. You’ll need to prime it.”
She blinked. “Prime it?”
A flicker of that smirk returned. “Good luck, princess.”
He turned and walked back to his tractor.
“Wait!” The word escaped before she could stop it. He paused, looking back over his shoulder. She faltered. She couldn’t ask for more help. She couldn’t. “Is there… is there a restaurant? A delivery service?”
Hunter looked at her for a long moment, the silence stretching. The bird shrieked again in the woods.
“There’s a pub in the village. Seven miles that way,” he nodded down the lane. “They do a pie on Wednesdays.” He climbed onto the tractor. “You’ll want to light a fire tonight. It gets cold. The wood by the shed might be dry. Might not.”
He started the engine. This time, she just watched him go, the dirty rag still clutched in her hand like a failed flag of surrender.
The house, when she finally inched the convertible up the overgrown drive, wasn’t a home. It was a grey stone testament to neglect. Ivy clutched at the walls. One shutter hung crooked. The blue door he’d mentioned was more of a grey-blue, peeling and sad.
She found the frog rock. The key was cold and heavy.
The door swung inward with a groan that spoke of centuries of boredom. The air inside was cold, damp, and smelled of dust and forgotten things. She flicked a light switch. Nothing. Of course.
Her phone flashlight cut a weak beam through the gloom. The kitchen had an ancient sink and a stove that looked like it belonged in a museum. She opened the cupboard above the sink. A confusing tangle of pipes and a single, ominous-looking switch stared back at her.
You’ll need to prime it.
Outside, the light was beginning to soften into evening gold. The woods around the house deepened into shadows. It was beautiful, in a terrifying, consuming way.
A chill, deeper than the air, settled into her bones. It wasn’t just cold. It was the silence, the weight of the isolation, the sheer scale of her own helplessness.
The fireplace in the sitting room was a gaping maw of blackened brick. The woodpile by the shed, when she ventured out to look, was stacked with logs that felt damp to the touch.
Hunter’s words echoed in the growing dark. It gets cold.
Back inside, she stood in the center of the dusty living room, her arms wrapped around herself. She could almost hear the drip of a tap somewhere. Or was it outside?
This wasn’t an adventure. This was a sentence.
And the only person within a seven-mile radius who knew she was here was a smug, green-eyed carpenter who thought she was a joke.
The first tear broke free, tracing a warm path through the dust on her cheek. She wiped it away angrily, smudging dirt and defeat across her face. The darkness in the corners of the room seemed to lean in, waiting to see what a spoiled, city-bred princess would do next.