Michelle Handsworth

Michelle Handsworth is both a highly capable lawyer and a witch whose supernatural perception makes her the decisive mediator between ordinary human society and the hidden world of Magical beings. Her central significance lies in the tension between professional restraint and personal intervention: she initially treats Cain Samson as a dangerous client from whom she must keep her distance, but when Cain loses control of his dragon nature and Brock Thaddeus is poisoned, Michelle accepts the physical and magical risk of becoming the conduit that saves Brock.

Identity and Introduction

Michelle is introduced as a curvy lawyer handling the affairs of the famous hockey player Cain Samson. She is comfortable enough with Cain to flirt with him, and she recognizes him as extraordinarily handsome, with blond hair and blue eyes. Yet the flirtation is deliberately kept within limits. As Cain’s attorney, she believes that a romantic relationship would violate professional ethics and compromise her ability to protect his financial interests. Her refusal is therefore not simple coyness: it is framed as a principled boundary between legal representation and intimacy.

Michelle’s deeper identity is revealed through the way she perceives Cain. She has always been able to sense auras, and years of experience have taught her to trust the warnings conveyed by that gift. Cain’s aura is unlike the calm yellow radiance she associates with her mother or the pale green aura surrounding plants. Around Cain, she detects flickering yellows and reds, together with a persistent smell of smoke. The warning is so strong that she recognizes him as something other than an ordinary human from their first meeting, when she sensed him before she saw him as his car arrived at the law firm. Other people perceive only a wealthy, successful athlete; Michelle perceives the concealed creature beneath the public image.

Boundaries, Desire, and Misjudgment

Michelle’s attraction to Cain is genuine, but she repeatedly uses the attorney-client relationship as the acceptable explanation for denying him. When Cain asks her out, she insists that dating a client would be unethical because personal feelings could interfere with objective legal judgment. She argues that the rules against lawyers dating clients exist to prevent the client from being harmed if the relationship ends badly. Her language presents distance as protection for Cain as well as protection for herself.

Cain’s reaction exposes the emotional truth that Michelle has tried not to acknowledge. He tells her that his invitations were never jokes and that he genuinely wants to be with her. His usual confidence gives way to misery, and Michelle realizes that his flirtation has contained serious feeling rather than merely the playful attention of a famous athlete. The change unsettles her because it turns Cain from an attractive but threatening Magical into a vulnerable person. Even so, she continues to prefer the apparent simplicity of human Brock, believing that dating Cain would mean accepting an unwanted complication.

That preference becomes a dangerous misjudgment. Michelle assumes Cain will accept her decision to date his best friend Brock Thaddeus, but Cain is not capable of treating the matter as an ordinary romantic disappointment. His dragon nature reacts with anger, and the concealed danger that Michelle has sensed in his aura becomes an active force. Her attempt to make the safer, simpler choice does not remove the supernatural conflict; instead, it helps trigger the crisis.

The Dragon Crisis and Michelle’s Choice

Cain attacks Brock after struggling unsuccessfully to contain his dragon. He later explains that he had been fighting the transformation since learning that Michelle agreed to go out with Brock, withdrew to seek peace and quiet, and then lost control. Brock is left infected and gravely ill, while Cain believes he has killed his best friend. Cain nevertheless carries Brock inside and places him on the bedroom bed as gently as possible, an action that preserves the bond between the two men even amid the consequences of his violence.

Michelle responds by abandoning the safe distance she had maintained. She tells Cain that she is a witch and that she had always known something magical surrounded him, although she had not known that he was a dragon. Her disclosure changes the relationship between them: the secret that had made Cain appear monstrous is now met by a supernatural identity of her own. Michelle is no longer merely Cain’s attorney interpreting a threatening aura; she becomes the person capable of understanding the magic and acting within its rules.

The cure requires a third person to serve as a conduit. Cain explains that the magic must pass from him through the conduit and into the infected person, and that the process is rare because many conduits do not survive the change. Michelle immediately volunteers to take that role. Cain refuses to ask this sacrifice of her, but she rejects the idea that his permission is required. Her decision is therefore not passive romantic surrender. It is an act of will in which she claims responsibility for Brock’s survival and accepts the danger inherent in her own magical abilities.

The Conduit and the Three-Way Bond

The transfer places Michelle at the center of an intense magical and erotic convergence involving Cain and Brock. As Cain’s dragon magic enters her, she experiences it as red, green, and yellow energy moving through her body and taking possession of it. The conduit process is presented not as an abstract spell but as a shared bodily event in which magic, desire, friendship, and love become inseparable. Michelle is the channel through which Cain’s power can reach Brock, making her participation the mechanism that converts a destructive attack into a rescue.

The magic passes from Michelle to Brock, and the shared force grows through their contact. All three become part of the same rhythm while smoke swirls around them, rising to a fever pitch as the dragon’s power completes its passage. The climax of the scene is also the climax of Michelle’s plot function: she does not merely witness Cain’s transformation or comfort Brock after the attack; she physically and magically connects the two men and enables the spell to finish.

The immediate result confirms that Michelle’s choice has worked. When the spell breaks, Brock’s fever is gone, his shaking has stopped, and his skin has returned to a healthy color. The smoke slowly dissipates around the three tangled bodies, marking the end of the crisis. Michelle’s willingness to become the conduit saves Brock and gives Cain a path out of the guilt of believing that he destroyed his best friend.

Character Arc and Narrative Role

Michelle’s arc moves from warning to recognition, and from avoidance to deliberate involvement. At first, her aura-sensing gift encourages suspicion: Cain’s smoke-scented red-and-yellow aura validates her instinct to keep away. Her professional ethics then provide a rational structure for that avoidance. But the plot proves that distance is not the same as safety. Cain’s hidden nature cannot be managed merely by refusing him, and Michelle’s attempt to choose the apparently uncomplicated human relationship with Brock becomes entangled with the dragon’s jealousy.

Her eventual action integrates the parts of Cain that she had kept separate. She can still recognize the danger in the dragon, yet she also sees Cain’s remorse, his love for Brock, and his refusal to sacrifice her without consent. Michelle does not resolve the crisis by denying the supernatural or by reducing Cain to a monster. Instead, she accepts the reality of his magic while retaining her own judgment. Her decision to volunteer, followed by her insistence that she does not need Cain’s permission, makes agency the defining feature of her transformation.

Michelle also functions as the novel’s bridge between legal order and magical consequence. She begins by invoking rules governing attorney-client relationships, objectivity, and financial protection. She ends by entering a magical system whose solution depends on risk, bodily connection, and a third-person conduit. The contrast does not erase her professionalism; it shows that her moral reasoning survives even when the situation exceeds the human institutions she first relied upon. Through Michelle, the story turns a forbidden attraction and a violent loss-of-control episode into a rescue shaped by consent, sacrifice, and the possibility of integrating desire with responsibility.