“Duck!” she yells.
I drop and feel a snowball whistle over my head.
“Now!”
We both rise and throw. Both shots hit.
“Truce!” Silas finally gasps, doubled over and wheezing. "Truce, we can't... You win..."
Naomi straightens, breathing hard, snow dusting her hair. Pride is written all over her face.
“Truce,” she agrees, sounding very pleased with herself.
We all just collapse backward into the snow, spread out in a loose star. For a while, the only sounds are our breathing and the distant rustle of pines.
“Snow angels?” Naomi suggests.
“Obviously,” I say.
Suddenly, we all flap around like deranged birds, creating the world's most chaotic angel formation. Then, we just lie there, watching the snow fall from the sky like nature's own glitter bomb.
I turn my head. Naomi’s lying in her mangled angel, eyes closed, lashes dotted with tiny flakes. She looks… peaceful. And perfect.
“It suits you,” I whisper.
She doesn’t open her eyes. “What does?”
“Being an angel.”
Her eyes snap open. Color crawls up her neck into her cheeks. “That—That's extremely cheesy, Felix.”
“Yeah,” I say, grinning at the sky. “Still true, though.”
She looks away, but I know she's smiling. "You're ridiculous."
“He is,” Silas agrees from my left, but he's smiling too.
Liam lets out a low, satisfied hum. “I really could get used to this.”
I feel it then. This palpablethingin the air. This storm, this day, this perfect snowball fight... things are different now. I can tell the ice around Silas' heart is cracking. The walls around Liam are thinning.
And me?
I suspect I'm already halfway gone.
Chapter seventeen
Naomi
We stumble back into the chalet, tracking snow and chaos into the mudroom. My toes are numb, my face is probably permanently pink, and I can’t stop grinning.
“Okay,” Felix pants, shaking his head like a golden retriever and showering us all in snow. “That was officially the most fun I’ve had this year.”
“You’re still a traitor,” Silas mutters, wrestling with a frozen bootlace. The corner of his mouth twitches like it’s trying not to smile. “Pack loyalty clearly means nothing to you.”
“I have a weakness for underdogs,” Felix declares.
“Pretty sure the side with the lawyer is never the underdog,” Liam says mildly as he hangs up his coat. When he glances at me, the look is so warm it feels like we just stepped into mid-July.
