“Helios,” I mutter. “That pretentious prick.”
SIXTEEN
AFTER
LARK
The cabin gets quiet in a different way at night.
Morning quiet is heavy with dread and coffee and bad news waiting inside encrypted files. Night quiet is… softer. The forest noise turns into a hush, and the little space around us feels less like a hideout and more like a bubble.
Knight gets the fire going in the tiny stone hearth, feeding it kindling with practiced hands. Orange light spills into the room, banishing the last of the gray. Shadows climb the wood-paneled walls.
I sit cross-legged on the rug with a blanket around my shoulders, mug of tea cooling between my palms, watching him like a creep.
He’s in sweatpants and a black t-shirt, bare feet, hair mussed from his fingers. The hard lines in his face are a little softer in this light. He looks less like the scary anonymous vigilante, and more like Knight Hayes, the boy who once drove me to a 7-Eleven at midnight because I’d never had a Slurpee and decided that was a life crisis.
My heart does that stupid flip it keeps doing now.
I’m so far gone it’s not even funny.
He tosses the last piece of kindling on, waits until the flames catch, then drops down onto the rug beside me with a little groan, stretching his long legs out toward the fire.
“Back okay?” I ask.
“Back’s fine,” he says. “Brain’s fried. Soul’s questionable. But my back is a temple.”
I snort into my mug. “You’re such an idiot.”
“You like that about me,” he says, leaning sideways until our shoulders touch.
I do.
Too much.
For a minute, we just sit there, staring at the fire. The flames crackle and pop, the sound almost hypnotic. For the first time all day, no one is talking in my ear. No ping from Arrow. No new bounty updates. No ghost of Luka’s smug face in my head.
It’s just… this.
Him.
Me.
And a future I’m half afraid to look at straight on.
“You’re doing the face,” Knight says quietly.
I blink. “What face?”
“The one where you’re somewhere three months ahead, arguing with a version of me that hasn’t happened yet,” he says. “What’s going on in there, Birdie?”
I take a sip of tea to buy time.
It’s lukewarm and tastes like cardboard and comfort.
“If I tell you,” I say slowly, “you have to promise not to make fun of me.”
“Oh, this is going to be good,” he murmurs, turning slightly to face me. The firelight catches the stubble on his jaw, the curve of his mouth. “Proceed.”
