After lunch, I find myself wandering through the safehouse, restless energy driving me from room to room. The decision looms over me like a storm cloud, dark and threatening, impossible to ignore.
I pause at a window in the hallway, staring out at the overgrown garden behind the house. Weeds choke what might once have been flower beds, nature reclaiming what humans abandoned. Somehow, it feels like a metaphor for my life—wild and uncontrolled where once there had been structure, however confining.
“Trying to find inspiration in the weeds?”
I turn to find Cillian leaning against the wall a few feet away, his pale hair falling across his forehead in a way that softens his usually sharp features. He looks better than he did yesterday—some color has returned to his face, and he stands without the slight hunch of pain I’d grown accustomed to seeing.
“Something like that,” I reply, turning back to the window. “How are you feeling?”
He moves to stand beside me, close enough that I can feel the feverish heat radiating from his body but not so close that we touch. “Better.”
I cast a critical eye over the flushed skin on his face, the pain setting wrinkles into his forehead, and don’t believe him for a second. “That’s good. We need you at full strength.”
Cillian only shrugs at that, avoiding my gaze.
“I hear you might have decided?” Cillian asks after a moment of silence.
I sigh, resting my forehead against the cool glass of the window. “Not yet. But I will.”
His voice is gentle, lacking any apparent urgency. “What’s holding you back?”
I turn to face him fully, studying his expression. There’s no judgment there, no impatience, just genuine curiosity and something that might be concern.
“I keep thinking about what happens after,” I admit, the words coming more easily than I expected. “Not just the immediate consequences, but the long-term ones. What kind of life we’d have, either way.”
Cillian nods, his pale eyes thoughtful. “And neither option looks particularly appealing.”
“Exactly.” The relief of being understood, of not having to explain myself further, loosens something in my chest. “If we run, we’re looking at a lifetime of hiding, of always looking over our shoulders. If we stay and fight, we’re risking everything on a rebellion that might fail spectacularly.”
“And even if it succeeds,” Cillian adds, “it’s impossible to calculate the cost of victory. People will die.”
A shiver rocks down my spine as I repeat, “People will die.”
A small smile touches Cillian’s lips. “You would make an excellent queen, at least. I can’t think of anyone more suited to a crown.”
The compliment catches me off guard. “Being good at something and wanting to do it are very muchnotthe same thing.”
“You’d have the power to make the court what you want it to be.”
Assuming I survive long enough to even lay eyes on the crown, is what he doesn’t say.
He shifts closer, that subtle change in his demeanor making my skin prickle with awareness. Heat rises to my face, and I turn back to the window, hoping he doesn’t notice. But of course he does. Cillian notices everything.
“You’re thinking about it,” he says, his voice dropping lower.
My fingers clench. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Cillian chuckles as he shifts closer, not quite touching me but near enough that I can feel the warmth of him along my side. “It doesn’t have to mean anything you don’t want it to,” he says quietly. “It can just be what it was—a moment of connection in the midst of chaos. Just something to make us feel better.”
The offer of simplicity is tempting, but I know better. Nothing about our situation is simple, least of all the complicated tangle of emotions and desires that exists between the three of us.
“Did you mean what you said?” I ask, the question slipping out before I can reconsider. “About being a buffer between Logan and me? About finding balance?”
Cillian is silent for a long moment, long enough that I turn to look at him again. His expression is serious, his pale eyes intent on my face.
“Yes,” he says finally, the single word carrying the weight of absolute certainty. “I meant every word.”
Something loosens in my chest at his confirmation, a tension I hadn’t realized I was carrying. “And you think it could work? The three of us?”
