Chapter 23
It’s Not You, It’s Me
NightandDarkarriveon Monday evening, and the flat immediately feels different.
Not smaller, exactly. More purposeful. The way a room feels when the people in it have something important to do and are getting on with doing it. They don’t bow this time, or rather Night inclines his head and Dark does something with his hand that might be a salute and might be something else entirely, a greeting between people who know each other well enough not to need the formality.
Hex receives it differently too. Not the princely stillness of their first visit. Something more relaxed than that, more like three people who have been through a great deal together and are about to go through more.
I make tea because it is the thing I know how to do and because my kitchen is the one part of this situation where I have any competence whatsoever.
Dark follows me in.
I am going to be entirely honest and admit that Dark following me into the kitchen requires a small adjustment period, because Dark in my kitchen is a considerable physical presence and the kitchen is not a large room. He leans against the counter in the way that Hex leans against the counter, which is presumably a shadow being thing, and watches me fill the kettle with the amber eyes thatare warm and steady and much easier to look at than I expected given how frightening he was the first time I saw him.
“You’re handling this well,” he says.
“I’m making tea,” I say. “Anyone can make tea.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
I know it’s not what he meant. I busy myself with mugs. “I’m not sure I have much choice.”
“You have plenty of choice.” He crosses his arms. “You could have told him to leave days ago. Could have broken the bond. Could have decided this wasn’t worth it.”
I think about that. I think about all the mornings and all the rearranged bookshelves and the blue jumper and the family dinner and the hallway with the blown lightbulbs, but all the glass carefully swept up.
“No,” I say. “I really couldn’t have.”
Dark looks at me for a moment. Something shifts in his expression, settling into something warmer than before. “No,” he agrees. “I don’t think you could.”
We take the tea through. In the living room, Night and Hex are talking in low voices, heads close together, and there is something about the quality of their conversation that makes me slow my steps. It’s not secretive exactly. Serious. The kind of serious that comes with genuine stakes and genuine history. Night is talking, Hex is listening, and the easy charm has stepped aside again in favour of that older, quieter thing.
I set the mugs down and sit on the sofa and try to look like I’m not watching.
I am absolutely watching.
I notice things. Small things, the kind you file away without meaning to. The way Hex tilts his head when Night says something he’s weighing up. The particular set of his shoulders when he’s thinking, different from the lazy confidence he wears the rest of the time. The sound of his voice in a language I don’t know, low andcertain, nothing like the voice he uses with me, but is still entirely recognisably him.
I notice these things and I put them somewhere careful.
The preparation takes most of the evening. I don’t understand any of it. There are conversations in a language I don’t know, and at one point all three of them do something together that makes the shadows in the room move in ways shadows are not supposed to, and the temperature fluctuates in a way that has nothing to do with the radiator. I sit on the sofa with my tea and my book that I haven’t read a single word of and try to be useful by staying out of the way.
At some point, I take the ring out of my pocket.
I don’t decide to. The metal is warm from being carried all day, and I’m just turning it over in my fingers the way I’ve taken to doing when I’m thinking about something I’m not ready to think about directly, I do it without really noticing I’m doing it.
Night notices.
He goes very still in the middle of whatever he was saying. Not dramatically. Just a pause, a fraction of a second, the way someone pauses when they see something they weren’t expecting. His emerald eyes drop to my hand, to the ring, and then move immediately to Hex.
Hex doesn’t look up. He is looking at something Night brought with him, a piece of something dark and flat that might be a map or might be something else entirely, and his expression doesn’t change at all.
But he knows. I’m certain he knows without looking up that Night had seen it.
Dark has gone still too, across the room, with a different quality of stillness from his brother. Where Night went quiet, Dark’s stillness has a weight to it, something that sits in the room without announcing itself. He looks at the ring in my hand and then at Hex and then at Night, and something passes between the brothers inthe way things pass between people who have known each other long enough not to need words for it.
I look at the ring. I look at Hex. He is still looking at the map or whatever it is, entirely absorbed, and he does not look at me.
