His thumb traces across my knuckles, and I feel him go distant again—that particular stillness settling into his body like he’s listening to something I can’t hear.
“Where do you go?” I ask. “When you look like that.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The waterfall fills the silence.
“Everywhere.” His voice is careful, the way it gets when he’s deciding how much truth to hand over. “The Crown shows me paths. Possibilities. Every choice branching into a thousand outcomes, and all of them crashing back into the same handful of fixed points.”
I pull back enough to look at his face. “You see the future?”
“I see futures. Plural.” His mouth twists. “None of them certain. All of them demanding to be accounted for.” He meets my eyes, and there’s something raw there that the truth venom cracked open and he hasn’t bothered to seal back up. “Right now I can see forty-three ways this conversation could end. Twelve of them involve you being angry with me. Seven involve interruption. Three involve—” He stops himself.
“Involve what?”
“Things I’m not saying out loud because I’d like at least one of the good outcomes to remain possible.”
I snort. “That’s cheating.”
“It’s survival.” But he’s almost smiling. “The Crown doesn’t let me turn it off. Every moment, every breath, I’m calculating. Running scenarios. Watching the threads tangle and separate and tangle again.” His hand finds my jaw, tilts my face up. “Do you know how rare it is to find someone who makes the noise quiet?”
My chest does something I’m not examining. “I make it quiet?”
“You make it bearable.” His thumb brushes my cheekbone. “When I’m with you, the paths narrow. The chaos organizes itself around a fixed point. You.”
I don’t have words for that. So I kiss him instead—soft, unhurried, the kind of kiss that says things I’m not ready to say out loud.
He sighs into my mouth and pulls me closer, and for a moment there’s nothing but warmth and water and the specific weight of his body against mine.
Then an arrow punches through the waterfall and buries itself in the rock two inches from Finnian’s head.
I’m moving before the spray settles, yanking him down and under the water, my back to the stone, his body shielded by mine. Stupid. Probably. He’s the one with three centuries of Faeexperience and I’m the one playing human shield, but my hands don’t care about logic right now.
Another arrow. Another. The waterfall shreds them into splinters but they keep coming, probing, searching for the gap in the cascade.
“We need to move,” Finnian says against my ear, his voice gone cold and tactical in a way that sends an inconvenient shiver down my spine.
“Working on it.”
I reach for the soil beneath the pool—there, under the silt and stone, roots threading through the bedrock like veins. I pull.
The earth answers.
Roots erupt from the bank in a wall of thorns and bark, blocking the arrow trajectory, buying us seconds. Finnian grabs my hand and we’re running, water streaming off our bodies, crashing through the moss curtain and into the grotto proper. We barely grab our clothes before arrows pierce our flesh.
Kieran meets us at the tree line.
His ice spear is already formed, his eyes sweeping the canopy with the flat assessment of someone who’s been killing things since before my grandmother was born. He takes in my bare feet, Finnian’s wet hair, the fact that we’re both flushed and breathing hard and very clearly just interrupted.
Not to mention naked. I slowly tug on my clothes that stick to me. He’s got to see they’re his clothes from his room at the castle.
He doesn’t react.
Not a flinch. Not a tightening of his jaw. Not even the subtle temperature drop I’ve learned to associate with his displeasure.
“Six archers,” Kieran says, like he’s reporting weather. “Eastern ridge. They stopped firing when you raised the root wall.”
“Stopped firing or repositioning?”
“Unknown.” He hands me a blade—his blade. “Orion’s circling north. Kestra and Tiana are holding the hollow.”
