Every time his arm moves, my scanning tracks it. Every time he shifts his weight, my body tenses like it’s bracing for contact that isn’t coming. My skin feels too thin and aware, like the lotus stripped off a layer I haven’t grown back yet, and now I’m sitting three feet from the person responsible, pretending to be interested in the grain of the wood beneath my boots.
I’m not interested in the grain of the wood beneath my boots.
I’m interested in the fact that his hands are steady now, and on the island, they weren’t.
Kieran sets a portion of fish on the crate we’re using as a table and sits down on the one across from me, his back against the hull. The lantern swings overhead, casting shadows that make the angles of his face look sharper and harder.
He’s back to the version of Kieran Cross the rest of the world sees.
But I’ve seen the one whose voice broke when he saidI can’t,who kept his thumb tracing circles on my knee even while his mouth was telling me all the reasons this was a mistake, and I can’t unsee him. I’ll never be able to unsee him, just like I’ll never be able to stop feeling the moment when he was inside me just enough to make me know exactly what I lost.
My scanning won’t let me forget either, because he’s burning hotter than should be possible—hot enough that he probably could have cooked the fish simply by placing it on his skin and letting it burn.
“You need to eat,” he says, completely devoid of emotion, as if the last time he spoke to me his voice wasn’t breathy and barely recognizable, sayingtell me to stoplike he was praying I wouldn’t.
How can he sit there and pretend nothing happened between us?
I don’t know. But if Kieran Cross can sit three feet away from me and act like he wasn’t shaking against my skin and half inside me a few hours ago, then I can sit three feet away from him and act like I wasn’t wrapping my legs around his waist and shattering from his touch.
I’m a Thorne. We compartmentalize. It’s practically genetic.
So, I shove every memory of the spring into a box, seal it shut, and do what I do best—default to data.
“I’m aware of the calorie requirements for sustained physical and magical exertion,” I say, staying perfectly still. “It’s approximately two thousand calories per day for a female of my height and weight, more if factoring in magical energy expenditure, which has been significant given the?—”
“Evie.”
I stop talking, my jaw clicking shut.
The boat rocks, water lapping against the hull in a rhythm my brain automatically catalogs as approximately 1.3-second intervals.
Say something. Don’t just sit here being the world’s most awkward dining companion. Eleanor would have something elegant and appropriate to say. Eleanor would not be mentally calculating wave intervals while avoiding eye contact with the man who made her?—
I clamp down on that thought so hard my teeth hurt, and a hairline fracture splits through my chest. It’s been spreading since I knelt on the Crown and felt my brother’s heat signature end in a blast pattern that looked like?—
Don’t.
But the crack keeps spreading, traveling through my ribs, into my throat, and behind my eyes where tears are building in a system with no release valve.
Kieran shifts, and for one wonderful second I think he’s going to close the distance and pull me against his chest like he did on the Crown, when he wrapped himself around me and fire traveled us to safety.
He doesn’t.
But I’m not here for Kieran. I’m here for Oliver, and the evidence keeps piling up. There was no heat trail leaving the Crown, no trace of him on Circe’s island, and no signs he’d ever been on the Lotus Eaters’ shore.
Then there’s Avery, whose analytical prowess rivals my own, saying the emberlink was healing. Not stretching thin from distance, not weakened by separation, buthealing.The way it only does when the other half of the bond is?—
“I think Oliver is dead.”
The words taste like broken glass, and the wound they leave behind is worse than the thought ever was.
Kieran doesn’t flinch, but his thermal signature detonates. The steady sixty-eight beats per minute I’d been tracking spike to ninety in less than two seconds. Heat concentrates in his hands, his jaw, and the muscles along his forearms. It’s the exact pattern I’ve observed when he’s about to draw steel.
His hand tightens on the hilt of his dagger, and the blade doesn’t come out, but heat’s pouring off his palm where it grips the leather. It’s hot enough that the leather itself must be close to scorching.
His eyes meet mine, and the green in them burns like a blade in a forge.
“We’ll find out what happened. Every detail, and every name,” he says, each word as hard as steel. “And whoever did this will bleed for it.”
