“I fucking love you too.”
We crash together in a kiss that’s all heat and teeth and panic. His mouth is hot against mine, the taste of smoke curling over my tongue, the faint tang of ash clinging to his lips. I fist my free hand in his shirt like I can hold us in this moment. If I just squeeze tight enough, the guards, the queens, the whole magickal kingdom, won’t be able to touch us. Our lips break, our breath mingling, smoke sweet and ragged.
“Let’s get out of here,” I whisper, the words falling over themselves in their rush to escape. “We can figure out where to go after—once we’ve escaped. How about the Kingdom of Cups? They think we’re from there anyway. We’ll just…keep running until we figure out how to get home.” I pull back enough to meet his eyes, my grip on him aching, my pulse pounding so hard it hurts. “Whatever we decide, we’ll be together. And that’s what matters. That’s all that matters.”
For a heartbeat, he’s with me in that fragile, impossible hope. Then, the air shifts, and his hand slips from my cheek. He sits up, creating space that wasn’t there a breath ago, and brushes the sand from his hair.
“I want to be with you, Amanda, I do. But…” His throat works. “I need to be honest. About everything. Even if it risks this.”
I blink up at him, teary, blotchy, smiling like a buffoon. “You’re not about to tell me you secretly hate cats and cuddle Cinder to rub in how much she despises me, are you? Because that would really kill the vibe.”
A strained laugh breaks out of him, quick and fleeting. Then his expression sobers. He brushes his knuckles along his jaw.
My heart gives a single, hard kick, like it’s trying to break free of my chest. It knows before my brain fully has time to register that this is a deathbed confession. A final declaration before our story ends. And the way he’s looking at me… I already know it’s going to hurt.
“No. Nothing like that.” He swallows, gaze flicking away, then back to mine. “But I have been keeping something from you.”
“Okay…” The word comes out thinner than I mean it to.
An icy prickle rushes under my skin. I shiver and sit up. I’m suddenly too aware of how little I’m wearing in this desert realm, how bare I’ve become with him. As if on instinct, my arms fold over my middle, protecting myself.
“Fuck, I hope this isn’t a mistake.”
“What is it? What aren’t you telling me?” My voice is brittle. My nerve endings frayed, muscles braced for the blow.
“When we matched on Flutter…” He pauses, shaking his head. “It wasn’t supposed to be real. We weren’t supposed to end up like this.”
“You didn’t want to be magickally dropped into another world?” I try to laugh, a weak spark in the gloom.
“You were market research. I was considering funding a dating app company. Wanted to get an idea exactly how it worked. Us matching…” He pauses, dragging his hand down his cheek as each word sticks like a hot coal against my skin. “I wanted to see firsthand how effective the algorithm was. I didn’t want to be with anyone, but I did need to know if it would pair me with someone I connected with beyond the physical. Wouldmy money be going toward a product that could create real relationships?”
The breath leaves me in a pained exhale, sharp enough to feel like a blade slipping between my ribs. My body still aches from the Tower, from the fall, from what I let happen between us. What I asked for. What I surrendered to. The places where he touched me still hum with the ghost of his hands, and for the first time, that memory feels like contamination.
I clamber to my feet, anger blistering to the surface. Heat floods my limbs, my face as my mind claws back through every moment, dragging red ink across every touch, every yes, every truth I thought we’d whispered into being. One by one, the ink bleeds through until the memories are illegible, until I can’t tell if any of it was real.
“I’m a case study.”
Declan scrambles up beside me. “Not anymore.”
“But I was.”
Every beat of my heart chars its edges, turns it to ash inside my chest.
“Amanda—”
He reaches for me, and I back away, pressing my hands to my chest, like I can hold my heartbreak together while everything else falls apart. “Don’t touch me. You don’t get to touch me. Not after—” My teeth sink into the inside of my cheek hard enough to taste copper. “Not after telling me I was an assignment. A line item in your fucking market research.”
“I didn’t expect any of this,” he says, voice rough, like he’s trying to hand me a piece of himself. But I don’t have the ability to hold anything from him. Not whenmy own insides are scraped raw. So I turn to deflection, barbed and ugly, the armor I wear when the truth cuts too close and thinking positively, using affirmations and crystals, won’t dull the pain.
“Should I be grateful you caught feelings instead of just meeting up to fuck me for the sake of your spreadsheet?” My laugh is flat and humorless. “Is that what your mommy and daddy wanted for you? Because it sure looks like youcanmake your own choices. You just hide the inconvenient ones.”
He looks at me like I’ve just torn the last piece of him out of his chest.
“I should have known better. Even though this is the worst possible setting, you were—” I falter, because if I try to name what this man means to me, it will consume me whole. “This was all too good to be true. I should’ve known it wouldn’t stick.”
“You’re wrong, Amanda,” he says, the edges of his words rough. “I am so sorry I hurt you. But what we had—what wehave—is not too good to be true. It’s real.I love you.That’s real. That will never change.”
“You lied to me,” I cry. “About what you wanted. What you were even doing on the app. That you were using me. Everything between us is built on that lie. And of course you made the best of a shitty situation. You didn’t have much of a choice. Kind of hard to gather data about how well the algorithm picked a partner for you and then ghost me when you got your answers when we’re trapped in the same nightmare.”
