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I’ve lost track of the wind. Of the fields. Of my sense of direction and where one farm ends and the next begins.

I’m so tired. Only a raw wound burned into my brother’s arm keeps me upright. “You’re hurt.”

Folk turns to me, mouth twitching with what might’ve been a smile on another day. “So are you.”

“I’m okay.”

“Then so am I.”

I glare at him.

He doesn’t glare back. Instead, his expression changes, that fond amusement nothing but a dream. He stares past my shoulder, eyes narrowing. For one hopeful second, I think it’s rain.

Then I turn and see it.

A line of fresh embers tumbling across the horizon like a swarm of fireflies. They drift over the firebreak and vanish against the black. But orange blooms with a new spot fire a second later.

Then another and another.

Folk lets out a slow breath. He knows what that means, and so do I.

We aren’t finished.

We never were.

I meet his weary gaze and nod.

We go again.

22 OSCAR

It is the longest night of my life. Poet doesn’t come back. Neither does Folk, and in my struggle to chase after the man who holds my heart, I break my friend’s ribs.

“They’re not broken,” Mal tells me for the dozenth time. “You didn’t hit me that hard.”

Maybe not. But I’d wanted to and it sits wrong on my skin. Everything does. I feel like I need to be as naked as my soul feels right now and I am prowling around Poet’s yard, barefoot, my shirt…actually, I am not sure I ever put one on before charging up the hill to get to Aras and Hanna.

They are safe.

She took my car and the Rebel Kings escorted her to Rubi’s house in Devon. River has them there. I do not need to worry about my family. About my son and his mother. And for the first time I can remember in half a decade, I’m not. They’re not on my mind at all. I see nothing but fire and smoke, and the steely determination in Poet’s eyes as he shoved me away from him.

I love you, Oscar. But I have to go.

A growl rips from my chest.

Mal steps in front of me; he’s the only one here. When the wind changed, marking Porth Luck and the surrounding land as safe—for now—Jack and Sol went back to the Joker to open up for the emergency workers and anyone displaced by the fire. “If anything shite had happened out there, you’d have heard about it by now. The Kings are tracking Folk, remember?”

I remember. But I’ve never had the luxury of looking at a screen and believing what I see. So what if Saint keeps sending Mal screenshots of a moving red dot? All that means to me is Folk Whitlock’s phone remains whole.

The sky feels heavy.

Weighted by death and disaster.

I tip my face to it and hear my father’s voice, rich Lithuanian weathered raw by forty years of chain-smoking. Bangpūtys doesn’t bargain. He used to say it whenever he came to the harbour wall to wait for me after a storm. It is why Sol’s affinity for Cornish mythology felt like home when I first met him. Because we both understood the ocean never weighs love against loss. She takes what she is given, and tonight, this wildfire, as generational as the winter storm that nearly killed Sol and I, feels no different. It doesn’t know how gently Poet touches every living thing, including my son. It doesn’t know, or care, how deeply he is loved. It does not know I love him.

Neither does he.

My chest tightens until I can barely draw breath. I hear Poet again, in the moments before he left me, smoke swallowing the sky. I see myself looking back at him as though I didn’t know my own heart, and it hurts that I let him climb into that tractor believing I might not feel enough to be here when he gets back.