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I shrug. “There wasn’t exactly a good moment.”

“You could’ve started with, ‘Hi, Onyx. Met a ridiculously handsome, rich guy who wants to marry me.’”

“I don’t remember it happening in that order.”

He laughs again. “I knew something was wrong when those guys appeared out of nowhere and took me to Calder’s most expensive restaurant.”

I snort. “You mean the night you practically melted for Ryven?”

His ears go pink, but his eyes dance. “Well... He is very handsome, isn’t he?”

What am I supposed to say to that? He smiles the way he hasn’t smiled in years. Let him have this.

“Yeah,” I murmur. “He is.”

Onyx pushes himself out of the chair and hugs me again, this time quick, a hard squeeze before letting go. “Congratulations, JaJa.”

I kiss the top of his head, then guide him back into the chair before he can pretend he isn’t tired. “You too.”

He rolls his eyes but sits anyway, and I pull another chair over beside him. For a while we just watch the rain moving down the glass.

“You really weren’t going to tell me?” he asks.

“There wasn’t anything to tell.” I watch the drops race each other down the window. “He was caught in the landslide during the Hunt. I found him before the storm hit. We sheltered together, and then I left. I got eliminated. I thought I’d never see him again.”

Onyx studies me for a moment. “That didn’t exactly work out.”

I snort, my attention catching on the flowers reflected in the glass.

Winter lilies.

Huge white ones against the gray walls. I know them from a painting in Calder’s museum, in the room about the orchards. They only grow in fertile ground.

People put them on graves.

“So...” Onyx nudges my elbow. “What happens now?”

“Now?”

“Now that you’re married. Do we stay here? Do we go back to Calder? What does any of this mean?”

I keep looking at the flowers. “I don’t know.”

The words sit between us because the truth is, there isn’t much to decide. Tempest law says I’m married. Asher told me that himself. Whatever this is, whatever he thinks we’ve made, it exists now, whether I understand it or not. Going back to Calder isn’t really a choice anymore. Besides, Onyx is here.

He’s breathing without fighting for it. Laughing. Sitting by a window, flowers too expensive for me to imagine. There’s color in his face for the first time in years. I couldn’t go back to Calder, even if this marriage turned out to be a disaster. A life without Onyx is no life.

And he isn’t the only reason anymore.

I shut that thought down before it can go any further. But when I think about leaving Tempest now, it isn’t only my brother I see.

Out in the corridor, the low back-and-forth has stopped. The door isn’t quite shut, and their voices drift through the gap, low enough that I only catch pieces.

“How long’s he been in there?”

“Nineteen minutes.”

Ryven drags a hand over his mouth. “Long enough that he’s talking, not just taking it.”