Chapter 6 Felix
Felix
Ishifted my weight from foot to foot, the pavement cold beneath my trainers. Twenty-three minutes now. The lime tree above me dropped another yellowed leaf onto my shoulder, and I brushed it off with fingers that wouldn’t stop trembling.
He wasn’t coming.
The knowledge settled through me like code compiling—inevitable, final.
Kit was never late. When we secretly met here before work, he was always waiting under this tree when I arrived, no matter how early I managed to drag myself out of bed.
I’d suspected for ages that he arrived stupidly early, just in case I did the same.
My phone screen glowed as I checked our messages for the fifteenth time:
Are you okay to meet at our spot before work tomorrow? I want to talk to you.
Kit
I'll be there.
Simple. Direct. Kit didn’t waste words in texts, but he’d never broken a promise either. Not once.
The small terracotta pot in my hand felt ridiculous now.
The Philodendron Pink Princess inside was barely six inches tall, its heart-shaped leaves gleaming with streaks of bright pink against dark green.
I’d dragged Lily all the way to a specialist nursery in Kew yesterday, spending nearly two hours on Tubes and buses for one tiny plant.
“This is mental,” Lily had said, watching me inspect leaf after leaf for the best variegation. “It’s just a plant, Felix.”
“It’s not just a plant,” I’d replied, carefully selecting the one with the most vivid pink streaking. “It’s… it’s important.”
“So what exactly are you going to tell him when you give him this?” my sister had asked on the journey home, the precious cargo balanced on my lap.
“None of your business,” I’d replied, bopping her on the head.
I’d carefully placed the pot in my bag, sandwiching it between my headphones and a packet of biscuits.
The care instructions were burned into my brain—bright, indirect light, well-draining soil, water when top inch is dry.
My rucksack was definitely failing on the light requirements, but hopefully Kit would forgive a few minutes of darkness.
I’d stroked the heart-shaped leaves before I zipped up the bag. The metaphor wasn’t lost on me—my heart felt just as delicate, just as likely to crumple if handled wrong.
A bus rumbled past, belching diesel fumes. Early commuters hurried along the pavement, clutching coffee cups and staring at their phones. Normal people living normal lives, not standing under trees wondering if they’d been stood up.
Maybe there had been an emergency. Kit might have been called away on some urgent team business—a security breach, a last-minute job, something that couldn’t wait. That had to be it. Kit didn’t just… disappear.
I shouldered my rucksack and walked towards the hotel. By the time I reached the peeling side door, I’d convinced myself that Kit would be inside, probably in the kitchen making a cup of instant coffee, ready with a rambling grand speech of an apology for why he couldn’t meet me.
As soon as I passed Dolly, voices drifted from the kitchen—Flynn’s laugh, Priya’s loud commentary on something. Normal sounds. Everything exactly as it should be.
Except Kit’s laugh wasn’t among them.
The voices in the kitchen grew louder as I pushed through the swing door. Flynn was bent over his phone at the table, texting. Priya was perched on the counter, nursing a steaming mug and scrolling through what looked like medical journals on her tablet.
My stomach clenched. Kit wasn’t here.
“Morning, Felix,” Priya said without looking up.
“Is Kit here?” The words tumbled out before I could stop them.
She glanced up, eyebrows raised. “Kit? You know what? No, I don’t think so. Must be running late, I suppose.” A grin spread across her face. “Which is weird for him. I’m never going to let him hear the end of this.”
Flynn chuckled. “Maybe he overslept. First time for everything.”
But they didn’t understand. Kit didn’t oversleep. Kit didn’t run late. Kit’s internal clock was more reliable than Swiss precision engineering.
“I’ll let him know you were looking for him, though,” Priya said with a wink.
“Right,” I mumbled. “I’ll just go… check something.”
The anxiety built as I climbed the hotel’s creaking staircase to the second floor. Each step felt heavier than the last, my breathing getting shallow. By the time I reached the landing, my hands were shaking again.
I passed room 208—Flynn and Seb’s bedroom—but heard nothing from inside. Good. That meant Seb was in his office.
A few more steps, then I reached it. The door loomed ahead of me like some impenetrable firewall. My feet froze. My chest tightened. What if Seb thought I was being ridiculous? What if he asked why I was so worried about Kit specifically? What if—
The door swung open before I could knock.
“I heard your approach,” Seb said, leaning against the doorframe. His narrowed eyes scanned my face with that unsettling vampire perception. “What is it?”
“Umm…” I started, then immediately wanted to disappear into the hotel’s floorboards. “I was wondering if you knew where Kit was. Like, if you’d sent him out to do something? Because he’s not here. And he should be.”
Seb went very still for a moment. He checked his wristwatch. “He should be here. The two of us are meeting in twenty-two minutes. Perhaps he’s running late this morning.”
“Kit’s never late!” The words burst out of me.
“Then we’ll forgive him just this once, shall we?” Seb said dryly, still staring at me in a way that suggested “please leave me to my work.”
But I couldn’t. The wrongness of Kit’s absence sat inside my heart like corrupted data, demanding attention. “I think something’s wrong!” The desperation in my voice made me cringe. “We were meant to meet this morning. Before work. And he never showed.”
Seb’s eyebrows lifted slightly. “Why on earth were you meant to meet before work?”
A horribly long silence. My face burned.
“We’ve been… um… meeting,” I whispered. I was grateful Seb couldn’t see the mental image flashing through my head—Kit’s hands in my hair, his mouth against mine as he pinned me against our lime tree.
“To do what?” Seb asked, still looking confused, and I desperately wished my boss didn’t have the emotional intelligence of a teaspoon.
“To… to… to…” My heart pounded so fast I thought I might faint. “Train! Train. And run. And other… stuff.”
“I see,” said Seb, and the tiniest crinkle around his eyes suggested he might understand what “other stuff” meant. But probably not. This was Seb, after all.
“Kit has never missed one of our meetings,” I said, emboldened now that it was out in the open. Sort of. “Never. And he didn’t show this morning.”
“I see,” Seb repeated. Then he walked purposefully towards the hotel’s intercom system mounted on his office wall. Pressed the button. His voice echoed through the building’s speakers.
“Everyone to the basement. We have a code 909. Repeat, code 909.”