35. Everly
EVERLY
Ikeep pressing the bruise to make sure it's still there.
That's what it is, three days out from Wheeler's table, a bruise I can't stop pushing on.
The bond used to live at the center of me like a banked fire, four threads I could warm my hands at without thinking.
Now I reach for it and find thread worn down to filament, healing the way skin heals over a burn, thin and shining and wrong, and every time I touch it to check it I feel how close it came to going out entirely.
So I check it again. Of course I do. You worry a loose tooth with your tongue because it might come free.
It's late. Concordia keeps its own dark, deeper than the night outside, the kind of dark that has been collecting in these stones since before the Schism, since before anyone thought to raise the rest of the campus around the bones of this place.
The house has gone quiet the way it does when it's decided we're allowed to stay, and it decides, I've learned that much, the way it decides everything.
I'm sitting up in the wide bed in the room that's become mine here, knees to my chest, the old cold of the floor reaching up through the frame, and I have pressed on the bruise one time too many.
Three days, and none of us have been right.
We came up out of the Hollows after Wheeler with the bond drained to threads and the wrong instinct between us: to reach for each other the way we have since the summer, and to flinch when the reaching hurt.
So we stopped reaching, which turned out to be its own way of walking out on each other.
We scattered into Concordia's separate rooms and went quiet in a way we haven't been since before the desert, each of us nursing the same bruise alone, because pressing on it together was worse.
The men feel it more than they'll say. Twice this week I've heard thunder roll over Concordia with no clouds behind it—Atlas, somewhere above me, losing the grip he's so proud of keeping.
Ren's gone the other way, drawn down into himself, his hands restless, his blood-sense groping after a bond that won't hum back the way it used to and hating what it finds.
And they've been snapping at each other.
Stupid things—who left the kettle on, who took the stairs too loud at three in the morning—the old rivalry with nowhere to put itself now that the thing they used to circle feels too fragile to circle.
Three days, and the fight they nearly had in the corridor hasn't healed over.
It's just gone underground. Gone cold and clipped and careful, which is somehow worse than the shouting.
And me—I've been the most careful of all.
Baking at three in the morning because I can't sleep, grinding the cinnamon myself like that ever fixed anything, holding the bond like cracked glass and refusing to put my weight on it in case it gave.
Not reaching for a single one of them. Telling myself it was kindness. Knowing it was fear.
Three days of all of us braced and silent in a house that counts every breath we take.
I can't do another night of it.
Because here's the thing I haven't let myself land on until now, in the dark, with my own heartbeat too loud: I almost lost it.
Not lost them—lost it, the thing that runs between us, the only good magic Nyxhaven ever handed me and the one piece of all this I'd burn the rest down to keep.
Wheeler had his glass and his patience and he came so close to draining it dry that the threads still haven't grown back, and I've been treating them like something fragile ever since.
Holding my breath around them. Asking permission.
I'm done asking.
I stop pressing the bruise. And I pull instead.
Ren first, because his blood already knows mine, because of every man in this house his thread answers fastest. I find it healing-thin and I don't coax it. I take hold of it the way you take a hand you're afraid to let go of, and I pull. Three rooms away, I feel him go still.
Then Atlas, because he's the storm I've been soaked to the skin in since September, and because somewhere under all that contained weather there's a thread with my name burned into it.
I pull that one too. No finesse. No apology.
Both of them, and I mean it, and I want them to feel that I mean it through the worn places in the bond.
They come.
Ren in the doorway first, dark eyes finding me in the unlit room, because of course he knew before he knocked what state I was in.
He felt it rise off me, the wanting and the fear under the wanting.
Atlas a half-step behind, the air around him gone still and too charged, every hair on my arms standing up just from him crossing the threshold.
They find each other in the doorway before either of them looks at me.
It's a small thing, a flick: Atlas's shoulders squaring, Ren going very smooth and very calm, the calm he wears like armor.
Three days of cold corridors are still in the room with them, a low charge under the storm he carries in with him.
"She called both of us," Ren says. Quiet. Not a question. He's telling Atlas.
"I noticed." Atlas's voice is gravel already. "I felt the same pull you did."
"Then you know it wasn't a tie." Ren steps inside. "She doesn't do ties."
"Okay." I get up onto my knees in the middle of the bed and both of them look at me at the same time, finally, and I let them see my face.
"First—stop. Both of you. I'm not a flag you plant.
" I hold Atlas's eyes, then Ren's. "I almost lost this.
The bond. Wheeler nearly took it and I've spent three days being careful with it like it's going to break if I breathe wrong, and I'm not being careful tonight.
I want both of you. Here. At the same time.
I know exactly what I'm asking, and I'm not asking which one of you wants it more, because the answer is I don't care—I want the part where it's both. "
Silence. The storm ticks down a notch. I feel it leave my skin, the charge easing, the fine hairs on my arms lying back down.
Atlas's jaw works. "Both," he says, like he's testing the shape of it. "At the same time."
"At the same time."
Ren's mouth curves, barely. "He's going to need that spelled out," he says, dry as anything, the first joke I've heard out of him in a week. "He gets possessive."
"You get possessive," Atlas says. "You just do it quietly so everyone thinks you're the reasonable one."
"I am the reasonable one." Ren is already pulling his shirt over his head. "I'm here, aren't I, instead of breaking your jaw in the corridor like I've wanted to all week."
"You could've tried."
"Boys." It comes out of me warm, almost a laugh, and the thing is, the laugh is what does it.
The edge in the room turns. Whatever they were circling, they put it down, because I'm kneeling here asking and there is no version of either of them that's going to spend this arguing.
"You can hate each other tomorrow. Tonight you're both mine and you're going to figure out how to share me, and you're going to be good at it. Come here."
They come here.
Atlas gets to me first—of course he does, he's never met a doorway he didn't want to be through—but Ren's hand lands on his shoulder, light, a check, and Atlas stops. "Her first," Ren says, low. Not a challenge now. A plan. "I can feel where she is. Let me get her there. You hold her."
Atlas looks at me. I nod. "Do what he says. For now."
"For now," Atlas agrees, like it costs him, and the corner of Ren's mouth tugs, and then nobody's joking anymore.
Atlas reaches me first. He gets a hand into my hair and tips my face up and kisses me, and it's not soft—it's the kiss of a man who's been holding lightning behind his teeth for three days, all heat and pressure, the charge of him buzzing against my lips so that I feel it spark down the back of my throat and pool low.
I open to him without deciding to. His tongue strokes into my mouth and the storm comes with it, a live prickle over my lips and tongue, and underneath it something that's just him, and my hands come up and fist in the front of his shirt and pull, and he lets me drag it off over his head, breaking the kiss only as long as it takes the fabric to clear.
Then Ren's hands are on me from the side, turning me, and his kiss is the opposite of Atlas's: slow, deep, devastating, a man who feels exactly what his mouth is doing to me and adjusts to it in real time.
He kisses me like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it.
I make a sound into his mouth and feel him answer it through the bond, a warm pull low in my chest, and his fingers find the hem of my sleep shirt and skim it up my ribs, knuckles dragging over bare skin until I lift my arms and let him take it off me.
Then I'm naked between the two of them in the dark and there's a beat where they both just look, and I feel the want spike off both of them at once and crash together in the bond, doubled.
"Back against him," Ren says, low.
Atlas draws me into him, my spine to the broad heat of his chest, his mouth already at my throat and working down. "Both of us are going to touch you," he says against my skin, "until you can't think. That's the part you asked for. That's the part you get."
Hands move over me in the dark—Atlas's rough palms sliding up my sides from behind, Ren's lighter ones following the line of my inner thighs from the front, both of them learning me by feel and by the bond, finding what makes my breath stutter and going back to it.
Mouths follow the hands. Atlas's teeth graze the slope of my shoulder; Ren kisses a slow line down between my breasts, over my stomach, lower, until his breath is warm against the crease of my hip and I'm already shaking, already so wound up I can barely hold still for it.
That's how they put me between them.