Chapter 3
Marigold
FIVE MINUTES AGO, THIS HAD felt like home.
Now I was standing just inside the royal dorm’s common room, coat still on, staring at the door Cyrus had just fled through. Keane had taken my duffel—of course he had—like we’d all agreed to pretend things were fine.
They weren’t.
I reached for the chain at my neck—just the chain, not the ring. Not today. The cold metal caught between my fingers, thin and steady, something to hold on to.
The room looked the same as always. The fire crackled in the massive hearth. Cyrus’s leather chair sat angled toward it, untouched. The dark wood panels gleamed like always as the velvet drapes let in clean winter light. Everything here whispered money, power, and legacy.
And I felt like an intruder. Again.
Like last semester all over again—when I’d just found out I was a witch, when they called me half-breed behind my back, when I couldn’t take a step in here without feeling the weight of everything I wasn’t. Poor. Wrong. Other.
I hadn’t expected him to run. Not really. But maybe part of me had. Guys left when things got hard. I just didn’t think he’d do it so fast.
Well, Elio said, finally breaking the silence. He dropped onto the velvet couch, Echo’s scales flickering between anxious yellows and confused blues. That could have gone better.
Don’t. My voice came out sharper than I meant. Don’t make excuses for him.
Keane and Elio exchanged a look—that wordless kind that meant they’d talked about this already. About him. About me. My stomach twisted.
We weren’t going to, Keane said softly.
I sat down beside Elio on the couch.
What I want to happen next, I muttered, my eyes on my scuffed boots, is to unpack and maybe eat something that isn’t airport food. What’s probably going to happen is Cyrus setting more things on fire and me lying awake wondering what I did wrong.
You didn’t do anything wrong. Elio leaned forward. He’s been like this the entire month. Worse, actually.
Keane sat beside me, close enough that our knees touched. I didn’t move. That one point of contact felt like proof someone was still here.
He’s not thinking clearly, Keane said. Not about anything.
He hasn’t been, Elio added. All month, it’s like… like he was trying to burn his way through the guilt. Or through missing you. Or both.
A knot formed in my stomach. And now I’m here, and he runs. My voice came out small. So what does that mean?
Neither of them answered right away.
Elio glanced at me before looking away. It means he’s scared. That’s not the same thing as gone.
I wasn’t sure I believed that. But I wanted to. Of what? Me?
Of wanting you, Keane said softly. His hand found mine in my lap. Of needing something he can’t control. Of being vulnerable with someone who might not want him back the same way.
But I do want him. The words slipped out before I could stop them. I just don’t know how to want all three of you without it being… too much. Without being selfish or greedy or…
Elio leaned forward. He’ll come around. He has to.
Does he? I asked.
Neither of them answered. Because they didn’t know either.
I missed you, I whispered. Both of you. This whole month.
We missed you too. All of us, Elio said, his smile genuine. He shrugged one shoulder toward the door. Even if one of us is spectacularly bad at showing it.
My stomach growled, loud and traitorous in the quiet room.
Elio’s grin widened. Right. Food. Let me see if the kitchen sent anything up.
I DIDN’T SLEEP. NOT REALLY.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Cyrus’s face—that raw pained look right before he slammed his walls back up and fled. I kept replaying it, trying to catch the moment it turned. Trying to figure out what I’d done wrong.
As if I hadn’t already spent a month pulling apart every word between us. As if obsession could pass for clarity.
By two in the morning I gave up on sleep entirely.
The common room was quiet. The fire had burned down to coals.
Keane’s research was still spread across the table—maps and folders and Levon’s records, exactly where he’d left them before he’d gone to bed.
Weeks of work laid out in his careful handwriting, connections I couldn’t quite follow but trusted he could.
My bag sat on the floor beside the couch, still half-unpacked.
I pulled out my father’s notebook now.
When I grabbed it from the compartment in Alstone’s lab, I’d called it his journal. In the chaos of the rescue—alarms going off, Cyrus pulling me toward the portal—I’d seen the handwriting on the cover and I’d thought: This is it. This is him. I’d shoved it into my bag without looking closely.
But it wasn’t a journal. Not a personal note from the man I never knew.
Instead it was research documentation, organized and cross-referenced, the handwriting precise and impersonal in the way of someone writing for an audience of future strangers.
He had detailed evidence of corruption at wellspring sites, council meeting records, proof of the manufactured war, documented in neat columns with citations.
He’d hidden it all because it mattered.
Nothing of him in it at all.
I already knew what that felt like, almost. The diary the wellspring had sent me had been encrypted—a cipher I hadn’t been able to crack before the council burned it.
I’d saved a few pages, fragments I still carried, and I’d spent months telling myself that if I could just decode them I’d finally hear his voice.
Instead I’d gotten administrative record-keeping in his handwriting.
Clean and careful and completely impersonal, written for whoever came after him rather than for me.
The diary had been in code. This was in plain language. And somehow that was worse—because there was nothing to unlock. I could read every word, and still nothing was there.
I sat with that. The coals shifted in the hearth. Scout climbed to my knee, his tiny bones quiet against my leg.
I touched the chain at my neck. Just the chain, not the ring.
The ring had been his too—both of them were, the one I wore and the one my mother still had.
He’d had them filled with protection magic and sent them ahead of himself because he’d known what he was doing was dangerous and he’d wanted her to have something.
He’d never made it back to give them in person.
That was how I knew him. Through objects. Through rooms he’d once occupied that held no trace of him. Through Professor Undergrove’s careful words and Parker’s clipped assessments and Raynoff’s guilt-heavy acknowledgments. Through a few crumpled cipher pages I still couldn’t read.
And now through this—a man’s life work, meticulous and complete, that told me everything about what he’d believed and nothing about who he’d been.
He’d built something that could outlast him. That was its own kind of love, I supposed—forward-thinking, deliberate, a message sent in the only language a dead man has left.
But I’d wanted his voice.
I put the folder on Keane’s pile where it belonged, next to Levon’s records and Alstone’s monitoring logs. Someone would make sense of it. That was the point. That was what my father had understood. You built the evidence, you found the right hands, and you trusted the work to carry itself forward.
Then I went back to bed and watched until the morning light came through the curtains.
From my night stand, Scout tilted his skull as he watched me. His bow tie was perfectly straight. Mine was metaphorical and unraveling.
Yeah, yeah, I muttered, dragging on jeans and an oversized sweater. Some of us were busy catastrophizing our entire relationship history. Living and dead.
I needed something orderly, where effort led to results and the rules didn’t change halfway through. So I grabbed my theory textbook and went to the library—the one place that had never asked anything of me except attention.
When we entered, Scout chittered anxiously, his tiny skeletal form pressing against my neck like he was trying to burrow into my skin. He seemed to be hiding from something he sensed I couldn’t see yet.
I reached out briefly to the dead in the walls. I felt something…but I didn’t know what. They were uneasy. Were my emotions just bleeding onto them?
In the back of the library, my friends had claimed their usual corner like nothing had changed.
Aurora sat regally upright even in a worn Wickem hoodie and jeans.
Her braid was pulled tight, not a copper strand out of place.
Lucas was all elbows and focus, his glasses slipping down his nose as he scribbled in the margins of a thick textbook.
Raven hunched over her notes in a vintage band tee and too much eyeliner, her cropped black hair messier than usual and charms glinting from her piercings.
Lucas looked up first, grinned, asked about Albany. I gave the usual answers while his bird familiar watched me from the back of his chair. Aurora said she was glad I’d made it back safely.
Raven didn’t look up.
That was the first sign. Raven always looked up.
The month of silence suddenly felt less like being busy and more like a warning I’d ignored. Unease intensified from the dead around me.
How was your break? I asked carefully, looking between them.
Quiet, Lucas said. I went home for a bit. Came back early when classes started up. He glanced at Raven, concern flickering across his face. You stayed the whole time. Didn’t you?
She didn’t answer.
Aurora frowned, setting down her pen. She’s been like this all morning. Won’t talk to anyone.
Lucas’s frown deepened. I kept asking why she didn’t go home for the holidays, but she said she had ‘research to catch up on.’ Stayed in the library archives practically the whole month. His voice dropped. I should’ve realized something was wrong.
She still hadn’t looked at me. Boris sat beside her notes, his skeletal beetle form flickering with wrongness.
Scout disappeared into my sleeve, his bones rattling softly as he rearranged himself somewhere near my elbow.
Raven? I tried again.