Evie
The central room below deck is too small for two people who can’t look at each other.
It’s approximately eight feet by six feet of usable floor space, minus the crates of supplies along the port wall that are serving as makeshift chairs and the water barrels tucked against the starboard side.
That leaves roughly thirty-two square feet for two people, one of whom takes up significantly more space than average due to being six-foot-two and composed of muscle, steel, and emotional unavailability.
Kieran sets out two portions of fish on the cleanest surfaces he can find, arranges the shellfish beside them, and uses his fire to cook it all.
Every time his arm moves, my scanning tracks it.
Every time he shifts his weight, my body tenses like it’s bracing for contact that isn’t coming.
My skin feels too thin and aware, like the lotus stripped off a layer I haven’t grown back yet, and now I’m sitting three feet from the person responsible, pretending to be interested in the grain of the wood beneath my boots.
I’m not interested in the grain of the wood beneath my boots.
I’m interested in the fact that his hands are steady now, and on the island, they weren’t.
Kieran sets a portion of fish on the crate we’re using as a table and sits down on the one across from me, his back against the hull. The lantern swings overhead, casting shadows that make the angles of his face look sharper and harder.
He’s back to the version of Kieran Cross the rest of the world sees.
But I’ve seen the one whose voice broke when he said I can’t, who kept his thumb tracing circles on my knee even while his mouth was telling me all the reasons this was a mistake, and I can’t unsee him.
I’ll never be able to unsee him, just like I’ll never be able to stop feeling the moment when he was inside me just enough to make me know exactly what I lost.
My scanning won’t let me forget either, because he’s burning hotter than should be possible—hot enough that he probably could have cooked the fish simply by placing it on his skin and letting it burn.
“You need to eat,” he says, completely devoid of emotion, as if the last time he spoke to me his voice wasn’t breathy and barely recognizable, saying tell me to stop like he was praying I wouldn’t.
How can he sit there and pretend nothing happened between us?
I don’t know. But if Kieran Cross can sit three feet away from me and act like he wasn’t shaking against my skin and half inside me a few hours ago, then I can sit three feet away from him and act like I wasn’t wrapping my legs around his waist and shattering from his touch.
I’m a Thorne. We compartmentalize. It’s practically genetic.
So, I shove every memory of the spring into a box, seal it shut, and do what I do best—default to data.
“I’m aware of the calorie requirements for sustained physical and magical exertion,” I say, staying perfectly still. “It’s approximately two thousand calories per day for a female of my height and weight, more if factoring in magical energy expenditure, which has been significant given the—”
“Evie.”
I stop talking, my jaw clicking shut.
The boat rocks, water lapping against the hull in a rhythm my brain automatically catalogs as approximately 1.3-second intervals.
Say something. Don’t just sit here being the world’s most awkward dining companion. Eleanor would have something elegant and appropriate to say. Eleanor would not be mentally calculating wave intervals while avoiding eye contact with the man who made her—
I clamp down on that thought so hard my teeth hurt, and a hairline fracture splits through my chest. It’s been spreading since I knelt on the Crown and felt my brother’s heat signature end in a blast pattern that looked like—
Don’t.
But the crack keeps spreading, traveling through my ribs, into my throat, and behind my eyes where tears are building in a system with no release valve.
Kieran shifts, and for one wonderful second I think he’s going to close the distance and pull me against his chest like he did on the Crown, when he wrapped himself around me and fire traveled us to safety.
He doesn’t.
But I’m not here for Kieran. I’m here for Oliver, and the evidence keeps piling up. There was no heat trail leaving the Crown, no trace of him on Circe’s island, and no signs he’d ever been on the Lotus Eaters’ shore.
Then there’s Avery, whose analytical prowess rivals my own, saying the emberlink was healing. Not stretching thin from distance, not weakened by separation, but healing. The way it only does when the other half of the bond is—
“I think Oliver is dead.”
The words taste like broken glass, and the wound they leave behind is worse than the thought ever was.
Kieran doesn’t flinch, but his thermal signature detonates.
The steady sixty-eight beats per minute I’d been tracking spike to ninety in less than two seconds.
Heat concentrates in his hands, his jaw, and the muscles along his forearms. It’s the exact pattern I’ve observed when he’s about to draw steel.
His hand tightens on the hilt of his dagger, and the blade doesn’t come out, but heat’s pouring off his palm where it grips the leather. It’s hot enough that the leather itself must be close to scorching.
His eyes meet mine, and the green in them burns like a blade in a forge.
“We’ll find out what happened. Every detail, and every name,” he says, each word as hard as steel. “And whoever did this will bleed for it.”
Then he reaches for my plate and slides it across the crate until it’s close enough that the warmth rises against my chin.
“Eat.”
That’s it. One word.
A sound escapes me that might be a laugh or might be a sob.
I can’t tell the difference anymore. My eyes are burning, my throat is tight, and this man just sat through me voicing the worst thought I’ve ever had, and his response is to promise violence and then push fish at me like I’m a first-year who forgot to eat lunch.
So, I pick up the fish and take a bite.
I hate fish. I’ve always hated fish. It tastes like protein, salt, and the absence of everything that makes food worth eating.
It’s nothing like the meals Oliver enhanced with his flavor fire, warming each bite to the perfect temperature, making even the first-year food at Blaze Academy feel like a gift.
I swallow anyway.
Kieran watches me eat like he’s standing guard. It’s like the fish on my plate is a perimeter he’s defending, and my chewing is a tactical operation he needs to oversee.
I take another bite. Then another. The protein hits my bloodstream, a system I didn’t realize was failing until it’s sputtering back to life.
“We’ll reach the Pillars soon,” Kieran says, cutting through the silence. “When we’re back in the mortal realm, we’ll have more resources. More ways to find answers.”
The mortal realm. Where libraries exist. Where my family’s publishing house has archives dating back centuries. Where there are people who might have crucial information, records that might help me figure out what could have happened on the Crown that night.
Although from the way Kieran’s fingers brush the hilt of his dagger, I suspect that getting answers is a very different activity for him than it is for me. Blood over books, which is somewhat but not totally similar to steel before spells.
“What if the answers are the worst ones?” I ask, sounding smaller than I want to. “What if we find out he’s really…”
The glass-shard feeling is back in my throat, and I can’t finish.
“Then the person who did this is already dead.” Kieran holds my gaze, and there’s a heat behind his eyes that my detection ability doesn’t need to register. “They just don’t know it yet.”
His words settle into the fractured place in my chest. They don’t fix anything. They can’t. Because nothing can bring Oliver back, or undo what I saw on the Crown, or erase the growing certainty that the blast pattern meant exactly what I think it did.
But they make the next bite easier to swallow.
Eat the fish.
Survive the Pillars.
Find out the truth about Oliver.
And try very, very hard not to think about the way Kieran said whoever did this will bleed for it like it was a vow he’d ink onto his skin.