Evie
The storage space smells like salt and damp wood.
My thermal scanning’s been flickering since the Scylla shield. So, when I try to read the room’s heat signatures, the image stutters and fades, like a signal cutting in and out.
I’ve never been this depleted. It’s like going blind. My thermal scanning is how I process the world—heart rates, core temperatures, and heat fingerprints that tell me who’s nearby and what they’re feeling before they open their mouths.
Without it, I’m just guessing, like everyone else.
I hate guessing.
“Three water barrels.” I crouch beside the nearest one, running my fingers along the wood. “This one’s maybe fifteen percent full. The other two seem better.”
“Seem?” Kieran says from behind me, and even half-blind, even with my scanning flickering like a dying signal, his is the signature my magic holds onto the longest.
He’s the furnace that never banks. It’s almost superhuman in its intensity, which makes sense, since you don’t kill seventy-three vampires and rogues with steel alone if you don’t burn hotter than the rest of us.
He feels like war given a pulse, and I’ve stopped trying to classify him into any system I know.
But I need to focus on what’s important right now, which is counting our rations—not cataloging Kieran Cross’s thermal output like it’s a research project I’m trying to ace.
“I need to open them to be certain,” I tell him. “The formula for cylindrical volume is relatively straightforward, but without knowing the exact—”
“Evie.”
“Yes?”
“Approximately is fine.”
Right. Of course it is.
Stop being weird.
That’s easier said than done, especially when I move to the dried goods and my shoulder brushes his chest. The contact lasts maybe half a second, but the heat that bleeds through my shirt stays long after I’ve pulled away, searing itself there like a handprint.
I step back, my cheeks burning, nearly knocking over a crate in the process.
“Twelve ration packs. Five people. Three meals a day. That’s...” The math blurs. Numbers I could calculate in my sleep are swimming, and I have to start over. “Less than a day. Maybe thirty-six hours if we skip dinner and reduce portion sizes by half.”
“We’re not going to starve,” he says, sounding surprisingly patient.
“The human body can function on reduced caloric intake for extended periods of time, but cognitive function begins to decline after seventy-two hours of severe restriction. And given that we need to navigate monster-infested waters while potentially engaging in combat, impaired cognitive function could prove—”
“Evie.”
I stop talking, my jaw clicking shut so hard my teeth hurt.
Kieran crouches beside me, his knee pressing against my thigh, heat bleeding through my clothes where we’re touching.
“We’ll find land,” he assures me. “When we do, we’ll restock supplies and kill whatever tries to stop us.”
“And if the land has monsters?” I ask, since every land here likely has monsters.
“Then we eat the monsters.”
A laugh tears out of me, and once it starts, I can’t make it stop.
“Monster meat,” I manage to say. “You want to eat Scylla.”
“You were already cooking her with your shield,” he says, quieter now, almost gentle. “And that laugh...”
I sniff and wipe my eyes. “What about it?”
“It’s the first real thing I’ve heard from you in days.”
The laughter dies, and the silence it leaves behind is worse. Because Kieran’s looking at me the way he did in the Fury Loop, right before he flipped me over and pinned me on the stone, his green eyes intense and focused.
So, I move forward an inch, daring him to come closer, to slash that boundary down with as much ferocity as when he attacks anything with his sword.
“No,” he says instead.
“Why not?”
“Because I’m your teacher.”
“You were my teacher, at Blaze Academy,” I say, steadying myself. “Out here, we’re fugitives. You’re not the combat instructor who makes first-years bleed before breakfast anymore. Now you’re just Kieran, and you’ve been the only thing keeping me from falling apart since you found me on the Crown.”
His jaw goes tight, his expression hard as he starts locking down again.
No. I’m not going to sit here and let him ignore whatever this thing is between us. We’ve been dancing around it for too long, my patience is worn thin, and I’ve had enough.
“Tell me you haven’t thought about the Fury Loop,” I continue in the boldest, most non-Evie Thorne way possible.
“Nothing happened in the Fury Loop.” He doesn’t even flinch, or make any sign he heard me at all. He’s just… blank.
“You pinned me to the ground.” The words tumble out, hot and reckless, which makes me want to challenge him even more. “And I felt exactly how much you enjoyed it. Every. Single. Inch of it.”
For an endless second, neither of us breathes. The space between us is so charged that if my magic was at full power, my scanning would white out from the heat.
Then his shoulders go rigid, his hands curl into fists at his sides, and the walls slam back up.
“You felt the Fury Loop’s magic,” he says, cold and controlled. “It amplifies everything. Anger, fear, desire… none of it was real.”
Liar.
The word pulses through me, hot and certain.
Because his pupils are blown wide, and his heat signature’s spiking to a level I’ve recorded exactly once before—in the Fury Loop, with his hips pinning mine to the stone and his body doing things his mouth has never acknowledged.
I have months of thermal data on Kieran Cross.
His resting baseline, his combat spikes, the warmth when he watches a student improve, and his steady heat while he held me on his bed after he found me on the Crown.
The only match in my entire dataset of what he’s doing right now is the day he pressed me into the burnt red rock and told me not to say a word.
He just told me that moment wasn’t real, and his body’s calling him a liar in degrees I can literally measure.
“Your heat signature says otherwise,” I say, because apparently, all bets are off now.
“What?” He pulls back like I shoved him, his eyes widening a fraction before he locks it down.
“Your heat signature,” I repeat. “It’s only been this high once before, and that was during that moment in the Fury Loop.”
His breath stops for two full seconds, and the heat signature I just called out spikes even higher, because apparently being confronted with proof that I can measure his desire is doing the opposite of calming him down.
The silence stretches until it hurts. Then he swallows hard, sets his jaw, and does what Kieran Cross always does when he’s cornered—retreats behind a blade.
“I can’t give you what you want,” he finally says, and his heat doesn’t spike.
He believes what he’s saying. And that hurts worse than if he’d lied, because a lie I could argue with.
“You don’t know what I want,” I say instead, although it comes out shaky and unsure.
“You want the fantasy.” His heat spikes again, his eyes hard with the desire he’s trying and failing to suppress. “You want the forbidden romance. And you want the thrill of breaking the rules.”
He steps closer, and then we’re chest to chest, so close that I have to look up to meet his eyes. His heat’s everywhere now, surrounding me, and my body leans into it before my brain gives permission.
“Fine. Maybe I don’t know exactly what I want,” I admit.
“But you know what I do know? That I’ve spent my entire life being the Thorne who follows every rule, never takes risks, and always does the logical thing.
And where did that get me? My brother’s missing, maybe dead.
There might not be a tomorrow, and there might not be a ‘right’ time.
There might just be this boat, these monsters, and the very real possibility that we all die before we get home. ”
He doesn’t step back, and the fact that Kieran Cross is choosing to stay in my space when every instinct he has is very likely screaming at him to retreat tells me more than words ever could.
“The last time I let someone close...” He stops to center himself, and his eyes squeeze shut, then open again. “I couldn’t protect them. They died, and I had to watch.”
The air leaves my lungs.
Someone. Not a friend. Not a colleague. The way he says it... the devastation in his voice...
He loved them. Whoever they were, he loved them.
“How long ago?” I whisper.
“Six years.”
And just like that, the pieces click into place.
“You’re afraid. That’s what this is about. You’re afraid of getting close to someone again because you’re scared of losing them.”
His whole body goes rigid.
“Don’t,” he says, although the way he’s looking at me—as if my words are cutting through his walls like steel—says the opposite.
“You use the rules as a shield.” I’m on a roll now, and I refuse to let up. “You keep everyone at arm’s length so you never have to feel that kind of loss again, and now you’re doing it with me. You’re hiding behind professionalism because admitting you feel something would mean risking—”
“I can’t lose anyone else.” The words explode out of him, and my ribs ache, like he reached in and squeezed my lungs.
I don’t have time to formulate a response before the door opens.
Kieran and I spring apart so fast that I slam my hip into a water barrel, pain racing through me.
“Hey.” Callie steps inside, looking from Kieran, to me, and back to Kieran. “Is there anything in here that might help with navigation? Charts? A working compass? Anything?”
Kieran drags a hand through his hair. His chest is heaving, and there’s a wild look in his eyes I’ve never seen before.
“No,” he says, sounding surprisingly controlled given what he looks like, and what his heat signature feels like.
“Are you sure? Because I could swear I saw a chest earlier, and we could really use—”
“There’s nothing.”
“Fine. Whatever,” she says. “But if we sail in circles until we starve, I’m blaming both of you.”
She gives us a pointed look, steps out of the room, and closes the door.
Neither of us moves. His breathing’s ragged, mine matches it, and the two feet of air between us feels like a live wire I’m both afraid to touch and desperate to grab.
I should say something. Anything. But my brain’s stuck on I can’t lose anyone else, replaying it over and over, trying to extract meaning from the words like they’re a research text I can annotate.
“We should go up,” Kieran says, flat and distant.
The change of demeanor stings more than it should. But at the same time, I understand. I pushed too hard, demanding answers he wasn’t ready to give, and now he’s retreating behind the walls I was trying to cut down.
“Okay.” The word comes out quieter than I intended.
He gives me a single nod, turns, and climbs up the ladder, closing the hatch behind him.
I stay where I am, surrounded by thirty-six hours of food, three barrels of water, one conversation that changed everything and solved nothing, and the heat that Kieran Cross leaves in his wake everywhere he goes—especially when those places involve me.
When I finally make my way up, everyone’s scattered across the deck. Jade’s at the bow, staring at nothing. Callie’s at the helm, fiddling with the useless compass, and Logan’s adjusting the rigging.
I try to scan them out of habit. Core temperatures, heart rates, and the thermal fingerprints I’ve memorized for each of them. There’s nothing. My magic just gives one feeble flicker and sputters out.
Kieran’s on the other side of the boat, his back to me, his posture screaming do not approach… and I can feel his heat from half a ship away, because of course he’s the one signature my depleted magic refuses to let go of.
So, I find a spot near the remaining mast and sit down, pulling my knees to my chest and staring out at the water.
Oliver would know what to do. He always knew how to talk to people, how to read situations, and how to not make everything worse by overthinking it.
But Oliver isn’t here. He might never be here again.
I rest my forehead against my knees and try to breathe through the ache in my chest that might never go away.
One crisis at a time, I tell myself. Navigate the monster-infested waters and find Oliver first. Figure out the emotionally unavailable combat instructor whose heat’s still lingering on my skin later.
It’s not a great plan.
But it’s the only one I have.