Chapter 15
REN
I look.
Catalina's planning something big. Not another retrieval—something institutional. Can't get details yet but it involves the board. Your names keep coming up. All five. Be ready.
Then, thirty seconds later:
I mean it Ev. Whatever you're doing out there, start thinking about an exit plan.
I set the phone down. My hands are steady.
They're always steady—surgeon's hands, healer's hands, the kind of hands that don't shake even when the rest of me wants to.
I've trained that out of myself. You can't suture with trembling fingers.
You can't feel a pulse if your own hands are louder than the heartbeat you're searching for.
Across the campfire—banked now, just coals and ash—Everly sleeps in her sleeping bag with her face half-buried in the pillow she stole from the Comfort Inn three states ago.
The moose shirt rides up at her waist. One bare foot sticks out the bottom of the bag.
She sleeps like someone who hasn't been hunted, hasn't been strapped to a chair, hasn't been told she's a weapon—restless, sprawling, taking up space she doesn't realize she's claiming.
I watch her sleep and I feel something I don't want to name.
It's not the bond. The bond is warm and steady, the four connections pulsing in my bloodstream like a second circulatory system—I can feel Atlas two tents over, dreaming in voltage, and Felix on the other side of the campsite, awake and staring at the stars, and Callum somewhere in the shadows being Callum.
Those threads are there. Constant. Part of the architecture of my body now, like new veins.
What I feel when I look at Everly has nothing to do with magic.
It's the way she tilts her head when I cook, like she's trying to memorize the recipe through osmosis.
The way she argued with a gas station attendant in Oklahoma about the correct pronunciation of pecan.
The way she absorbs magic like breathing and then looks at her own hands like she can't believe they belong to her.
Yesterday she laughed at something Felix said—some dumb card joke, the kind he makes when he's trying too hard—and the sound hit my bloodstream like a drug I hadn't built tolerance for. Warm. Spreading. Making everything else feel farther away.
The problem is that I'm not the only one.
I felt Atlas kiss her three nights ago. Not saw—felt.
The bond transmitted it like a fever: the spike of want, the heat, the breaking open, and then the grief crashing through.
Atlas's hands on her skin and Atlas crying and the whole thing so raw it sat in my bloodstream for hours, hot and aching, a secondhand wound I couldn't close.
I know Felix is in love with her. Felix thinks nobody knows.
Felix is wrong. His heartbeat changes when she walks into a room—the rhythm stutters, resets, and my own pulse answers with something hot and possessive that I have to breathe through like a cramp.
He can bluff the others. He can't bluff my blood.
I know Callum is falling. Callum doesn't know Callum is falling, which is both infuriating and somehow very Callum—the man's been trained to assess every situation except the one happening inside his own chest.
Four men. One girl. A bond that ties us all together and makes it impossible to hide what we feel because every spike of jealousy and want and tenderness is broadcast to four other people like a radio station none of us can tune out.
I should hate this. The sharing. The fact that whatever I feel for her is felt by them too, that there's no private space left, no emotion I can hold that's just mine.
Every time I look at her I know three other people are looking at her the same way and the jealousy runs hot and bright and I have to breathe through it like a contraction, ride it out, let it pass.
But here's the thing about jealousy. Here's the thing I didn't expect.
When Atlas kissed her, I felt his want—and underneath the jealousy, underneath the possessive surge, there was something else. Relief. That she was wanted. That someone else saw what I see. That I'm not crazy for the way my hands itch to touch her, because three other men are losing the same fight.
It doesn't make the jealousy go away. It makes it survivable.
I get up. The coals need tending. I add kindling—dry sagebrush, broken twigs—and blow on it until a flame catches. Then I go to the 4Runner and pull out the cooler and the camp stove and start cooking.
It's what I do. When the feelings get too big for my body, when the jealousy or the fear or the wanting gets so loud it drowns out my heartbeat—I cook. Hands moving. Knife on cutting board. Oil in pan. The body knows what to do when the mind is screaming.
I make breakfast. Eggs—real eggs, bought yesterday at a ranch stand outside Sedona from a woman who asked no questions and sold us two dozen for ten dollars.
Peppers from the same stand. The last of the bread, going stale, which means I toast it over the flame until it crisps instead of crumbles. Coffee. Always coffee.
Five plates. I make five plates without thinking about it. Two months ago I made one plate. One portion. One person. The math has changed and my hands changed with it before my brain caught up.
The food wakes them. It always does. Atlas first—he follows the smell of coffee like a storm follows a pressure gradient, eyes barely open, hair wrecked, conductor tucked under one arm.
He sits by the fire and takes the plate I hand him and eats without speaking.
We have this routine. I don't need words from Atlas in the morning.
His heartbeat tells me everything: slow, steady, the nightmares fading but not gone.
Felix next. Already talking. Always already talking. "Ashford, is that actual toast? Like, bread-based toast? Not the dehydrated sawdust crackers we've been—"
"Eat."
He eats. Still talking, but around food now, which is its own kind of miracle.
Callum emerges from whatever shadow he slept in.
Takes his plate. Nods. The nod is new—two weeks ago he took the plate like it was a contractual obligation.
Now the nod has something in it. Gratitude, maybe.
Or the closest thing a Bolingbroke gets to gratitude, which is acknowledging that someone did something for them without immediately calculating what they owe.
Everly comes last. Sleep-rumpled, the moose shirt hanging off one shoulder, hair in a knot that's more suggestion than structure. She takes the plate and her fingers brush mine and the warmth goes through me like a match struck down my spine.
"You're always up first," she says.
"Someone has to feed you."
She smiles. Small, private, the kind of smile that isn't meant for anyone else. It hits my bloodstream and stays there.
I eat my own plate. Sitting in the dirt.
Watching the sun come up over the red rocks while four other heartbeats pulse in my blood alongside my own, and the jealousy is there and the want is there and the fear is there—the fear that I'll feel her hurt someday and my hands won't be fast enough—and all of it lives in me at the same time and none of it cancels the rest.
Five plates. I made five plates.
That's the answer to a question I didn't know I was asking.