Chapter 18
EVERLY
Felix Ferrix kisses me in the parking lot of a destroyed motel in Flagstaff, Arizona, and it’s nothing like kissing Atlas.
Kissing Atlas was grief and rain and a storm breaking. This is—this is a gambler turning over his last card and showing you the hand he’s been hiding all summer.
We’re on the steps of the motel. The others are inside—Ren packing what’s left of our things, Atlas and Callum doing a sweep for anything we might have left behind.
The motel is wrecked. Two rooms with blown-out windows, a car still smoldering in the lot, scorch marks on the pavement. Somewhere three blocks away, sirens.
Felix is sitting beside me. Close, the way he always sits—close enough to be in my space, far enough to pretend he’s not.
Ren’s blood magic healed the worst of it, but Felix is still careful when he breathes, still holding his left arm tight against his ribs.
The blast caught him in the chest. He stepped in front of it.
I watched him get thrown through the air like something discarded and my whole body went cold in a way that had nothing to do with magic.
“You need to stop doing that,” I say.
“Doing what?”
“Throwing yourself in front of spells meant for me.”
“It was the only winning—”
“Don’t.” The word comes out sharper than I mean it to.
My voice is steady but my hands aren’t—they’re shaking, the adrenaline crash making everything loose and electric, and I can feel the grimoire magic still buzzing under my skin like a hive I’ve disturbed and can’t calm down.
“Don’t tell me it was the smart play. Don’t tell me the odds were favorable. You almost died, Felix.”
He’s quiet for a moment. The sirens get closer, then farther, then stop. Somewhere a dog is barking.
“I know,” he says. No smile. No deflection. No card metaphor. Just: I know.
I look at him. The parking lot lights are out—Atlas’s lightning killed them—so the only light is the smoldering car and the stars and the faint glow of the motel’s emergency exit sign, green and sickly, making everything look underwater.
Felix’s face is shadowed and tired and honest in a way I’ve never seen it.
The mask is down. Not lowered, not adjusted, down—like the blast knocked it loose and he hasn’t had the energy to put it back.
Without the mask, Felix Ferrix looks terrified.
Not of the mages. Not of the running. Not of the summer or the Administration or whatever’s coming next.
He’s looking at me with an expression I recognize because I’ve seen it in Atlas’s face and I’ve felt it through the bond from Ren and it’s the look of someone who’s realized they’re in deeper than they planned and the water’s still rising.
“In the future threads,” he says, and his voice is different—quiet, stripped, the cards-and-bluffs cadence gone. “I can see how this ends. Most of the ways it ends. And in most of them—” He stops. Swallows. “You need to be more careful.”
“So do you.”
“I’m not the one they want, Everly.”
“You’re the one who almost died tonight.”
He looks at the smoldering car. At the stars. At anything except me.
“Sixty-three percent,” he says. Barely audible. “That’s the number I carry around. The percentage of futures where you don’t make it to twenty-five. I shuffle the deck every day hoping the number changes and it doesn’t. It hasn’t changed all summer. And I can’t—”
His voice cracks. Felix Ferrix, who bluffs like breathing, who turns everything into a game he’s winning, whose whole identity is the performance of being three steps ahead—his voice cracks on the word can’t and the sound of it goes through me like an electric shock.
“I can’t be the one who watches that happen,” he says. “I can’t. I’m not—I won’t survive it. The version of me that survives you dying is someone I don’t want to become.”
I should say something. Something comforting, something smart, something that addresses the fear and the percentage and the futures he can see that I can’t.
I kiss him instead.
Not gentle. Not the grief-tender way I kissed Atlas, not the rain-after-the-storm slowness of that pre-dawn in Arizona.
I grab the front of his shirt and pull him toward me and his mouth meets mine and it’s hard and desperate and tastes like blood—his, from a split lip Ren didn’t fully heal—and smoke and the particular flavor of a person who’s been holding something back so long that when it comes loose it comes all at once.
He makes a sound against my mouth. Not pain—surprise. Like he didn’t see this coming, which for a chaos mage is either an insult or a miracle.
Then his hands are on me.
Not careful. Not the tentative way Atlas touched me, grief-shaking, afraid of his own strength.
Felix’s hands are certain. One on my waist, gripping, pulling me closer.
The other at the back of my neck, fingers in my hair, tilting my head so the kiss deepens, and the taste of blood and smoke becomes the taste of him—something sharp, something electric, like shuffling a deck so fast the cards burn.
I pull him closer. He winces—ribs, the blast, Ren’s patchwork—and I ease up and he makes a sound of protest, don’t stop, and pulls me back, and we’re kissing on the steps of a wrecked motel in Flagstaff while a car burns twenty feet away and the bond between us blazes so bright I can feel the other three react.
Atlas’s spike of recognition. Ren’s sharp intake of breath. Callum’s shadows pulling tight.
Felix’s hand slides under my shirt. His palm against my stomach, warm, and my whole body lights up—not the grimoire magic, not the bond, just skin responding to skin, nerve endings doing what they’ve done for every human since the beginning of the species.
His thumb traces my ribs and I arch into him and his mouth moves from mine to my jaw, my neck, the place where my pulse hammers under thin skin, and I feel his breath there, hot, unsteady.
“Everly.” My name in his mouth sounds like a card he’s been holding against his chest for weeks, finally played.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know what this is.”
“I know.”
“I’m not—I can’t promise—”
“I didn’t ask you to promise anything.”
He pulls back. Just enough to look at me. His eyes are dark in the parking lot light and the mask is still down and he looks wrecked and terrified and more real than I’ve ever seen him. His hand is still under my shirt. My pulse is still pounding. The car is still burning.
“Sixty-three percent,” he says again. Quieter.
“Then we change the odds.” I put my hand over his—the one on my stomach, warm through the fabric. “That’s what you do, isn’t it? Nudge the odds?”
He almost smiles. Almost. The corner of his mouth twitches, and for a second the gambler is back, the bluffer, the man who reads the room and plays the angle. But underneath it is the thing I just saw—the person who can’t survive my death and knows it and hasn’t figured out how to fold.
“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I do.”
The motel door opens. Ren steps out, sees us—my shirt rucked up, Felix’s hand on my skin, our mouths swollen and close—and stops. For one beat. Two. His face does something I can’t fully read, and then he goes back inside without a word.
Felix exhales. Drops his forehead against mine.
“He’s going to be weird about that,” he says.
“Probably.”
“Everyone’s going to be weird about that.”
“Definitely.”
“Worth it.”
“Yeah.”
We sit on the steps. His hand slides out from under my shirt but finds my hand instead, and we sit there with our fingers tangled and the car burning itself out and the sirens gone and the desert dark and enormous around us. The bond pulses. Four heartbeats. All awake now. All adjusting.
Felix lifts my hand and presses his mouth to my knuckles.
Not a kiss. More like a promise he doesn’t know how to say yet.
Then he lets go, stands up, and the mask is back—not all the way, not the airtight bluff he wore in June, but enough.
A working mask. The one he needs to get us through whatever comes next.
“We should go,” he says. “Before someone calls the cops on the burning car.”
“We should.”
Neither of us moves for another minute. Then we do.