Chapter Eighteen
It had been hours now. Time felt wrong down here, stretched thin in a way that made it hard to track how long we'd actually been sitting in this room.
Amber, Cian, Yakob, Rowan and I had gone over everything — the whispers, the shadows, the tree, every scrap of magic that had led us here.
Then we'd talked about our lives, the town, everything that needed catching up.
But the longer we sat with it, the heavier the actual situation got.
Cian and Yakob had been stuck here for years. Trapped in this strange place that felt like a living memory of home and wasn't. The Sanctum, they called it. It gave them what they needed — books, food, rooms that appeared when asked for. It just wouldn't let them leave.
A safe place. A perfect home.
Also, unmistakably, a prison.
"The moment we stepped through that door, it closed behind us," Yakob said, voice heavy. "We've tried everything to get it open again. Nothing's worked."
"It's not just the door," Cian added, shaking his head. "We've searched every inch of this place. The Sanctum doesn't behave like a normal building. It's like it's alive. Keeping us here on purpose."
I sat back, the weight of it settling into my chest. The room around us was lined floor to ceiling with books, leather-bound volumes on everything from spell theory to magical history, most of them clearly well-thumbed by two men with nothing but time to fill.
"We've tried every spell we could find in these," Cian said, fingers tracing the spine of a book on the table in front of him. "It's like the answer's always just out of reach. Like we're missing something important."
Amber sat beside me, her hand resting in mine, her eyes wide and thoughtful as she listened. I could feel the tension running through her, the weight of everything we'd learned today pressing down the same way it was pressing on the rest of us.
We'd just trapped ourselves in a place we might never get out of.
Rowan broke a long silence eventually. "I told you about the journal I found. I never asked how it actually got there. I swore I felt your magic in the house."
Cian's eyes lit with something almost proud. "That's because I was there. Sort of."
"How?"
"There's a spell — found it in one of these." A small, tired smile. "Let me project myself into the real world for a while. Invisible. I couldn't interact with much, but I could move small things. That's how the journal got to you. Figured if anyone could piece it together, it'd be you."
"How'd you manage magic like that from in here?" I asked.
"I did it," Yakob said. "A transportation spell, of a kind. If I'd had more training, or a coven behind me, I could've done more with it. Even that small amount cost me most of a week's strength."
Amber offered to get drinks a while later, her dad following her to the far side of the room, the two of them talking low, sharing something that felt too private for the rest of us to intrude on.
Cian watched them go, something quiet and thoughtful crossing his face. "It's good, seeing him have that with her. Some kind of family left, after everything."
"Yeah," I said. "Glad you had him too, down here. Glad you had someone looking out for you good enough that you call him Dad."
"I wouldn't have survived without him." Cian's voice went quieter. "Hate that he was kept from Amber and his wife this whole time. But I'm grateful every day I had him with me instead of going through this alone."
A lump formed in my throat listening to that. The man who'd raised Amber, protected her at the cost of his own freedom, had also been the one keeping my brother alive down here the whole time.
"He's a good man," I said, glancing at Yakob across the room. "Glad you had him too."
Neither of us felt the need to fill the silence after that. Eventually Yakob and Amber rejoined us, and we drank tea and kept talking, going over the books, the spells they'd tried, until exhaustion finally caught up with all of us at once.
Yakob offered to show us to a room. Cian promised pancakes in the morning, the kind he swore were perfect.
Amber, Rowan, and I followed Yakob down a long hallway lined with more books, the air cool and quiet in that same watchful way the whole Sanctum carried.
At the end of it, he opened a door onto a room that hadn't been there before we arrived, apparently — a bed big enough for three, a window with a false view of mountains that didn't exist anywhere near this town, a small bathroom off to the side.
"It gave us this?" I asked, still not fully used to how the place responded to what we needed.
"It knows," Yakob said. "Every time we've needed something, it's been here." He gave us a tired, sad sort of smile, said goodnight, and left us to it.
The three of us stood there a moment, the day settling heavy over all of us at once.
"I don't even know where to start," Amber said eventually.
"Same," I admitted.
She crossed to the bed, pulled back the quilt, and looked between the two of us. "Come cuddle. I need to not think for a while."
I dropped onto the mattress without hesitation, arm already open for her. Rowan stayed exactly where he was, arms crossed, jaw set, planted in the corner of the room like he'd decided to make himself part of the furniture.
Amber glanced at him. "Are you coming?"
He shrugged. "Do you want me to?"
I grabbed the nearest cushion and threw it at his head without much aim, hitting him square in the shoulder anyway. "Don't do the thing you do where you are annoying."
Amber rolled her eyes. "I wouldn't ask if I didn't want you to." She sighed, dragging a hand through her hair. "What's your problem?"
"What?" He frowned.
"We're trapped in a tree. With people we never thought we'd see again. I'm exhausted. You look exhausted. I genuinely cannot deal with whatever weird vibe you've had going. Spit it out."
He opened his mouth. Closed it again. Said nothing.
Amber huffed, pushing herself up onto her elbows, some of the exhaustion in her expression giving way to frustration instead. "Why don't you just kiss me and get it over with, then. Might make this less painfully awkward."
"No." Flat. Immediate. He finally crossed the room, but slower than I expected, like every step cost him something. "Not like that."
"Not like what?"
"Like it's a demand. Like it's something to just get over."
She blinked, some of her confidence faltering, nerves creeping in where the frustration had been a second earlier. "Well — how, then?"
He stopped at the edge of the bed, looking down at her with an intensity that made even me hold still.
"I'd do it like this."
He kissed her.
Not the careful, restrained thing he no doubt wanted to do.
He kissed her like something had finally snapped loose after holding on too long, walking her backward until her knees hit the mattress and she went down onto it with him following, his weight settling over her without breaking the kiss once.
"Well," I said, watching them for a second, "that answers that."
Amber's hand fisted in his shirt, pulling him closer, and I gave up on words entirely and crossed the room to join them, tugging my own shirt over my head on the way.
"Room for one more?" I asked, already knowing the answer from the way she reached for me without breaking away from him.
"Always," she breathed, and I settled in beside them, watching Rowan finally let himself have what he'd been white-knuckling around for weeks.
His mouth moved from hers to her jaw, her throat, teeth grazing her collarbone hard enough to make her gasp.
I caught her free hand and pulled it toward me instead, kissing along her knuckles slow, deliberate, watching her attention split between the two of us in a way that had her whole body going restless against the sheets.
Rowan tugged her shirt over her head without breaking the rhythm of his mouth against her skin, and the sight of her spread out between us, chest rising fast, pink hair fanned across the pillow, undid something in both of us at once.
He palmed her breast with one hand while his mouth dropped lower, tongue tracing a slow line down her stomach, and I leaned in to catch her mouth again just as her breath hitched hard.
"Rowan." Half warning, half plea, the second his fingers found the waistband of her jeans and worked them open with unhurried, deliberate patience that had her hips already lifting to help him.
He pulled them down her legs slow enough to be its own kind of torture, mouth following the trail his hands left behind, and by the time he settled between her thighs she was already shaking, one hand fisted tight in his hair and the other still locked with mine.
"Quiet," I murmured against her ear, feeling her whole body jolt the second his tongue found her properly. "You're going to want to try, at least."
"Can't—" Her voice broke off into a moan she barely managed to swallow, hips rolling up against his mouth on instinct.
I kissed her through it, swallowing every sound she couldn't fully hold back, one hand sliding down to toy with her breast while Rowan worked her with a focus that bordered on reverent, like he'd spent every one of the last three years imagining exactly this and had every intention of doing it properly now that he finally could.
"Give me something to do," she gasped eventually, tugging at my waistband with far more urgency than finesse, and I didn't need telling twice.
I shifted, giving her room, and the second her mouth wrapped around me every ounce of composure I had left went straight out the window.
She worked me slow at first, then faster as Rowan's mouth against her clearly started unraveling her focus, her moans vibrating around me in a way that had me fisting the sheets just to stay upright.
Rowan added two fingers alongside his mouth, curling them with a precision that made her whole body arch off the bed, her lips going slack around me for a second before she recovered, redoubling her efforts like she was determined to finish us both at the same time out of pure stubbornness.
"That's it," Rowan said against her thigh, voice wrecked. "Let go for both of us."
She did, shattering silently between us, her whole body drawing tight and then releasing in waves that dragged a groan out of me I couldn't fully hold back, and out of Rowan too, who followed her over the edge with his face still buried against her, hips rocking once against the mattress like he'd lost the fight to stay composed entirely.
Her mouth around me finished the job a few seconds later, and I came hard enough to see spots, one hand tangled in her hair while I tried and failed to keep from making noise myself.
We collapsed into a loose, tangled heap afterward, all three of us breathing hard, sweat-slicked and boneless against the sheets.
"That was..." Rowan started, voice rough, and then trailed off entirely, staring at the ceiling like the rest of the sentence had gotten lost somewhere on the way out.
"That was what?" I prompted, grinning despite the exhaustion pulling at every muscle in my body.
He was quiet a long moment, jaw working, something unguarded moving across his face that he usually kept locked down tight. "Everything I didn't let myself think about wanting. For three years."
Amber made a small, breathless sound and reached for his hand, pressed between the two of us. "Good everything, or overwhelming everything?"
"Both," he admitted. "Mostly good."
She laughed, a little unsteady, her face still flushed against the pillow. "That was definitely something."
Nobody said anything else for a while after that.
The room settled into something quiet and a little strange, three bodies too tangled together to properly separate, none of us particularly inclined to try.
Eventually the exhaustion of the whole day caught up with all three of us at once, and I drifted off with Amber's head on my chest and Rowan's hand resting against her hip, the quiet hum of the Sanctum settling in around us like it was watching, patient, waiting to see what we'd do next.