5. Brynn
brYNN
The compatibility mirror on the third floor is showing two faces where there should be one.
I stop in the corridor, clipboard hugged to my chest, and stare. The glass is built to read a single guest at a time. Right now it’s holding two signatures side by side, identical, stacked over each other like a photo taken twice.
“That’s new,” I tell the empty hall.
The hall doesn’t answer. Good. Plenty of things have answered me today.
I’m supposed to be doing a calm, professional pre-convergence walkthrough.
Check the wards. Log the glitches. Smile at guests.
Pretend the resort hasn’t been hiccuping like a drunk oracle since my magic went off in the atrium and announced to four hundred people that I’m fated to the most insufferable man alive.
So far the walkthrough isn’t calm. It’s not professional either.
The dream garden lilies are blooming in reverse. The fountain in the east court is running uphill. And a service candelabra in the library tried to hold my hand.
Now the mirrors are seeing double.
I lift two fingers toward the glass, not touching, just close enough to feel the hum. My Resonance Magic stirs under my skin like a cat deciding whether to bite. The doubled signature pulses back at me. Two threads. Same weave. Twined so tight I can’t tell where one ends.
“It’s not broken.”
I jump. The clipboard clatters off my hip.
Tristan Van Alstein leans in the archway behind me, all golden grin and unearned confidence, holding my clipboard out like he caught it midair. He probably did.
“You shouldn’t sneak up on the staff,” I say. “We hex.”
“You’d never. You like me.” He nods at the mirror. “Let me guess. It thinks there’s two of someone.”
“It thinks there’s two of you.”
“Tragically, no.” He pushes off the wall and ambles over, all loose shoulders and trouble.
“That’s not me. That’s the other half of a matched set.
Evander and I came into the world about ninety seconds apart and we’ve been ruining instruments ever since.
Twins do that to your little machines. Same blood, same year, same magic. The readers can’t pick a lane.”
I look back at the mirror. Two threads. The doubled thread.
“I noticed you were twins,” I say. "Except for the eyes, of course."
“It’s why the convergence rituals always glitch when we’re around. Mother loves it. She thinks chaos builds character.”
He says it light, but his eyes flick to the glass and stay there a beat too long.
“Your mother thinks claw marks in marble build character.”
“Ha! Now you understand the family.” He hands back my clipboard, suddenly closer than I want him. “Does Leo know you’re wandering the resort alone before a storm?”
“Leo doesn’t manage my schedule.”
“He thinks he does.” Tristan’s grin sharpens. “Careful, sunshine. My brother’s a glacier with abandonment issues. You’re the first warm thing he’s noticed in a decade.” He’s already drifting toward the stairs. “Don’t melt him too fast. The rest of us aren’t ready for feelings.”
Then he’s gone, and the mirror behind me flickers, and for half a second both faces in the glass turn to look at me.
I do not stay on the third floor.
Marguerite’s office sits at the heart of the matchmaking wing, warm and lamplit, smelling of beeswax and old paper. She’s at her desk under a tower of compatibility ledgers, silver hair pinned, glasses low on her nose. The most steady thing in this entire unsteady place.
“You look like the resort’s been chasing you,” she says without looking up.
“The fountain’s running uphill. A candelabra made a pass at me. And the mirrors are seeing twins.” I drop into the chair across from her. “Tell me that’s normal. Lie to me if you have to.”
She sets down her pen and studies me over her glasses with the patience of someone who’s done this for centuries.
“Convergence pulls everything loose,” she says. “The closer the moons get, the thinner the walls between things. Mirrors double. Magic wakes. Old readings rise to the surface like silt.” She tilts her head. “You’re tired, Brynn. I told you to rest before the alignment. You didn’t.”
“I never do.”
“No.” Something gentles in her face. “You burn at both ends and call it efficiency. I worry about you, you know. More than the others.”
It catches me off guard, the warmth of it. I came in braced for a lecture about the chaos I’ve caused, and instead she’s looking at me like I’m something she’s responsible for.
“Can you unlock it yet?” I ask. “The match. Mine and Leo’s?”
She sighs. Spreads her hands over the ledgers like she’s already tried a hundred times.
“It won’t move. I’ve pulled every override I have, and the record sits there sealed in a magic older than my authority. Whatever bound you to him, it wasn’t done at this desk.” She watches me closely. “Does that frighten you?”
“A little.” I pick at the edge of her blotter. “Mostly it makes me angry. I don’t like being moved around like a chess piece.”
“No good witch does.” She reaches across and stills my fidgeting hand under hers. Her skin is cool and dry and certain.
“Listen to me. A bond can amplify what’s already there. It can pull two people toward each other faster than sense allows.
But it cannot invent a feeling that was never going to exist. If you feel something for that impossible boy, it’s because some part of you chose it. Not the resort. You.”
She holds my gaze a beat longer than the words need.
“So stop bracing against it,” she says, softer. “I’ve watched you fight every good thing that’s reached for you. Don’t fight this one. Let it in.
Let it finish, whatever it’s growing into. It’ll go easier if you stop trying to outrun it.”
The kindness of it sits heavy in my chest.
“That’s annoyingly wise,” I manage.
“I’ve had practice.” She squeezes once and lets go. “Now go rest. Truly. Before the storm makes it impossible.”
I’m halfway to the door when my magic moves.
Not a flicker this time. A pull. Deep and downward, like a hook set behind my sternum, yanking toward something far beneath the floor.
I stop walking.
“Marguerite.” My voice comes out wrong. “Do you feel that?”
She frowns. “Feel what?”
But she doesn’t feel it. I can see she doesn’t. Whatever’s pulling at me, it’s pulling at me alone.
The lamps flutter. Every flame in the office bends toward me at once, then snaps straight.
The pull behind my ribs tightens until it aches, and underneath it, far below the marble and the wards and the careful warm order of this room, something enormous shifts its weight.
“It’s stirring,” I whisper. “The thing beneath the resort. It’s waking up because I’m here.”
Marguerite is on her feet, but she’s not afraid of the building. She’s afraid for me.
“Brynn, sit down before you fall down. Your magic’s reaching for something it shouldn’t. You need to ground it now.”
I want to. I genuinely do.
But, that’s when the storm hits.
It doesn’t roll in. It slams down. One breath the windows show a violet dusk, and the next the whole sky drops like a fist, black and screaming, throwing the gardens flat.
The pressure change pops my ears. Lightning the color of bruised plums forks across the dome and the wards light up trying to hold it.
Alarms wail through the wing. Doors seal themselves up and down the corridor, one after another, that heavy magical clunk of a resort battening its own hatches.
Lockdown.
“Two days early,” Marguerite breathes, gripping the desk. “It’s two days early, that shouldn’t be possible, the alignment isn’t until...”
I’m not listening anymore.
Because the second the dome seals, the bond comes alive.
It rips through me like a struck cord, every nerve singing one direction, and I know exactly where he is before I have a single reason to.
Across the resort. Already moving. Already coming.
His wolf pulling toward me as hard as I’m pulling toward him, the two of us two threads in a glass, twined too tight to find the seam.
The thing under the floor turns over once more and goes still, listening.
And somewhere in the dark of the locked-down resort, with nowhere left for either of us to run, I feel Leo Van Alstein stop fighting it.
He’s coming to find me. And the storm just made sure there’s only one place left for both of us to ride it out.