LVII
White lights climbed every lamppost in town. Storefront windows glowed with poinsettias and gold ribbon. Lantern Society stickers gleamed in the corners of polished windows, small and tasteful and everywhere once you knew to look for them.
The festival sat at the end of Main Street like something out of another century—all winter roses, iron gates, and warm gold light spilling from tall windows onto the snow. Ice sculptures stood in the garden like frozen saints.
The Nova rolled to a stop beneath the portico.
Heaton came around my side and opened the door without a word. The irritation in him had been riding the bond since we left the estate—not loud, not wild, just there. A steady metallic pressure under everything.
Inside, the place was beautiful in the way expensive traps usually are.
Evergreen garlands wound up the banisters.
Candlelight shimmered against cut glass and polished brass.
Somewhere near the far hearth, a violin quartet played something soft enough to pass for celebration.
Guests drifted through the ballroom in dark suits and silk dresses, champagne in hand, all bright smiles and lowered voices.
Victor took Penny’s wrap with a flourish and passed it off to an attendant without ever taking his eyes off her.
Penny rolled her eyes, but the blush was immediate.
“Divide and conquer,” she whispered as Victor offered her his arm. “You two do the creepy spy thing. We’ll monitor the dance floor.”
Victor looked pleased with the assignment. Heaton did not.
He shrugged my coat from my shoulders and handed it off, his fingers brushing the back of my neck only once—light, controlled, enough to send a distinct pulse through the tether.
Then Victor and Penny were gone, disappearing into the crowd in a wash of satin and reckless charm.
“Look alive, October,” Heaton said, silver eyes sweeping the ballroom with lethal precision. “These people didn’t come here to dance.”
I followed his line of sight.
Now that I was looking for it, the room changed. Tiny gold emblems gleamed at cuffs and collars. Men in dark suits stood too still in the corners. Women laughed with their mouths and not their eyes. Everywhere I looked, people were watching other people watch.
“A fundraiser?” I asked.
“Recruitment.”
My mouth tightened.
I meant to stay with him. I meant to stay sharp.
Then I saw Ford.
He stood across the room with Natalie and her parents near the front of the hall, where a table of white candles had been arranged beneath framed school portraits and missing-person flyers.
A special vigil display.
For the missing kids. For Sasha. For all the names no one was saying too loudly tonight.
Ford’s head bent as Natalie’s mother spoke. One hand rested at the small of Natalie’s back.
And because I had learned nothing, the sight of him still struck somewhere tender.
Not because I wanted to go to him. Because the what-if slipped through anyway—the thought of a life that might have been simpler, quieter, devastatingly human.
Heaton’s head turned with the slow, inevitable snap of a predator catching a scent.
A piercing, localized frost bloomed along the inside of my wrist. A silent warning.
Get it together.
“Ah,” Heaton said, voice low. “It seems he’s decided to join us after all.”
The distraction was a cold splash of water, and I tore my eyes away and followed his gaze instead.
Julian stood at the far end of the room near a cordoned-off mezzanine bar, polished and self-satisfied in a dark, tailored suit.
Light brown hair. Dark eyes. Smile too neat to trust. One of the older Lanterns leaned in to murmur something in his ear, and Julian’s attention shifted briefly toward the VIP gallery above the floor.
“Shouldn’t we follow him?” I asked.
But my eyes were already drifting back toward the candlelight of the vigil.
Back toward Ford.
“Eventually.”
“What does that mean?”
I looked at Heaton. He was still staring straight ahead, his jaw set like granite; his eyes had gone flat in the warm light of the ballroom.
“It means,” he said quietly, “that I’m not following Julian anywhere until you are actually here.”
A flush climbed my neck. “I am here.”
His expression didn’t change.
“Part of you is standing over there with Ford. The rest of you is trying to pretend I can’t feel it.”
The truth burned.
“Heaton—”
“No,” he cut across me. “Not now.”
I opened my mouth.
Then it closed.
Because he was right. And I hated that he was right.
Across the room, Julian disappeared behind a cluster of elite donors, but Heaton didn’t glance after him. The mission, the reason we were here, had suddenly become secondary.
“Come on.”
He closed the distance between us, his hand wrapping around my wrist, low and firm. He steered me through the edge of the crowd, past the draped windows and the last spill of violin music.
We slipped through a heavy side door and out into the gardens.
Cold met us.
The world outside felt hushed and half-dead—frozen hedges, sleeping rose canes, white gravel paths glinting under dim lantern light. The music from inside dulled to a golden, meaningless blur behind the glass.
He didn’t stop until we reached the center of a secluded path, far from the windows and the prying eyes of the party.
Only then did he let go.
I rubbed at the place his hand had been, my skin tingling, and tried not to shiver.
“Shouldn’t we go back?” I asked, my voice small in the quiet. “If Julian’s here—”
“Julian can wait five minutes.”
Snow silvered the shoulders of his dark coat. He stood with his face tipped slightly toward the sky, breathing once through his nose as if he were trying very hard not to say the first thing that wanted out.
That was new enough to worry me.
“Heaton,” I said.
His name bloomed in a white plume between us.
He looked at me then.
And whatever he saw there made something in his expression go colder.
“We are standing in the middle of a Lantern event,” he said, each word measured with control.
“We walked in without the compass, without a clean exit, and without any idea how much tonight is already stacked against us. Half the people in that room are pretending this is a charity gala. The other half are deciding who they can use before the solstice is over.”
His silver eyes held mine, merciless and unreadable in the moonlight.
“So, tell me why I had to drag your attention back from Ford like a hand off a hot stove.”
The accusation hung in the frozen air, crystal clear and undeniable.
My own defenses felt flimsy, even to me.
“You’re right,” I whispered. “I’m sorry. I’ll get my head straight.”
He didn’t soften.
“Do you like him that much?” he asked, voice dangerously bare of emotion. “Is that what this is? Because if it is, then for God’s sake, go do something about it. I’ll keep my mouth shut for five minutes if that’s what it takes to get it out of our system.”
The offer was so brutal it stung.
“It’s not like that.”
“No?”
“It’s not about him. It’s about this.”
I gestured between us, at the invisible, searing bond stitched through my ribs.
“I’m trying to be respectful of you. I know you hate this.” My throat tightened, but I pushed through. “So, I’m not going to make it worse by chasing something I can’t even have while I’m still tied to you.”
A humorless laugh escaped him.
“You think this is about me?”
He took a step closer, his presence stealing the air from my lungs.
“You think I’m so fragile I can’t handle feeling what you feel?”
His hand lifted to my chin, cool fingers catching me before I could look away.
“Let me make something clear. This bond does not create feelings out of thin air. It amplifies what’s already there. It’s a signal booster, not a puppet master.”
His gaze dropped to my mouth, then returned to my eyes.
“So, you can stop using it as an excuse.”
“I’m not.”
“Don’t stand here and tell me you’re choosing me out of some misplaced sense of decency.” His voice dropped to a quiet, lethal frequency. “I don’t want your sacrifice. And I don’t want you using it to avoid the truth.”
“And what truth is that?”
“The truth,” he said, thumb brushing once along my jaw, “is that you’re not staying away from him because you’re worried about me.”
His hand slid from my chin to the side of my neck, his thumb settling beneath my ear where my pulse had nowhere to hide.
“You’re staying away because you’re already drowning in this.”
His eyes held mine.
“In us.”
The words struck somewhere deep enough to make me hate how badly I wanted them to be true.
“No,” I whispered. “I mean it. If keeping my distance makes this more tolerable for you, then fine. I can do that.”
His exhale was slow and controlled, but I felt the violence of it ripple through the tether.
“You think this is about what’s tolerable?”
My fingers tightened in the silk of my skirt.
“What else am I supposed to think, Heaton?” I shot back. “You look at me like you need me and hate me for it. Like every time I get close, you’re trying to decide whether I’m saving you or making you worse.”
The words came faster now, raw and ugly and too late to call back.
“There is no us. There’s a bond we didn’t ask for and a problem we still have to solve. That’s all this is.”
Snow caught in the dark sweep of his hair and melted at the collar of his coat. His face stayed perfectly still, but the bond gave him away—ice, pressure, something furious and wounded moving beneath all that control.
“That’s not all this is,” he said.
I shook my head, but weakly. “You don’t know that.”
His fingers tightened just enough at the side of my neck to keep me from looking away.
“I. Know. You.”
His gray eyes searched mine with an intimacy that felt merciless.
“I know the difference between your fear and mine,” he said. “I know when the bond is amplifying something real, and I know when you’re using it as somewhere convenient to hide.”
My breath caught.
“And right now,” he said quietly, “you’re hiding.”
I tried to pull back a fraction.
He didn’t let me.
“If you wanted Ford, you would have gone after him.” Every word came measured, soldier-straight, impossible to dodge. “You wouldn’t be standing out here trying to convince me your restraint has anything to do with me.”
The words hit like a slap.
“You’re not using the bond to protect me from Ford,” he said. “You’re using it as a shield because you’re terrified that if you look at me for one second without it, you’ll realize you never actually wanted to walk through that door he left open.”
I stared at him, breathless.
“I don’t know what’s me and what’s the bond anymore,” I said, hating how small it sounded.
“Then let me be certain enough for both of us.”
“And if there is no us?” I asked because the question had lived inside me so long it came out bleeding. “If there’s just a bond you can’t wait to cut yourself out of? If I’m trying to spare us both from something that should never have happened in the first place . . . ”
His hand left my neck.
For one second, I missed it.
Then his thumb dragged once across my lower lip, and the rest of me forgot how to move.
“You keep talking like I’m enduring you,” he said, voice dropping lower. “Like this is something I’m surviving out of obligation. Like I’m tolerating the bond and waiting for the first chance to cut you loose.”
He leaned in, his shadow blotting out the garden lights until the world narrowed to the two of us and the falling snow.
“That is not what’s happening here.”
I could hear my heartbeat. Could feel it stumbling against the pad of his thumb.
“Then what is happening?”
For the first time since he dragged me into the garden, something raw flashed across his face.
“What’s happening,” he said, “is that you mistook restraint for indifference, and I let you. Because restraint was the only decent thing I had left.”
He took one more step.
Now there was nowhere left for the cold to go.
The garden lights blurred at the edges. Snow melted on my eyelashes. Somewhere behind us, inside the ballroom, applause rose and fell.
It might as well have belonged to another world.
Heaton looked down at my mouth.
Then back into my eyes.
“You want the truth?” he asked. “Then feel it.”
And then he kissed me.