He looked over to the booth. Rowan was already looking his way. When Briar met his gaze, a shy smile lit his features, a secret shared between them. Briar, helplessly, smiled back.
Two drinks slammed down next to him. He jolted, looking up to find not Aisling, but Maebh standing over him.
“Stop looking at him like that,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like you love the bones of him.”
He couldn’t answer her fury with anything honest. Vatii’s discomfort manifested in a ruffle of feathers.
Maebh held the drinks still, so when he reached for them he had to wait for her to release the handles. She did and said, “He’s told me to wind my neck in. God knows, I’ve tried. But you hear me right, I cannot watch you play him. He’s not a ride you can hop on and off.”
Briar said, “It’s not—I’m not—”Playing him.He couldn’t say that either.
She glanced toward the booth, where Rowan started to stand. “He’ll give out to me for this. Just know, if you hurt him again, I’ll have your head. And I don’t mean that figuratively. I’ll feed you to the feckin’ woods.”
Briar nodded and took the drinks back.
Rowan grumbled, “I told her not to give you a hard time.”
“No. I deserved it.”
They finished their drinks and headed out. Rowan helped Briar search for Linden, but the distinctive black and white of his ensemble was nowhere to be seen, so Rowan escorted him home. He made an admirable attempt to cheer Briar, but Maebh’s words stuck like slivers under his skin. She was right. He had to do something to rectify the situation, and he knew—prophecies be damned—what the truest, most honest,fairestthing would be.
Tell Linden how he felt. Leave him. Live out the rest of his remaining time with Rowan and hope that, if Linden found a cure, he was benevolent enough to share it. Even with his earnings from the press release, Briar doubted he could afford it.
Or he could cut himself off from Rowan and devote himself wholly to Linden, but with the knowledge it wouldn’t be fair to anyone involved. He’d be doing it for selfish reasons. He had a choice, Niamh had told him, but did he really when his life depended upon the right one?
Briar shivered. His jitters came on partly from his need for another draft of potion, and partly because the night had gotten colder, and he hadn’t made a jacket to go with his dress. Rowan stopped to sweep his wool cloak off, wrapping it around Briar.
“You’ll get cold too. We’re almost home,” Briar said, teeth chattering.
Rowan rubbed his hands up and down Briar’s shoulders. It made all the thoughts Briar had been chewing on turn hooked and sharp, catching him up in memories of Rowan, cupping his hands and using his breath to warm them.
He forced himself to keep walking, but the sense of Rowan so near didn’t abate. Slowly, slowly, his mind turned, arriving at its inevitable destination as they stopped at his front door.
He started to take the cloak off. Rowan lay a hand over his. “Keep it.”
It didn’t feel like he was talking about the cloak.
Under Rowan’s hand, Briar’s began to shake violently. It was a combination of things. His racing heart. The cold. The way Rowan looked at him.
Mostly, though, it was the curse.
Rowan caught him when his legs gave out. His arms wound around Briar’s middle, stopping his fall backward, while Vatii startled off his shoulder and flapped up to the roof’s eave. The world swam, and Briar groaned as he tried to stave off an incoming episode.
Rowan held him with one arm, the other finding his keys in the pocket of his dress among the coins and empty vials of potion. In a fumbling rush through the door, he got them up the stairs, setting Briar on the bed.
“In the right cabinet.” Briar gripped the headboard, squeezing his eyes shut against the bright lights in his periphery. Rowan pressed an uncorked vial into his hand. He hardly tasted it going down. Gradually, the light speckling his vision faded. The splitting pain in his head didn’t, like someone had put a wedge in the crack of his skull and taken a hammer to it.
Rowan hovered near him. “Tell me what to do.”
“I don’t know,” Briar gasped. It took an effort to speak.
The bed sank next to him. “Please, Briar. Stay with me.”
His broken voice cracked through everything. Briar couldn’t do this. Much as he cared about Linden and didn’t want to hurt him, that felt inevitable. His impending death felt inevitable. The only good in all of this sat next to him.
