In another, she's caught out in a storm that won't let her go, the kind Atlas couldn't call off because it isn't his, rain coming sideways and her hair plastered flat and her mouth shaping a word the wind takes.
In the worst of them, a thing comes up out of the basement of a building I have never once set foot in—something patient and wrong—and takes her down into the dark with no sound at all. That's the one that wakes me.
I don't count any of it in numbers. I never have. People think the gift is arithmetic and it isn't—it's odds, it's chance, it's the long animal sense of which door the night walks through. And lately the night keeps turning her death up in a dozen shapes, dealing them to me face-up like a dealer who's stopped pretending the deck is fair.
There's one more I carry that isn't hers. It sits lower, behind the others, the way the one chip you can't afford to lose sits at the bottom of the stack. The odds on my own death. I keep it where I keep everything I don't intend to put on the table, swallowed down and lodged under the ribs, a stone I've gotten used to the weight of.
I deal another losing hand. Across the green felt, past the tall windows gone milky with autumn, the building next door stands the way it always stands. Concordia Hall. Old in a way the rest of Nyxhaven only pretends to be—not old like money, old like a thing that was here first and has been waiting to be asked. It faces something. That's the best I've got for it. Every other building on this campus faces the quad, faces commerce, faces the part of itself it wants you to see. Concordia faces something I can't stand at the right angle to.
It bends the odds. I've felt it since my first day here, a drag at the edge of the sight, the way a deep current pulls at your ankles before you've decided to go in. Stand near it and the futures thin out. Stand inside it—I imagine—and they might go quiet altogether.
I have run that thought more times than I'd admit. A place where the photographs stop. Where I couldn't see her die because I couldn't see anything, and for once the silence would be mercy instead of the thing in the basement.
I haven't told her that the building pulls at me. I haven't told her about the staircase or the storm or the dark. Telling her means saying the next sentence out loud, the one where I explainwhere my own odds run out, and I'm not ready to have that conversation with myself, let alone with her looking at me while I do.
So I cut the deck instead. One-handed, a flourish nobody's watching, the cards whispering against each other and going right back to moving.
The house, as always, wins. I just haven't decided yet what it's winning.
***-
The session room smells like old smoke and older varnish, and at nine sharp Wheeler is already bent over Ren like a man at a well he's been told not to enjoy and is enjoying anyway.
That's the cover I've been waiting for.
There are rules to the hour. We get the hour. One sanctioned window a day, the five of us at the long table while Wheeler "supervises our independent study," which is the gentle name for what it is: him drawing magic out of us a measured amount at a time, logging it, feeding it back to Catalina, leaving us each a little emptier than we came.
The marks burn quietly the whole time, low coals on the backs of four hands, mine in with the rest, reminding us where the boundary is.
Everly's the only one at the table without one. She doesn't need a mark. She is the boundary—sitting in a chair, wearing a borrowed cardigan because Callister House keeps the heat too low on purpose, the warded ground they leashed all four of us away from, given a face and a name.
Everly Grey is to my left with her cards out because I made her keep her cards out—it gives our hands somewhere to be that isn't suspicious—and her skirt is the gray wool one and her kneesare together and her attention is on Wheeler and Ren the way all of our attention is supposed to be.
Wheeler's is, entirely. That's the thing about Ren's magic. It's a deep well and it draws slow, and a man drinking from it can't think about anything but the drinking. Wheeler's got both hands hovering, his eyes half-shut, the greed all over his face, taking the Sanguis pull up out of Ren in a long unhurried line while Ren sits there and lets him and gives the room nothing. Three feet away. Close enough to hear, too lost to look.
The odds on him noticing anything for the next four minutes are as long as they get.
I lean toward her like I'm going to say something about the cards. "You're holding your hand wrong," I murmur, low, under the felt-soft sounds of the room. "It's a tell."
"I'm not holding anything," Everly says.
"Mm. That's the tell." I let the grin land, the easy one, the one that's done its work on tables harder than this her whole life without her quite tracking how. The bond gives me a beat of her before her face does, a small warmth arriving from her side of the thread between us, a flush of attention turning my way like the table's luck changing. I feel it behind the sternum, right where the sight lives, her hand on the place she's never touched. "Don't look at me," I say. "Look at Ren. Keep looking at Ren."
She looks at Ren.
And I put my hand under the table and slide it up her knee.
She goes still—the good still, the held-breath still—and the cards in my left hand keep right on walking knuckle to knuckle, because the cards are the cover and the cover does not get to stop. Her skirt gives. My palm finds the warm inside of her thigh and she lets her knees come apart by an inch, just an inch, the smallest yes in the world.
Her chin stays pointed dead at Wheeler while everything below the table answers me, and God, I love this. Good girl. Holdexactly that. Hold it while I get my hand where I've wanted it since she walked in and sat down in that prim gray wool with her knees clamped together like that was ever going to stop me. Like that wasn't just a dare with buttons.
"There's a storm Thursday," I say, conversational, for anyone half-listening. My fingers find the edge of her underwear and slip past it, and she's already soaked—drenched, slick to the touch, her cunt swollen up under my fingertips. Christ. She's been sitting here playing prim and getting this wet for me the whole goddamn time, and the thrill of it goes straight up my arm and lodges somewhere mean and delighted.
Her pleasure comes up the thread between us as its own clear signal, distinctly hers, a second heat I can feel arriving from her side and read like a card she's tipped me.
It doesn't bleed into mine and double back. That's not how it works for me. Ren gets the feedback, the closed circle, her want pouring into him and his into her till neither can find the seam. I'm not blood. I'm chance. What I feel of her runs alongside what I feel on my own, two separate hands dealt to the same man, and right now both are bad for my composure. Hers is climbing fast under my fingers. Mine's been hard as a fist since she crossed her knees at me.
She did that sitting still in a hard chair while a man drank Ren dry three feet away. She got that wet because I told her not to look at me. I am going to be so insufferable about this later that she'll want to deck me. Worth it. Worth every second. "Cold front. Atlas is thrilled. He gets very chatty about isobars when there's a front."
