"You don't get to do that," I say, and my voice only cracks a little. "You don't get to ruin each other over me. I'm not a—I'm not a thing you win." The grimoire settles under my sternum, sated, the coin taste fading on the back of my tongue, holding all four of them down at the floor like leashed dogs, and I hate that I can do this. I hate that I'm the only one in the room whocould."I'm in it. Whatever happens tomorrow happens to me too. So you don't get to stand here deciding it over my head and burning the house down when you can't agree."
Nobody argues. The fight's gone out of them, drained down into the boards with the rest.
And here is the thing I won't say. The thing I'm going to have to carry out of this room by myself.
Watching them go that far—watching four men I love willing to wreck each other, willing to bleed for the right to keep me safe—it horrifies me. It does. I felt the shadow find Atlas's shoulder and my whole stomach turned. That's the true thing and it's the first thing.
The second thing arrives right underneath it, uninvited, low and hot and entirely mine: some animal part of mewantedthe proof. Wanted to see exactly how far they'd go.
And when I saw how far, it landed somewhere deep and shameful and warm, and I am disgusted with myself for it, standing here with their magic pinned to the floor, that wanting curled up small and bright behind my ribs where nobody can see it.
I don't say a word about it. I never will. I tuck it away with everything else I'm not built to look at yet, and I hate,already, that I'll be carrying it down those stairs tomorrow right alongside the fear.
Helena has been by the cold hearth the whole time, watching, the way she watches everything, like she's already seen how it ends and is only here to confirm the timing. She doesn't comment on what I just did. She has the grace, at least, not to look impressed.
It's Callum who breaks the quiet, and he doesn't break it loud.
He's flexing the hand the mark sits on, staring at the closed half moon of it, and when he speaks it's to Helena, low, like he's been holding the words behind his teeth since September and they finally got loose.
"If it comes to a choice." He stops. Starts again. "Down there. If it's the Well, or my mother—" His jaw works. "Which do we choose?"
The fire isn't lit. The hall is cold and old and full of dust that's been settling on the same mantel since before any of us were born, since before Cordelia, maybe, and the question hangs in it and turns slowly and nobody reaches for it.
Helena doesn't answer.
Atlas doesn't. Ren doesn't. Felix is looking at the middle distance again, and whatever's written on his invisible chalkboard, he's not reading it out.
I watch Callum wait for an answer, watch the wait stretch and go nowhere, and I understand that this is the thing eating him alive. Not the choice. He could make a choice. It's that no one will say it out loud with him, that he's been left to hold it by himself in the dark, and the silence where the answer should be is louder than anything we shouted at each other tonight.
He nods once, like he expected exactly that.
Then he picks his shadow up off the floor, where I left it, and folds it back around his feet, and we go to our separate corners of the only house that won't tell on us, to wait for morning.
26
FELIX
Ihave been stacking the odds since noon.
Not loudly. You don't have to be loud. You nudge the small things—a missed bus, a text answered late, a hallway that empties when it could've stayed full—and the day leans, the way a deck leans when you've thumbed one corner soft. I'm not predicting any of this, for the record. Predicting is something happeningtoyou. This is me, reaching into the deck and cheating it into place before anyone's dealt a card.
By the time the sun goes down, this room is the likeliest place in every branch I can still see for her to be standing in. I built it that way. I'm not above admitting it. I built tomorrow into a wall I can't move, and then I spent the whole afternoon making tonight the one room on the right side of it.
The cards are in my left hand, walking knuckle to knuckle, the way they always are. The way breathing is always.
Then she knocks, and they stop.
That's the tell. I know it's the tell. I let them stop anyway.
"You're early," I say when I open the door, because it's easier than the true thing, and the grin gets there before I do, lands where it's supposed to, holds. She's got her coat still on, rain inher hair, and her eyes go to the cards gone still in my hand, same as always.
"I'm never early," Everly says. "You said that yourself. I'm reliably a little late."
"You're a little late to everything except the one thing." I step back to let her in. "Statistically remarkable."
I have spent the day watching her die.
Not on purpose. You don't get to choose. I ran the branches off tomorrow same as I run them off everything, and tomorrow is a hand where the house keeps drawing to a flush. In one she goes down into the Deep and doesn't come up. In one she comes up and isn't her.
