The arcade wasn't part of the plan. Which, of course, made it perfect. Kit had spotted it right after their second funnel cake, his eyes still blown wide from the X, hair whipped into static from the Tilt-A-Whirl, and hands dusted in powdered sugar like he'd just stuck up a beignet truck.
"C'mon, Del," he said, tugging her by the wrist toward the flashing neon entrance. "Let's go pretend we're twelve and loaded with quarters."
"We don't have quarters," she pointed out, but her voice was bubbling with laughter. Still, she let him lead the way. Her feet felt lighter than they had in days, as if the carnival's chaos was somehow unwinding things inside her she hadn't even realized were tangled.
The moment they stepped inside, the world flared into cacophony: bells ringing, synthpop pulsing overhead, the air thick with the ozone tang of scorched circuits and popcorn. The clatter of tokens tumbling into metal trays mingled with the wild chorus of teenagers squabbling over skee-ball and little kids shrieking at the jackpot lights.
Kit made a beeline for the change machine, slapping down a folded, sweat-damp twenty. "This is my noble sacrifice for the cause," he announced, as if bestowing treasure. "May we win every cheap plastic prize in this godforsaken palace."
The machine groaned, then clattered, before spitting out a waterfall of tokens that spilled and bounced across the sticky checkerboard floor. Kit scrambled to scoop them into his hoodie like a frantic magpie, arms overflowing with dull brass coins and pure glee.
Delorah tried to stifle her grin, but failed utterly. "What are you even gonna do with all those?"
He grinned back, eyes wild and laughter-bright, his bravado as oversized as the pile in his arms. "Dominate."
Twenty minutes later, they were elbow-to-elbow at the skee-ball lanes. Kit had already lost two rounds of air hockey with impressive, slapstick flair and claimed a single victory: a blinking plastic ring from the claw machine, which he'd ceremoniously thrust onto Delorah's finger as soon as it was his.
"Your highness," he intoned, dipping into a dramatic bow, the plastic gem casting odd little rainbows on her knuckles. "Queen of Chaos, Mistress of Coin Pushers."
Delorah, flushed and breathless from laughter, swept into a goofy little curtsy. "Thank you, peasant. Now fetch me a slushie, before I banish you to the pinball dungeon."
Kit pressed a palm to his chest in mock devotion, saluted haphazardly, and shambled theatrically off toward the snack counter. He fished out his phone while waiting in line, screen sticky with sweat and sugar. One unread message flashed up at the top.
Tyler: what are you two even up to anyway?
Kit snorted aloud, earning a side-eye from the man working the counter, and thumbed out a reply:
Kit: LIVING MY TRUTH. Proof pending.
He spun to frame a crooked photo. One that he had caught himself grinning by the neon blur of the claw machine, Delorah in the deep background, all kinetic energy and wild focus, pumping plastic shells into an arcade shotgun as pixelated zombies closed in.
Kit: [Image Attached]
Kit: She's a menace with that gun. Send help.
The slushie machine sputtered, coughed, then yielded two oversized cups. One bright red, one chemical blue. Kit juggled them awkwardly, almost dropping a straw, grin stretching so wide his cheeks ached.
He ducked back into the riot of sound and light, weaving past sticky birthday parties and shrieking kids. Delorah turned as he approached, her eyes brilliant, cheeks flushed, hair escaping its braid. For a split second, time seemed to glitch.
The world didn't feel like it was ending after all, just spinning around them in wide, dizzy circles of color and sweetness.
And Kit… didn't want to come down. Not now, not ever.
The neon from the arcade bled out onto the cracked pavement, staining the parking lot in decadent sin. Cheap reds, aggressive blues, teeming with a kind of synthetic life that made everything and everyone look brittle and uncanny, like comic-book villains brought to life under sheets of candy cellophane. Sebastian hadn't planned to follow them.
At least, that's what he told himself as he slipped through the arcade's side entrance, collar half-raised against the sticky wind, Kit and Delorah's laughter already echoing through him in a way that somehow soured the fluorescent air.
He could have gone home. He could have vanished, unseen, like smoke dissipating in the dark. He should have.
Instead, Sebastian slouched against the icy glass curve of the claw machine, his reflection fractured in smears of condensation and neon. His fingers drummed on the gleaming Audi key in his pocket. Click, click, click. Sharp little stabs of sound that felt surgical, precise. His gaze fixed fast across the pop and chaos of the arcade, zeroed in on Kit and Delorah in the full heat of their riot.
Kit had that look again. The one that made Sebastian's jaw clench and his molars ache, the look that was all reckless dare and summer-sweet freedom. Delorah was laughing. Her head thrown back, mouth bright, hands hooked around Kit's arm as if he were the one anchor in a world spun off-axis.
Kit, of all people, looked unburdened. Lighter than Sebastian had ever remembered seeing him. Luminous, like the world wasn't devouring them by inches. As if he hadn't just stolen something irretrievable and danced off with it like it was a game.
Then Kit pulled something from his hoodie pocket: a plastic ring, gaudy and cheap, the prize light flickering through its gummy pink gemstone.
Sebastian stopped breathing.
It was nothing. It was less than nothing. A trinket, a joke, a thing you'd leave crushed at the bottom of a pocket without even remembering how you got it. But Kit, in his infinite foolishness, knelt. Right there in the whiplash glow of the skee-ball sign, eyes fierce and open, one hand held out with an honesty that bordered on sacramental.
The pulse of the arcade muffled, constricted. For a moment, the world funneled down to the soft scrape of Sebastian's palm flattening against the glass. Too hard, searching for some purchase, some pain that would feel real. The claw machine's innards rattled silently beneath his fingers, lurid prizes dangling in stilled anticipation.
Delorah stared for a second, as if suspended between breaths, then. Stupid, brave, perfect—she took the ring and slid it onto her finger. Kit looked up at her like she was the only thing worth surviving for, wide-eyed and fragile and so full it threatened to spill over.
Sebastian's throat jumped. He swallowed, but the taste was metallic. Blood, anger, sorrow, he wasn't sure. Each flavor scorched a little deeper.
He watched Kit's hand brush against hers, tentative, trembling, breaking and reforging some ancient promise Sebastian couldn't name but felt the splinters of in his bones. Kit forgot, in that instant, who he wasn't allowed to be, and Delorah let herself forget everything else. They were radiant...idiotic, doomed, alive.
A breath tangled in Sebastian's chest, refusing to move or die. Not yet, he told himself, jaw tightening, the urge to shatter something dancing behind his eyes.
The spider inside him stirred...cold, clever, relentless, calculating. Weaving its invisible silk around his ribs and heart. He forced his pulse down, willed the flaring ache in his belly back to diamond-cold focus. Emotion was for the weak. Rage was a distraction. Heartbreak was a myth men made up to excuse powerlessness.
Let Kit believe he'd won something. Let him hand over his penny-candy crown and empty his hands of hope. All he had done was fall deeper into the snare. Spun his own silk ropes, trapped himself where the web met the knife.
Sebastian forced out a breath, slow and surgical. He rolled off the machine, giving the sleeve of his coat a careful, deliberate tug. A man erasing evidence, even of nerves. Each movement placed, no wastage, no tremor. He still owned this night. He always would.
Not yet, the silk whispered in his blood. Not here. But soon.
A cold, careful smile ticked up one side of his mouth. A scalpel's smile, nothing human in it, nothing warm. The kind of rictus that belongs to a shadow behind glass, or to something vast and patient crouched at the heart of its web, centuries deep in the art of waiting. The kind of smile spiders wear in the dark, a second before the web pulls tight and the world goes still.
"Play your games, Adrian." Sebastian murmured, just for himself, voice razor-thin as he watched Kit's trembling hand. "When it counts, I'll cut the strings myself."
And then he moved, as silent as wind. The shadow peeling from around the garish corners, boots noiseless on the sticky concrete as he slipped out beneath the blur and riot of neon. Behind him, the web trembled, keen and waiting, the world too bright and naive to sense its closing shape.
Let them laugh. Let them pretend this was safety. The ending was already crawling closer, spun tight and waiting for his signal. And Sebastian, the prince of this kingdom. He would be ready when the time came.
.
.
.
.
They boarded the Ferris wheel just as the first firework gasped into the night, a sputtering bloom of red and gold that turned the low-hanging clouds into a swollen bruise. Over the clamor of the fair, the world seemed to hold its breath.
Kit gripped the safety bar with one hand, thumb tracing invisible patterns across the chipped metal, nerves fizzing in his veins. Static and spark, all sharp edges under the thin shield of his skin. The car rocked as they settled, Delorah's thigh pressed against his: too warm, too present. He catalogued it, the precise pressure and heat. Too much a reminder of all he'd want, not nearly enough to sate.
The wheel churned into motion with a mechanical sigh, lurching them upward. Below, the pier unraveled in slow, swirling ribbons.
The lights and booths scattered like spilled candy, the sticky crescendo of shrieks from sugar-high children, the synthetic laughter that rode the air, tinny and insistent, braiding itself into the memory of the night.
But above, higher with every rotation there was something the noise couldn't touch. Stillness, edged with anticipation. A sky waiting not to heal, but to break open.
Delorah leaned forward, pressing her palms to the cold plexiglass. Firework smoke drifted past like ghostly handwriting. "You ever feel like you're floating and falling at the same time?" she asked, her voice almost lost in the hush between explosions.
Kit blinked, slow. His breath frosted the space between them. "Only around you," he said, and was almost surprised by his own honesty.
She turned to look at him. A hesitation, a fragile calculation. Her eyes holding something raw, unsanded. No teasing tonight, nothing sharp. Just an open wound with a question stitched along its edge: will this hold, or will it hurt?
He didn't move at first. Just watched the carnival light catch in the plastic ring on her finger. A cheap thing, but claiming more than it should. His hand curled tight on the bar. He didn't know if he wanted to reclaim that ring or melt it into her skin.
Another firework shredded across the darkness. White, then blue, then a hungry red that painted Delorah's silhouette in new shapes.
Kit leaned in, heart hammering. Not smooth; not the practiced confidence he could fake at a party but a truth as awkward as it was undeniable. He pressed his lips to the curve of her cheekbone. A barely there kiss, featherlight and shivering. Worshipful. As if he feared too much touch would make her dissolve away.
"Thanks for today," he breathed out, his voice trembling slightly. "For saying yes."
Delorah didn't answer right away. She studied him, eyes impossibly bright, wind-tangled hair wild around her face. She looked suspended between girl and wildfire, between bravado and breakage, hovering in that dangerous place where wanting becomes need.
Her mouth twitched, like maybe she'd smile, maybe she'd scream. Finally, she said, soft as a secret: "You didn't give me much of a choice."
But her voice was velvet; her fingers sneaked into his hand beneath the safety bar. She laced their hands together, steady, sure. She didn't let go.
Their car swung gently at the Ferris wheel's crown, everything below smeared with light and color, but up here there was a hush. Infinite space. A sky trembling on the edge of revelation.
Somewhere down in that chaos, a spider spun and waited, patient and sure. But up here on the arc of the world, they were only two kids: reckless, weightless, pretending for just a moment that the stars were only fireworks and the rigged future couldn't reach this high.
They didn't speak much after the Ferris wheel. They didn't have to.
Kit led her down the crooked gravel path toward the mostly abandoned parking lot, the carnival yawning shut behind them, lights dimming one by one like eyelids at the edge of sleep.
The sky was bleeding into night, a haze of orange smeared thin by the cooling wind, purple clouds layered atop each other like bruises in bloom. The breeze spat salt and seaweed from the coast. Lazy, but sharp enough to raise goosebumps on bare arms.
Delorah's phone buzzed.
She flinched. Just a shiver. Kit caught the glow before she glanced down, the screen bright enough to slice through dusk. The contact name glared in all caps: MOM: You need to be home by 6. Your father's waiting.
The text felt louder than fireworks, louder than the rides and shrieking crowds. All the more so for the silence now humming between them.
Delorah muttered, "Jesus." Her thumb hovered, uncertain. Instead of replying, she angled the screen toward Kit, the stand-in for a shrug. "Guess the kingdom calls."
Kit's laugh was thin and brittle, a sound more felt in the teeth than heard. "You gonna tell them who you were with?"
"Depends," she replied, trying for a breezy brightness that didn't quite land. She tucked the phone away with a single practiced flick, her voice forced lightness running out of slack. "You gonna tell yours?"
He stiffened, just slightly, an almost invisible flicker crossing his face.
His jaw shifted and set, gaze fixed on something over her shoulder. "My dad doesn't ask questions unless he's picked out the answers in advance."
They paused beside a sagging game booth, its neon sign fizzing out with stubborn irritation—half-lit, half-dead, its sickly blue and pink stutter pooling in a puddle near a trash bin choked with greasy napkins and wilted paper crowns. Kit leaned into the metal rail, as if he could press the moment into something real and heavy. A bead to slide onto the string of memory.
"You want me to take you home?" he asked, voice softer now.
Delorah studied him. "Aren't you gonna get in trouble?"
He rolled a shrug off his narrow shoulders. "Already am."
That silence, thick as honey, bloomed full between them. The pier flickered further behind; off in the distance, the sky's last firework fizzled out, a lonely pop echoing like a tired sigh. Ash drifted to earth, invisible in the twilight.
Delorah fussed with her sweater, the sleeve sliding stubbornly off her shoulder. It exposed a pale collarbone, the hollow beneath. Kit's gaze snagged on the line of her skin; he looked away, then back, unable to help himself.
Without warning, she peeled off the sweater and held it out to him, a bundle in her hands both casual and deliberate. "You're shaking," she said, her voice trembling at the edges.
He blinked, uncertain. "Del…"
She pushed the sweater against his hands. "Just take it. It'll smell like me. You'll feel snug. Everybody wins."
His fingers gripped the knit, careful as if it were spun sugar. Dense with her warmth, her salt, a note of vanilla and dryer sheet. He didn't put it on; just held it like a live thing, knuckles whitening in the thin light.
"Thanks," he managed, voice turned inward and small.
Delorah turned toward the exit, then paused, glancing back with a brittle smirk. "C'mon, smoke boy. Before I turn into a pumpkin. Or a divorce settlement."
Against all expectation, Kit laughed. Real this time. He tugged the sweater over his head, the sleeves hiding his hands, the hem falling nearly to his knees. It drowned him in her, the way rain can drown a gutter, urgent and complete.
They walked side by side toward the edge of everything. Toward the parking lot, where her mother's voice waited tinny in her pocket, where Kit's brother would frown at the hour, where somewhere a spider was spinning and spinning, weaving something just as heavy and delicate as the night they shared.
The world settled behind them, slow and soft, and together they moved into the next hush, their shared silence loud as hope.
.
.
.
.
Kit's car slowed as they reached the LaRoche estate, tires grinding over gravel that crackled like brittle bones beneath a boot. Every crunch was too final, too loud. The sound of a door slamming shut behind a secret you weren't ready to let go.
The mansion loomed beyond the wrought-iron gates, its form etched against the dark like something conjured rather than built. Each window spilled gold-toned warmth, a carefully staged invitation to comfort, but every hedge and topiary bristled with cold precision, each leaf cut sharp as a reprimand.
It looked less like a home than a painting you weren't allowed to touch, a scene arranged for someone else's gaze: stone matched to shadow, shadows sewn precisely to silence. Beauty plucked clean of anything disruptive; grief would feel misplaced here, awkward and unwelcome as a scuff on marble.
This was a place where nothing ugly could exist, where truth only entered if dressed in pearls and rehearsed apologies.
Inside the car, the heater hummed its steady lullaby, but the warm air fell short of their silence. The quiet now had teeth. It pressed at Kit's throat, crowded between their shared breaths, reshaping comfort into ache.
Delorah sat curled in the passenger seat, hunched small, like someone already bracing for impact. Her blazer was askew, lapels wilted, one button hanging on out of stubbornness. Loose strands of hair clung to the damp line of her cheek, snagged in her lashes every time she blinked. She looked like a girl returning from somewhere she'd never been supposed to go.
Her fingers twisted the hem of her skirt. Tugging, smoothing, worrying the fabric as if it might unravel the memory of how easily his sweater had fit between her hands. The car's little universe held traces of her. Sea salt, something sweet and sharp beneath her perfume, the faintest ghost of smoke. It wound tighter around them each passing minute, made a sanctuary out of the pause.
She didn't want to open the door. Not yet.
"Thanks for today," she said. A small, shapeless thing in the dark, almost lost against the murmur of the heater. "I needed it more than I thought."
Kit didn't move. His hands stayed on the wheel, ten and two, locked like he might steer the world back a little, keep her with him a moment longer. His knuckles were pale, skin stretched thin, the fabric of her sweater soft and strange where it bunched at his wrist. It belonged on her. Somehow, it fit him better.
"Anytime." The word scraped out raw, threadbare. Not gratitude; not quite. More like it hurt to say it, knowing what came next. Grief in the hollow of his throat. Like he missed her already, even though she sat inches away.
He risked a look at her, just a flicker, which landed like a hand pressed to her chest. Blue shadows pooled over the slope of her neck; his gaze moved maplike over the lamplight on her cheek, the parted lips, searching for an anchor. Delorah's eyes did not meet his, fixed instead on the glow of the house stitched behind the gates.
Her hand lifted to the door handle and hovered. She wasn't ready. Couldn't quite let go, not yet.
"I hate going back in there," she whispered, a confession barely audible, so vulnerable it nearly lost its shape.
Kit's exhale was slow, clouding the window. "Then don't. Stay a little longer."
This time, she looked at him, the crisp LaRoche cheekbones turning into the light, eyes cloudy with memory or hope or both. She searched his face for something neither of them had words for. Permission. Bravery. A reason to ask for more.
"But you already drove me home." It wasn't a protest. It was a question, heavy with dare. With wishing.
He looked away, fingers drumming on leather, the beat of a thought he dared not finish. Then his hand went still. He spoke without looking, voice nearly invisible in the dark: "I know. I just... I don't want to watch you disappear through that gate."
Delorah's mouth opened, but language deserted her. There were no words for this kind of ache. Not for the everlasting dusk that pressed between leaving and gone. Instead, she reached across the gap and tugged the sweater's cuff higher on his forearm, smoothing the edge with her careful fingers. Neither for warmth nor comfort but for the fact of touch, the anchoring of him here, with her, now.
"Don't wait out here too long," she murmured, letting her hand linger a heartbeat longer than she needed. "You'll catch cold."
Finally, the spell broke. She opened the door, slow and reluctant, bracing as the cold swept in. A verdict, a reminder. She stepped out, feet crunching on the gravel, her figure limned in gold from the mansion's distant lights.
She didn't look back. But her shadow, cast long and sure across the dashboard, kept watch until the gates groaned open with ancestral disapproval and shut behind her, sealing her away from whatever freedom the night had offered.
Kit stayed where he was, both hands anchored to the wheel, wrapped in borrowed warmth, holding the dark taut around himself—like if he tried hard enough, he could knot the evening in place and refuse to let it slip away.
For a moment, he didn't breathe. The car's engine ticked in the aftermath. The world waited with him, suspended, neither ending nor beginning. Just caught between.
Behind her, Kit's car idled at the mouth of the drive,the engine thrumming a note of hesitation. It was just long enough to make her wonder: maybe he would come back. Maybe.
He didn't.
The engine issued a quiet sigh, reversed with the grace of a tide pulling away, and slipped down the winding gravel, headlights swept by hedge and shadow until they faded to a single, flickering thread. When it snapped, when the last of his warmth spun out across the night. That was the true end of the evening. The closing of the day's last door.
Inside, the quiet struck her first. Not peace; the curated quiet. The kind that echoed off wax-slick floors and up toward cavernous ceilings, filling every inch with rehearsed order. It was silence sharpened for display, polished to reflect power, crafted for discomfort. A hush designed to be fragile, to shatter. A hush that waited for mistakes.
Next came the ticking of the grandfather clock in the foyer both patient and insistent. Each click echoing in the hollow beneath her ribs, pacing her every breath. Tick. Tick. Tick. Each moment pronounced, carved open, measured like a private metronome brandished as warning.
Then came footsteps. Measured. Unhurried but impatient. The sound of someone who walked as if the world would step aside for her. Her mother's heels biting marble with the certainty of a gavel.
Her mother's voice ricocheted from the foyer, lacquered and coldly precise. "Delorah, we need to talk. Where have you been?"
Nothing in her tone betrayed surprise, or fear, or the pain of waiting. The words had the polished detachment of an actress reciting lines first memorized, then resented.
Delorah froze beneath the chandelier, its crystals catching the light and fracturing it, scattering fractured rainbows across the marble. Each shard seemed to pin her in place, caught beneath a spotlight she'd never asked for. For a fleeting second, she ached for the rattling Ferris wheel, the anonymous dark, Kit's sweater warm at her shoulders. She longed for the freedom of being unseen.
"I was just out," she blurted, too swift, her voice splintering in the vast hush. The lie clattered down, brittle against the tile.
"Out?" Her mother's heels clicked, a single, coiled sound like a trigger set. She drew closer, her gaze sharp and impenetrable. "With whom? Why didn't you answer your phone?"
The shape of the words was maternal, but the core was interrogation. These were not questions but charges masquerading in pearls and perfume. Each landed with surgical precision. Sharp, fast, designed to draw a flinch.
Delorah's fingers twisted at the hem of her skirt, aware for the first time how wrinkled she was, how the salt-stiffened edge gave her away. She could still taste wind and spun sugar and the ghost of Kit's cigarette on her lips. Her body still hadn't returned; part of her was still spinning over the ocean, high above it all. She wasn't ready for this world yet. Not without some bruise or scar or scrap of proof that the other one had been real.
"I was with a friend," she said, the lie sour in her throat. "We skipped class."
Silence, sharp as glass. Not the shock of betrayal. Rather, the cool, thoughtful parsing of risk.
Her mother tipped her head, eyes narrowing just a fraction, studying her daughter as if she were an expensive painting hung a few degrees off-center. Judgment hidden under admiration; speculation painted as concern.
"Skipping class isn't like you," she intoned at last. Each syllable fell with careful, deliberate chill. "Are you being honest?"
There was no softness to her voice. No maternal ache. There was only calculation. Clearly ticking through possibilities, consequences, optics. She didn't want the truth. She wanted control, leverage.
Delorah shrank a little smaller, thumb pressed white against skirt pleats. Her heart fluttered, useless. Suddenly, a brisk knock rattled the front door. Too loud, too sudden, and it set her nerves jangling. Then came her father's voice floating in from the study, smooth and polished, echoing around the marble like a sentence handed down:
"Is that you, Delorah? Who were you with today?"
The question curved low, a punch below her ribs. The warmth in her body deserted her. The carnival, Kit's laughter, the sweater pulled over his hands, the dying sun, even the afterimage of fireworks. Gone in an instant, memory sweating off her like a fever she'd never be allowed to keep.
She steeled herself for the next performance. The next judgement. The next test in a house where silence was just another way to hurt.
And suddenly, it became impossible to believe she'd ever been anywhere else. That she had ever left this house, ever spun out over salt air, ever touched freedom. The carnival, the sunset, Kit's laughter. All of it had faded so fast she questioned if it had been real at all, or just a trick of longing.
Her mother didn't move. Not a shift, not a breath out of place. She only watched, gaze sharpening to a needlepoint, slicing through Delorah's resolve with the careful efficiency of a scalpel poised above an incision.
There would be no room for a lie tonight. No room for the truth, either.
Delorah's spine uncurled from its fearful bend, stacking itself bone over bone until her shoulders squared. Her hands clenched involuntarily going white-knuckled in the twisted fabric of her skirt, hanging onto something, anything, that was hers.
She took a breath. Drew in undertones of lemon polish and ancient rugs, of dust motes and judgment, of longing pressed flat beneath a thousand rules.
And she stepped out anyway, onto the ledge.
"I was with Kit Honey," she said, voice quiet but meant. "We skipped together."
A pause stretched, long and taut.
You could hear the clock again, marking time with exquisite cruelty.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
For a heartbeat, Mrs. LaRoche's composure slipped in a single blink, too slow, a crack in the glaze. Then, as quickly as it had come, the mask snapped back into place, seamless but for that hairline fracture only a daughter would notice.
Footsteps approached from the marble hall: her father, shouldering the scene before he even stepped into the light. His brow was already drawn, arms folding in the prophecy of disappointment as if the story's ending was etched in stone before she could even open her mouth.
"Kit?" he echoed, voice heavy with disbelief, tart with warning. "The Honey boy?"
Delorah nodded, heat flushing up her neck, burning beneath the skin. Her embarrassment blooming as if she'd confessed a crime instead of admitted to being young.
"Yes," she repeated, smaller but unwavering, braced for their storm.
Her mother's voice slipped into a register that was icy and deliberate. The kind of cold that masquerades as clarity, the kind that lulls until you're under the surface and breathless.
"Delorah," she said, each syllable pressed to a fine edge, "we've discussed your associations before. You know what's expected of you."
Delorah dropped her eyes down to anywhere but the gazes trained on her. A lone thread unraveled in the rug. A crack slithered through the far tile. The shimmer of dust caught in her shoe's shine. She clung to these small truths, relics of worlds less suffocating.
"I know," she whispered, her voice flat with borrowed words, recited for decades, echoing down this hallway long after she'd grown too tall for her childhood dresses.
Her father stepped near enough she could almost taste his cologne. Spiced warmth, once a comfort, now a presence pressed against her throat. His smile flickered, brittle as bone china. Lovely, but hollowed out, lined with invisible warnings.
"We only want what's best for you," he said, all velvet. But underneath, the syllables went off like locks being thrown, a sentence dressed in silk and compromise.
The silence that fell was neither awkward nor accidental; it was imposed, precise and predatory, architected to press her back into the shape they expected. It rang metallic in her chest, tight as a hand around the throat, final as a deal signed in a room she wasn't welcome in.
Silence that said: you belong to us. Silence daring her to ever forget it.
Delorah stood motionless in the artificial gold of the foyer, chest fluttering beneath stilled ribs. There was no crying here. No sharp inhalation, no trembling lip. She just stood, while the world pressed in on all sides:
Kit's scent ghosting through her sweater, salt and spun sugar still spun into the seam of her lips, and his name soft in her mouth, sweet and dangerous, the only rebellion she had left.
.
.
.
.
The Honey estate loomed up from the darkness like a warning etched in stone. Sharper than memory and colder than grief. An expanse of severe geometry and hollow windows, its silhouette fractured the moonlight across mulch beds and manicured hedges. Even under the porch lights, it looked less like a home and more like an oil painting left out in the rain: beauty run thin, warmth blurred away.
Everything here was unblemished, untouched, and unkind. A place too spotless for grief. Too carved-up for love. Nothing about this house had ever felt like home; it never would.
Kit eased the car up the ruler straight drive. The crunch of tires on the gravel felt deafening. He killed the engine and let his hands rest on the wheel, flexed and splayed. For one suspended moment he just sat there, willing the leather grooves beneath his fingers to offer up some sort permanence. A mark, a memory, something that could outlast the night.
The headlights ticked off. Darkness swallowed everything but the glimmer of the front steps.
He told himself to breathe. He didn't.
Before he even made it out of the car, the front door swung open fast. No knock, no warning, just as if anticipation were the real master of this house.
Sebastian waited in the doorway, leaning with one shoulder against the frame, cast in gold and shadow. He looked composed, utterly at home in the disarray of others. Arms crossed, his face was unreadable but for the little curve at the mouth. A smile glazed on with a surgeon's care.
"Hope she was worth it," Sebastian said. His tone was almost gentle. Almost.
Kit's stomach twisted reflexively, a hook wrenching below the ribs. Guttingly familiar. The kind of sensation he'd grown used to in his years with his 'family.'
"What are you talking about?"
Sebastian stepped aside, granting passage the way a king might grant mercy. Tidy. Poised. Dangerous. The smirk on his lips bloomed larger and sharper still like a flower raised on glass and venom. He never had to shout. His words drew blood without effort.
"He's waiting for you in the study," he said, one brow arched. "I told him where you were."
The world wrenched sideways. Kit's mouth went bone-dry. "You what?"
Another shrug, that unbearable, elegant looseness that was deadly as a stiletto. "You're not the only one who knows how to play this game, little brother."
Kit didn't answer. He couldn't have if he wanted to. Rage flared up, electric and wordless, and he launched himself past Sebastian, boots slamming out along the marble floor. Each step echoed and rebounded, a challenge, a warning. A fuse humming beneath his skin.
Down the corridor, the study door sat ajar. Like a mouth half-open, gold lamplight leaking in a thin, cold ribbon across the polished wood. Not an invitation. Not warmth. Just exposure that was clinical and precise. Enough light to cast shadows longer than a man deserved.
He knocked once, sharply. Then pressed through.
Mr. Honey waited behind the desk, the desk that was half altar, half throne, all claim. He never looked up, not at first.
The room smelled of old books, cigar smoke, and something colder. An undercurrent of iron and ice, of bloodlines unsoftened by affection. The only human warmth here lived in the glow of whiskey on the far sideboard.
A thick, leather-bound portfolio rested before him. Mahogany and gold, corners dogeared, evidence of the years and the weight. Mr. Honey's hands drifted over its pages, deliberate, almost delicate. He didn't bother to greet his son.
"So it's true," Mr. Honey said, voice low and precision-sharp. It was a voice built to carry across chessboards and war rooms, leaving no room for comfort.
"You took the LaRoche girl out of school. After everything we did to finalize the contract."
Kit froze, the word sinking in with glacial weight. He didn't move from the threshold. His hands balled at his sides, nails biting crescents deep into his palms.
Contract.
Such a simple, metallic word. Heavy with threat. An inheritance you couldn't outrun.
"I didn't know she'd agreed to anything," Kit replied, fighting for steadiness. His voice broke, just a hair. A fracture he couldn't hide, didn't dare try.
Mr. Honey's gaze stayed anchored on his documents, drawing out the silence. When the moment finally cracked, he raised his eyes. They were shrewd, pale—measuring Kit with the impartiality of a judge regarding a line item, not a son.
"You think that matters?" he replied, every consonant biting.
He closed the folder with a deliberate motion, every inch a picture of measured control. The heavy thud of it landing on the desk resounded like a gavel. A verdict passed, the ruling never in doubt. The only question now was what price would be exacted for defiance.
And Kit, caught in that golden, pitiless light, remembered how it felt to stand at the edge of everything. The wind and carnival and hope long since smothered by contract and design.
"Perception is everything."
Mr. Honey rose from his chair with a deliberate grace, slow and controlled, as if he'd planned every motion before Kit ever walked through the door. The verdict had already been passed; he was just acting out the sentence. No wasted movement. No unnecessary force. Each step around the desk was a scalpel laid gently along the line between intimacy and threat.
"And you," he continued, his voice as silken as it was sharp, "have embarrassed this family."
He circled around Kit. Not pacing, not wandering, but stalking. Every inch was claimed, every breath taken as if he could measure Kit's worth by proximity alone.
"You've jeopardized a carefully orchestrated alliance. But that's not the worst of it." He stopped just in front of Kit, a mirthless curl haunting the edge of his mouth, as if delighting in damage already done. "You've tainted her reputation before the ink's even dry."
Kit's chest rose and fell with shallow, staccato breaths. His pulse beat hard, a syncopated rhythm under his ribs. A body bracing for impact, for shame, for whatever might come next. He could feel his control splintering, fraying at the edges like rope pulled taut across broken glass.
"She's not yours to control."
It came out low. A nearly invisible spark in the dark, not a declaration but a dangerous ember.
Mr. Honey didn't flinch. His smile spread, glacial and exact.
"No," he agreed quietly, the civil tone of someone granting a mercy that was merely sleight of hand. "But she's Sebastian's now."
Silence swallowed the room whole.
Not an empty silence, but a forceful one. A vacuum that pressed into Kit's chest and drove out all the air. It hung there, a verdict without need of a gavel, a lock that shut with a whisper instead of a clang.
Mr. Honey stepped closer, blotting out the lamplight with his shadow. Kit could feel the chill of him, until there was nothing in the room but the weight of inheritance and consequence.
"And if you don't stay in line, Adrian—"
The old name. Kit flinched; it poured down the line of his spine like meltwater, cold and bracing and humiliating.
"If you cost us this deal, you won't just be cut out." Mr. Honey leaned in, words like an undertaker's hand, low and terminal. "You'll be forgotten."
Forgotten.
Not punished. Not exiled. Not even lost.
Just erased.
He didn't have to repeat himself. He didn't need to. The silence pressed the point further than any spoken threat could: Do you understand me?
Kit's breath shuddered, but he couldn't fill his lungs. Something shifted inside him in that moment. Not the brittle shatter he'd known in childhood, not the frantic crush of panic that could pass as anger. This was something deeper. The creak and groan of a centuries-old fault line finally wrenching open—a crack in the foundation that wasn't abrupt, but final. A quiet giving way. The earth under him, unreliable.
His mouth parted, as if to answer, or argue, or beg for something he could no longer name. But nothing came. Not anger, not pity, not defiance. Nothing.
He nodded just a fraction. The smallest gesture. Something so bare it could hardly belong to a person at all. A bow, a submission, a goodbye.
Then he turned and walked out.
Not quickly as running would break the brittle illusion of control. Not with anger. He needed all the fragments of pride he could sweep up. Just steady, just far enough, not to be seen as he came undone. The door shut soft behind him, and the weight of forgetting. Of disappearing settled, slow and certain, onto his shoulders.
.
.
.
.
His room wasn't safe. But it was quiet.
Kit collapsed back against the closed door, his spine anchoring him as if he might otherwise float apart. His chest dragged at the air, ragged and shallow, as if he'd run barefoot for miles through broken glass and the wounds were all inside. Even in the hush, the air pressed too close. So still it throbbed, amplifying every shuddering breath. It felt like he was echoing against himself.
His father's voice lingered, a stain clinging to the plaster, caught in the dust and the weave of the curtains. You'll be forgotten.
Not a threat. Not even a punishment. A sentence. A promise, edged in iron and polished to a shine. A future shaped like teeth.
Kit jammed the heels of his palms against his eyes, hard. So hard sparks bloomed in the darkness behind his lids. Maybe if he pushed in far enough he could force the words out, bleed them down his face, purge the memory through sheer force of will. No luck. Nothing but pressure, building and building.
He kicked off his boots. First one, then the other. They toppled sideways, dull and graceless, as if his bones had forgotten how to be careful. Their hollow thud stuck out in the static, a punctuation mark at the end of the day.
The blackout curtains were already drawn. They were always drawn, smothering every inch of light in his room. The room was choked with gray, layers pressed upon layers, the only movement the drifting swirl of dust in the impossible twilight. The air felt thin, like oxygen sequined with ash. No sun. No warmth. Just walls and the muted, unresolved pulse of something like grief that had never found a name.
Sebastian had told. Of course he had. Not from loyalty. Not from principle. Because it hurt. Because it always hurt more to see Kit want something, even a little.
You don't get her. You don't get anything.
Kit sat on the edge of his bed. The mattress sighed under his weight. He hunched low, elbows digging into his knees, jaw clenched till it creaked. His fists pressed hard against his thighs, blunt nails scraping denim. Anything to keep himself from shaking.
For a moment, the silence in the room felt alive with its own brittle, humming breath. Then:
Delorah's laugh bloomed, bright and golden, inside his head. Unbidden, unwelcome, impossible to un-hear. It seeped through the cracks of memory, untarnished by this house, this name, this moment. It was raw, sunlit, reckless and alive. Like sunlight poured through a bullet hole in stained glass. A sound with no business existing here.
That laugh had split something open in him at the fair. Not because he wanted her, or because she needed him. But because in that instant, she'd been vividly alive in ways he hadn't remembered being in years. Not here. Not as Kit. Not in this borrowed skin.
Just don't forget who I am when this all hits.
He hadn't said when I break. He didn't need to. He was always breaking: quietly, persistently, bit by crumbling bit. And she couldn't know. Couldn't see how much of him already lay scattered.
He surged up from his bed too fast. The room spun, blurring at the corners, but he didn't wait for the ground to steady. He crossed the gloom as if pulled by a string, drawn with purpose to the dresser.
The bottom drawer. The one he never opened unless he needed to feel the weight.
Fingers skimmed past his crumpled notebooks that were half-finished, abandoned. Past the cracked watchface from a birthday he never celebrated. Past the cologne bottle, untouched, a gift for a future that never arrived.
There: small, orange, scuffed by years of handling. The bottle. The label was gone. Either it was rubbed away or peeled off in a moment of uneasy conscience. But his fingers knew it by heart. It was guilt, memory, permanence in the palm of his hand. A scar that had never healed over.
It didn't look heavy. But it was.
The weight was metaphysical yet precise. The sum of threat, comfort, dare. Something to tip the moment toward silence.
He stared, daring it to move first. It didn't.
He hadn't touched them since the party. Since that night when Delorah looked at him and, for one impossible instant, he hadn't felt like broken glass. When her gaze had slid right past the sharp edges and looked for something alive in the ruin, something that might still answer to a name.
But now? Now the weight was back. Heavy and suffocating, predator and companion.
He popped the cap, movements mechanical. His hands didn't waver. They'd rehearsed this a hundred times.
One. Two. Three. Bitter on his tongue. Chalky against his teeth. No water, only silence to chase it down.
And the numbness began. Not the float, not the chemical high, not yet. Just the hush. The smoke seeping behind his ribs, curling into the cavities Delorah had opened and left behind.
He didn't even notice his feet moving, one after another, carrying him elsewhere. Somewhere farther from forgetting. Or closer yet.
The hallway felt colder than it should have. The kind of cold that seeps into your bones and makes every step sound too loud on the floors. Or maybe it was him. Maybe whatever warmth he'd kept hidden had finally bled out, leaving only that hovering numbness, soft at the edges, strangely comforting and cruel.
It was like being a ghost, drifting back into the fire. Knowing it would burn. Not caring anymore if it did.
Sebastian's door was propped open just enough. A perfect slant of caution and invitation. Of course it was. With Sebastian, every gesture was both: a welcome and a warning, a test to see how deep the claws had sunken.
Kit went in without knocking.
Sebastian sat at his desk, sleeves rolled high on his forearms, gold watch catching the lamplight, a heavy glass of something expensive perched in his hand. He looked at ease, casual as a wolf in a wool coat. Pleased with his territory, pleased with his control. He didn't look up.
"Took you long enough," Sebastian said, swirling the amber drink. The ice clinked, small and cruel. "Was wondering when you'd show up to cry about it."
Kit barked a sound. Short, sharp, almost a laugh. It was closer to shrapnel than humor, a reflex twitching out before he could swallow it.
"You think this is funny?" he spat.
Sebastian finally glanced up, a smile curving his lips. It was knife thin. A line cut across his face and nothing more. It never reached his eyes.
"I think it's inevitable," Sebastian replied, voice slick as oil. "You were never made for this family. Not the way I was."
He leaned back, sipping slow, letting the silence press in.
"And Delorah?" he added, licking a stray drop from his lip, savoring the shape of her name. "She deserves someone who knows how to handle a contract."
Kit moved closer, the burn in his belly melting fear into a strange, scalding steadiness. The pills were sanding the raw edges into something harder. Meaner.
"What, you think this is about paperwork?" His words sparked in the air. "You think a signature will ever make her love you?"
Sebastian's eyes didn't flicker. Didn't even register the insult.
"She doesn't have to love me," he said, dead calm. His fingers drummed the glass, slow and dismissive. "She just has to sign."
Kit realized he'd clenched his fist so tight his knuckles ached. It wasn't sharp fury. It was heavy, sullen, like a low drumbeat underwater. But it pushed him, step after step, until the room felt too small for two of them.
"You don't know her," Kit said, voice shaking now with something halfway between earnestness and threat. "You don't know anything about her."
Sebastian stood, his every movement economical, unhurried. Certain his world would never be shaken. "I know she's your weakness," he said quietly. And after a pause, a smile like broken glass: "And now? She's mine."
Something gave way. Not a choice but an inevitability. Kit's hands lashed out, shoving his brother hard enough to make him stagger. Not far, but far enough that Sebastian's face flashed surprise for one brief, precious second.
Sebastian righted himself with practiced ease, flicking an invisible trace of dust from his collar. A laugh floated between them. Low, mocking, shaped for an audience of one.
"I should thank you," he said, voice syrup-smooth. "You made it so easy to take her."
He set his glass down, each motion neat, final. Then, with the brutal precision of a surgeon, he added:
"Some people are built for power."
His gaze raked Kit, cool and merciless, as if dismantling him was a daily ritual. "Others for pity. I'm sure you know which one you are."
Kit's hands trembled, not with fear, but something darker. A kind of fracture, deep and invisible, between the jagged truth of how much he cared and the horror that maybe Sebastian was right.
He turned. Left. Not sprinting, not slumping. Just gone, because if he stayed, the next thing to break wouldn't be furniture, or glass, or bone. It would be the last splinter of himself he'd been holding onto. And he wasn't sure, in this moment, if it would be Sebastian who suffered the most, or Kit himself.
The pills warped in his bloodstream, high slipping crabwise into something sharp and warped. Everything felt too exposed, too fragile. A funhouse mirror flexing before the snap.
Deep beneath the noise, in the caverns beneath the anger, a voice coiled through the marrow of him, cold and certain:
He's right. All along, he's always been right.
And Kit turned toward the darkness, no comfort, no anchor, just the echo of that verdict trailing him down the hall.
.
.
.
.
Kit sat slumped on the floor beside his bed, knees hugged tight to his chest. The carpet beneath him felt scratchy and cold, grounding him in a way that nothing else could. The ache in his back, the pull in his hamstrings, the tired heaviness in his bones.
The light filtering through the curtains had gone a washed-out grey, dull and indefinite, the hour caught somewhere between night and morning. Outside, the day was dying quietly, stripped of anything golden or gentle.
He hadn't moved in hours. He just breathed. Just survived. Just held still as the numbness settled deeper, as if remaining motionless would keep the fractures inside from widening any further.
The phone on his thigh buzzed, a brief electronic shudder in the hush.
Delorah.
He stared at the name, heart stuttering against his ribs. Somehow, seeing it. Seeing her. Felt like a challenge and a lifeline at once.
He opened their thread, thumbs moving slow, as if each letter carried the weight of everything left unsaid.
Delorah: You holding up okay?
Kit: I know we haven't said anything yet. About yesterday.
Her reply came quick. The bubbles fluttering alive almost before he finished.
Delorah: Yeah. I didn't know how. Or if you wanted to.
He watched the dots, picturing her curled on her own bed, hair tangled, mouth set. He thought of her voice, the way it pitched softer for him.
Kit: It didn't feel real until I saw his face. He said it like it was a win.
A long, brittle moment. But then.
Delorah: It felt like betrayal. Like the floor cracked under me and no one even blinked.
Kit pressed his forehead to his knees, fingers tightening around the phone until it creaked in protest. Rage and helplessness pulsed in his blood: thick, dark, sour.
Kit: They knew. Both sides. For how long?
Delorah: Since last week. My parents signed the night of the party. Said it was better not to "burden me."
The word 'burden' scraped hard against the inside of his skull. He wished he could smash it, hurl it back at them, make them bleed with it.
Kit: He gloated. Sebastian. Like you were some trophy he earned.
Delorah: I saw his face too. He looked proud. Like I was already wearing a collar with his name on it.
Kit lurched to his feet, breath ragged. The quiet shattered anew, now sharpening instead of soothing, a fresh wound in the shadows.
He paced. Stopped. Typed, hands trembling with all the things he never said out loud.
Kit: It's you. I didn't know it was going to be you. If I had…
Delorah: What? What would you have done?
He hesitated, fingers halting over glass as if afraid the truth could break her screen.
Kit: Run. Fought harder. Anything.
A span of seconds stretched out almost as tender as a bruise. Then:
Delorah: We can't change what they did. But we don't have to go quietly, either.
His heart thudded wild and sick.
Kit: You're saying we fight this?
Delorah: I'm saying I don't belong to him. I never did.
Her certainty hit him gentler than hope, fiercer than prayer. Kit stared at her words, letting them unfurl inside him, making space where there hadn't been any.
He typed slowly, each letter burning with promise.
Kit: We'll burn this whole thing down before I let them take you from me.
A single moment both weighted and bright before her answer arrived:
Delorah: Then don't let go. No matter how bad it gets.
Something kindled in him. Danger and devotion all at once.
Kit: I won't. Not even if it kills me.
He let the phone drop to his lap, limbs loose as if the words had drained him. For the first time all day, the tightness in his chest loosened, just a little. For the first time, he could take a deep breath that didn't echo with ashes.
And as the shadows stretched long across the room,
Kit closed his eyes for a moment and held her name like a lifeline.
Kit's Private Journal – (date smudged, corner torn) Ink scratched and jittery, the paper warped where his hand lingered too long.
It's easier when I'm not all here. And that's not some poetic "I'm floating above my mess" bullshit. It's literal. The way my body just stoops off to the side, limping like a coat I forgot to take off or a costume after a play. Every word I say drags a two-second echo behind it, like it's not sure it matters.
I can sit in the same room for hours, barely blinking. Sometimes the light changes, sometimes it doesn't. The days smear together until I lose the outline.
Sebastian's face—God, I still see it. Burned behind my eyelids, flashbulb bright. Smug, satisfied, so certain he finally seized something he thinks means nothing to me. He doesn't know the half of it.
I do care. I care so much it's like acid churning somewhere under my ribcage. Makes me sick with it. Makes me hate the way wanting feels like a wound.
Delorah said we'd fight. She said, "I don't belong to him." But I keep thinking: What if she breaks first? Worse. What if I do? What if she's the one who survives this and I'm the one who's just… smoke?
I wasn't supposed to use again. Not after the party. Not after she looked at me like I was worth pulling out of the fire, like I hadn't already left myself behind in the ash.
But this week, everything's sharper than glass and I needed it dull. Needed to breathe without swallowing splinters.
So yeah. I took them. And I hated myself halfway through the second one, but I still took the third. Was never about the high. It's about the hush. The soft static between heartbeats where, just for a second, I can't remember whether I'm about to scream, or shatter, or disappear into her arms and hope the world forgets me.
She deserves better. More than a boy with wreckage for a childhood and a fistful of pills he spits lies over.
But the fear sticks anyway. What if I'm the poison, not the cure? What if I've already tainted her just by loving her wrong?
I don't know how to be okay, but I'm getting good at looking it. Maybe it counts for something. "Fake it 'til you make it".I think that's what they say. Right?
…Right? —K
(In the bottom left margin, twisted sideways, written smaller and sharper, a scrawl half-hidden by a blur of ink:)
Sometimes I think the real me died in that fire too. Everything left is just smoke and muscle memory. Smoke, with a pulse.
.
.
.
.
The Honey estate had surrendered to stillness. All the windows were dark, each expensive shade drawn tight; every hallway hushed, maids discharged, secrets left simmering beneath the shine of lacquered floors. All the sins of the house tucked neatly away beneath silk sheets and imported pillows, the echoes of the day locked behind closing doors.
Except one.
Kit's door stood unlatched, a sliver of unspoken invitation. An anomaly in a house where nothing was ever left open by accident.
Sebastian tested the handle, pushing gently, careful as a surgeon. He glided in, always soundless. His gloves fitted to his hands not for caution, not for evidence, but for ritual. Everything Sebastian did was ceremonial in its way: the glove, the silence, the slow exhale. This was not a breaking-and-entering. This was a visitation.
The room lay steeped in charcoal gray, not blotted with true darkness but paved in dimness. A sepia hush, neither living nor dead. It felt like a body that had survived a trauma and was holding its breath, waiting for a sign to release.
Kit lay collapsed at the bedside, one shoulder pressed to the carpet, shoes kicked off and shirt askew. Delorah's sweater draped from his collarbone, both a relic and a shroud. His arms curled inward, the posture of a child drawn in on himself after the fall, trying to disappear.
On his chest, Kit's journal rested open. Lines of smeared ink wavered beneath the lamplight, the script was raw and uneven. Some letters already blurred, as if the pages themselves had tried to muffle the pain.
Sebastian stood above him, a stillness that wasn't gentleness but analysis. Taking the measure, reading the patterns, calculating the means of entry. To read the journal felt like a trespass, but Sebastian's face did not change, not even a flicker of guilt or glee. No smirk, no judgment. He simply absorbed, line by line, every exposed thread:
Unraveling. Doubt. Guilt. Love dressed up as disaster.
A breath escaped him. Restrained, not quite a sigh. Not quite relief or sadness. Something closer to confirmation: yes, he understood his brother's breaking points now, mapped the fractures under the surface.
He knelt, flipping the page with careful, gloved precision, attentive not to break the fragile edge, not to leave a mark. His thumb hovered over the bottom margin, where the final secret sprawled sideways, a message meant for no one:
Sometimes I think the real me died in that fire too. Everything since has just been smoke with a pulse.
Sebastian let the moment hold. Then, with something almost sacred, almost gentle. He closed the journal and slid it beneath Kit's limp hand, as if returning a weapon to a fallen knight. He crouched there, just at Kit's side. Not dominating, not prying. Just present.
Kit didn't wake. He breathed in shallow gusts, eyelids flickering, chest taut with the energy of fading nightmares. It wasn't the sleep of peace or pleasure; it was the collapse of a body outrun by pain.
From the inside of his tailored coat, Sebastian withdrew the phone tracker. A sliver of black plastic, no bigger than a pill. It had purpose. Built for silence, for secrets, for surveillance. A tool as intimate as a fingerprint.
Kit's phone lay where it had landed, half-cracked, abandoned. Unlocked and unguarded.
Installing the tracker took less than thirty seconds, but Sebastian let it take minutes. A slow, meticulous waltz around the code and software. Not because he needed to go slow, but because he relished control, the choreography of intrusion. This was not just a violation. This was a twisted form of care. A promise made in shadows.
He set the phone down exactly where it had been, aligning the cracks, tucking the cord beside it.
Sebastian leaned in, so close he could feel the warmth of Kit's breath, smell the stale tang of insomnia and sweat, the salt of tears not yet shed. For one brief second, he might have been something softer, some shade of concern barely remembered and quickly forgotten.
Kit shifted and murmered. A fragment of a memory, a ghost passing through.
But Sebastian whispered anyway, threading the words into the hush:
"I'll keep you safe, little brother. Even from yourself."
The door clicked closed, the sound swallowed by the thick hush of the hallway, but Sebastian lingered just beyond the threshold. His hands hanging at his sides, gloves tugged loose but not removed, the stubborn afterscent of Kit's room clinging to him: smoke, dust, salt, something faint and floral spoiled by something sharper. The perfume of quiet despair, knotted tight beneath old laundry and old wounds.
He hesitated. Turned back. Pausing, almost uncertain. A sensation foreign to him.
Careful as a thief, he pressed his palm to the door and opened it again, inch by inch, pulling silence into the room with him.
Kit hadn't stirred. He was still draped beside the bed in his disheveled armor: Delorah's sweater slipping from his shoulder, the old journal balanced against his palm, half-curled and defenseless on the floor. It might have looked peaceful, complete with the hush and the way the gray light outlined him in silver, but Sebastian knew better. He could spot counterfeit serenity in the dark. He could smell it.
He let the door whisper shut, this time more tenderly. Each step into the room was slow, deliberate, almost reverent. Like a man entering a tomb not of the dead, but of a living thing gone to ground out of terror and exhaustion.
Kit's room looked exactly as Sebastian remembered: unnerving not for its mess, but for each small monument to defeat. Kit never left chaos. He left evidence.
A cracked dish, bristling with safety pins bent out of shape. A brittle rose pressed between the warped pages of a book abandoned on the nightstand. The remnants of a notebook, half its dreams ripped away. A poster half-peeled on the wall, its thumbtacks rusting, surrender seeping in through the corners. An old hoodie balled in the basket, sleeves stained like the memory of an injury. Maybe ink, maybe blood, maybe both.
Nothing here was whole. Nothing here escaped diminishment. Everything carried the mark of living attempted, living survived.
Sebastian drifted to the dresser and opened the lowest drawer, a sigh escaping him. Soft, wistful, almost affectionate. There it was: the orange bottle. Rattling faintly when he nudged it. Three pills gone. He didn't touch it. Let the drawer shut if only to feel its quiet, final slide.
At the desk, the chair was canted awkwardly away from the burnished wood, a pen cap lying bare on the floor like the remnant of an abandoned idea. He bent and picked up the paperback face-down atop a clutter of printouts, thumb smeared along the broken spine. Dog-ears reared from every other page, a chorus of unfinished hopes.
It was marked not at the ending, but at the place where Kit had lost the will to even pretend he might finish.
Sebastian set it down again, gentle as if laying a shroud.
At the nightstand, Kit's phone lay upside down, charging, screen lifeless and waiting. A Polaroid was wedged beneath it, nearly swallowed by the heap of cords and receipts. Sebastian slid it free half expecting Delorah, but finding a coastline blurred in motion, foam and sky smudging at the edges. He recognized it from summers long before. Their mother, laughter and salt and wind. For a moment, he almost pocketed it. A keepsake that wasn't broken, not yet.
But he thought better of it. He placed the photo back in its hiding place, tucking it beneath the phone so it would remain safe, so Kit would know someone remembered.
Finally, Sebastian lowered himself to his haunches beside the bed and watched his brother's chest stutter in shallow sleep. The kind that never restored, only postponed collapse.
Kit twitched, a sound caught in his throat. He shivered, fragile and small, and Sebastian hovered above him. As familiar as a shadow, unreadable as a memory. A charge in the air, a bond older than feud or rivalry. Some ancient ache neither could ever quite kill.
And then, in a voice so soft it could have been the drugs blurring reality, or grief, or something stranger, Sebastian whispered:
"You still don't see it, do you? How beautiful you are like this. Before the world touches you."
He straightened. There was no guilt, no hurry, just the cold satisfaction of a collector who has finished his rounds, and found both too much and not enough.
He slipped out into the corridor, closing the door one last time, leaving Kit shrouded in gray, surrounded by tokens of loss and fragments of love.
And in the hush, with the house holding its breath, Sebastian disappeared into the velvet dark. His mind already dreaming of more.