Page 121 of Fallacies

Easton nudges my shoulder. “Ask her about the ward.”

Most of our words will have to be spelled out, one letter at a time, but this one we translated. We agreed it was most important.

Ward, I ask her.

Lucina is quiet for a long moment. Long enough that I begin to bristle, fisting and flexing my fingers, then lacing them together to stop the fidgeting. I’m seconds from signaling to her again when the star begins blinking.

Working on it.

“What did she say?” Easton asks, eager to know if all their research on wards was actually worth a damn.

“She’s working on it,” I translate, not breaking my stare with the tiny star as I signal back to her.

Be safe.

Lucina’s response comes a second later: You too.

My shoulders sink, a pleasant heaviness settling over my body. Knowing she’s okay—at least for now—is grounding. I’m safely attached to the earth again instead of drifting into the void that is my own stress and anxiety. I swear to all the gods I wasn’t like this before her.

In Lucina’s defense, I’ve never loved anyone the way I love her.

And in my defense, she finds trouble everywhere she goes. She’s a magnet for it.

Pax claps a hand on my shoulder, and I snap back into my body with a jolt. “Feel better?”

He’s grinning when I look over at him, the orange glow of the fire flickering across his face.

“Yeah, I do.” I shrug him off and stand, picking up my half-eaten dinner and taking a seat across the fire from Devon.

Pax joins the rest of us, and I listen half-heartedly as my coven talks about nonsense. May’s cooking skills, the lingering stench in the bunker, and then the conversation shifts from Lucina’s scary-identical illusion of Alesi to Nix telling the story of how he met his late girlfriend.

“I just wouldn’t consider that a meet-cute,” Hunter snorts.

Phoenix looks up from his meal and squints back at him. “What the hell do you know? You weren’t there.”

“Yes,” Hunter corrects him, “I was.”

Nix’s brows pinch.

“You used the hilt of my knife to knock her out and then you ordered me to stand watch while you dragged her out of the courtyard.”

Devon snorts, and Easton huffs a laugh, scooping more stew out of the pot over the fire.

Nix opens his mouth to retort, but no sound comes out. Instead, he settles back against his crate and shakes his head at his dinner. “That’s not how I remember it.”

“I’m going into Streatham tomorrow,” I blurt out, feeling the shift in tension as soon as the words leave my mouth.

I keep my attention on my food.

“And why would you do that?” Devon asks over the crackle of the fire.

I look up then, noting the concern on their faces. They don’t understand it. No one does, and the only person who might is in a place I can’t get to. I thought I’d be able to handle it, but I don’t think I can.

“Because I can’t just sit here and do nothing,” I tell him. Tell all of them.

Hunter’s brows pull together, looking around the group of us like he’s missing something. “What is there to do?”

Easton chimes in, always the realist, “Nothing. There’s nothing we can do until Lucina finds a way to take down⁠—”