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Adam mouths, ‘I believe him,’ entirely sincere, and doesn’t even bother pretending it’s a joke.

Felix heads back out to the counter, already composing whatever he’s going to say to Dis tonight. He mutters something under his breath about the audacity of keeping secrets from him. Adam squeezes my shoulder as he walks past.

“You okay?” Adam asks.

“Not really,” I say. “But I will be.”

He nods, doesn’t push, and follows Felix out. I’m left alone in the stockroom for a second longer than I need to be, thinking about Dis. About what it must take to unsettle someone who’s already worn a crown and survived it. About Hex going quiet, really quiet, not his usual mischievousness, but something underneath it, something with actual weight.

I finish my shift somehow. Cheerful mask more or less intact. I do not write Dark on a single other cup, though I catch myself starting to twice and stop each time before the pen touches cardboard.

The rest of the afternoon passes in a blur of orders and small talk. I find myself watching the shadowy corners more than I should, half expecting, absurdly, that he might materialise anyway, pause or no pause, just to check I’m all right. He doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t. That’s rather the point of a pause.

Adam offers to swap his shorter shift with mine. Saying he’d be happy to lock up. I smile and shake my head, and tell him I’ll be fine.

Adam has someone to go home to. All I have is a lonely walk and an empty room. The bush outside my window will just be a bush tonight.

I’m in no hurry for any of it.

Felix aggressively unties his apron and stomps off at the end of his shift. Adam follows after him, casting several worried glances my way before he goes. But he does go, and just like that, I’m all alone for the last hour of business.

By the time I lock up, I’m exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with standing all day. I walk home the long way because there is no reason to hurry. The streets look exactly the same as they always do. But they don’t feel the same.

I pass the alley from that night with the mugger. It feels like a different life already. I pass the church with the crooked spire, the graveyard I’ve always found strangely peaceful. Neither one helps tonight.

Somewhere across town, Felix is about to make the former king of the Shadow Realm tell him the truth.

I hope it’s not as bad as I think it is.

Chapter 14

Unpleasant News

I’ve checked the bush four times in the last hour.

It’s just a bush. Ordinary, slightly overgrown, exactly the same bush it’s been all year. There’s nothing there tonight, obviously, because there’s no reason for there to be, and I know that. I check anyway. The curtain twitched back an inch, holding my breath for half a second each time like it might have changed its mind about being empty.

It hasn’t.

I make tea instead, mostly to have something to do with my hands. The kettle takes forever. Everything takes forever tonight.

Hannah bursts through the kitchen door halfway through, hair half done, one shoe on, hunting for the other one under the sofa cushions. “Don’t wait up,” she says, breathless, already halfway back out. “Big night. Don’t judge me tomorrow.”

“Never,” I say, and mean it. She’s gone before I can say anything else, the door banging shut behind her, leaving the flat quieter than it was thirty seconds ago.

Everyone else is already out at some big party I wasn’t invited to. But I don’t mind. I don’t much feel like parting. And after growing up with parties every full and new moon, it’s nice to have peace and quiet.

The kitchen is a disaster. Someone’s left three mugs stacked precariously in the sink, along with a pan with something crusted and unidentifiable still soaking. There are crumbs scattered across the counter like nobody’s ever heard of a cloth.

I start cleaning it all. Methodically, because it needs doing and because keeping my hands busy is currently the only thing standing between me and sitting very still and thinking too hard.

I narrate the whole performance to myself in High Priestess Magdalene’s voice, something about the sacred discipline of a clean counter reflecting a clean soul, and it makes me laugh, badly, alone, in a kitchen with nobody awake to appreciate how badly.

I find someone’s abandoned essay draft wedged between the toaster and the wall, three pages deep into something about tort law. I leave it propped against the kettle where they’ll actually see it, because even mid crisis I can’t quite bring myself to be the sort of person who ignores a stranded piece of coursework.

I’m rinsing the pan when the buzzer goes.

I open the door and find Felix, looking rather frazzled, his hair slightly less immaculate than usual. There’s a particular grim set to his jaw that means whatever he’s about to tell me isn’t going to be nothing.