Page 23

Despite my tone, Kelter’s voice is soothing. His shoulders rise and fall with the same ease and mystery of the sun. “I knowyou.”

“How come you’re still my friend then?” It’s what I’ve wanted to ask this whole last year. It’s the question that makes me a rotten friend, pulled right from my mouth and into this moment to join the rest of the pain and unknown. How could he really know me and still want to be at my side?

His eyes saturate with hurt. “You’re quick to shut people out.”

“I’m not shutting you out, Kelt.” But I am.

“And you put up all these walls. You push everyone away from the start because that’s what they end up doing to you.” His fingers thread through mine, an awkward, noisy move with the cuffs. “But it backfires.”

My mouth parts. I search for words and come up short.

“You don’t even know how you end up pulling them in. You’re oblivious. You do it with those creepy-beautiful eyes. You make them want to know more, keeping them up at night, trying to figure you out.”

Creepy-beautiful?

He’s all riled up now, his lips trembling beneath three days’ worth of forgone shaves, and I’m too stunned to stop him.

“You show how strong you are, up against yourself, dealing with whatever lurks inside your head. You make them wonder if they could be as strong as you if they had to be. You make them doubt, make them vulnerable.”

Please be done.

He’s not.

“And then—” His chest heaves. “You let them see a weakness, a true flaw, and you become so real, so…somagnetic”—his eyes flutter shut and reopen, all those colors swirling at me—“that you make it impossible to walk away.”

I’m speechless.

This man rarely passes ten words at a time most days. My brain muddles through what he just said. This can’t be right. If it were, I wouldn’t be scarred right down to the center of my soulfrom years of abandonment and rejection. I wouldn’t only have one friend. One friend who stuck around, one friend who didn’t walk away…

And I get it. He answered my wretched question. He’s not talking about anyone but himself, and why he’s still at my side a whole year later. And it’s too much. I don’t want to be magnetic or creepy-beautiful. Or figured out.

“So please don’t let that happen.” A grimace distorts the face I know so well. He drops my hands. “With him. Or anyone else.”

“I won’t.” I’ll agree to anything to take the pain from him.

Footsteps thud in the hallway, and two tall men in gray jumpsuits enter. I stare up at the overcast sky through the collapsed roof, trying not to breathe. The men move through the room with ease despite the jutting planks and debris-littered floor, their black boots crushing chunks of ice with satisfyingcrunchesandcracks. They circle the boulders, some reaching higher than their knees, then crouch and flatten their hands onto the glistening surfaces. And they melt them.

Instantly.

With their bare hands.

The ice turns to puddles.

Dammit. I thought my sanity would last a bit longer.

My mind wavers, unable to make sense of it. I reach for Kelt again, my restrained hands extending without planning or thought, instinctively searching for something right in a realm of wrong. He can fix this. He can tell me I’m hallucinating. Maybe dreaming. I turn, setting my eyes on him, but he’s looking back at me, calm as ever, waiting to see what I’m going to do.

I’m going to fall the fuck apart. That’s what I’m going to do.

One of the men approaches the final boulder, only feet away from us. He doesn’t look more than a few years older than me, but he’s tall like the Centress, his brown hair disheveled, and theangles of his face make me want to keep looking. With the touch of his hand to the ice, water gushes over the floor.

Even with his ankles restrained, Kelt manages to hop to a crouch, avoiding the rush of water flooding into the corner and down the grate. But I’m stuck in my head, observing, analyzing, panicking, my body a step behind. The ice-cold liquid soaks my bottom. I try to jump up, forgetting about my tethered ankles and end up flipped around and wetter than before. My body reacts—goosebumps prickling, hands wringing water from the dress—but it’s no longer controlled by any rational part of me. I’m too far gone.

This close up, there’s no denying it. I saw it melt. I feel the water, but it can’t be. I know I’m on edge, even unstable, but this is approaching the insanity I feared, if not fully embracing it.

“Ever.” Kelter’s voice reaches my frozen figure, and I wait for everything to fall back into place—but it doesn’t.

I stare blankly, my head crushing inward. “Something’s not right.”