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I glance at Elias, voice dry. “If you get mud on me, I’ll kill you.”

He snorts. “What, no pillow talk first?”

Silas kicks at him under the blanket. “Shut up and get cozy.”

Elias slouches back, folding his arms behind his head, grinning like a cat with a mouse pinned under its paw. “You know, Luna’s gonna lose her mind when she finds out you two had a sleepover without her.”

The mention of her name lands sharp in my chest, unwanted and inevitable.

Silas hums thoughtfully. “We should invite her next time.”

“No,” I say immediately.

Both of them turn toward me, matching grins like devils.

“Oh,” Elias murmurs, eyes flicking over me like he’s reading something in me I don’t want to be seen. “You really are the fun one.”

Silas kicks him again, harder. “She’d love this.”

“She’d ruin this,” I correct.

“She’d make it better,” Elias counters, voice softer now, and it’s the way he says it—the way he’s not looking at me but past me, like he’s thinking about how she laughs when she’s half-asleep, how she curls into people without thinking—that makes something sharp dig under my ribs.

Silas flops onto his stomach, chin on the mattress. “We’ll get her next time. Make popcorn. Burn the world.”

And the terrifying thing is—I almost say yes. Instead, I shove the blankets off, stand, stretch slow and deliberate.

“Enjoy your little club,” I say coolly. “I’ll be in the study. Where adults belong.”

As I step toward the door, I hear Silas whisper behind me, smug and too pleased.

“He’ll come back.”

I miss coffee. The thought curls sharp and bitter behind my teeth as I pad barefoot down the crooked hallway, the floorboards groaning beneath me like they're tired of holding us up.

I miss the weight of the machine humming in my kitchen back home, the hiss of steam, the dark bite of caffeine that never quite took the edge off but made the day bearable. I miss my room—mine, not this half-rotted house crumbling at the edges of a world that shouldn’t exist. I miss my motorcycle, sleek and black and real beneath me, not some illusion pieced together by Branwen’s rotten magic.

Most of all, I miss my phone. Not the thing itself—gods know I cursed it more than I used it—but what’s trapped inside it.

It's in my pocket now, useless. No power in this place. No circuits humming in the Hollow.

But the photos are still there.

I find a quiet spot on the back stairwell, the walls slanted and cracked, the shadows long and stretched thin. I slide the phone out, thumb across the glass like it’ll spark to life. The screen flickers weakly—nothing left but a faint pulse of light and the last thing I looked at before the world fell apart.

Luna.

Half-drunk smile, loose and easy in my bed, legs tangled in sheets she threatened to strangle me with. Her mouth parted, chin tipped toward the camera like she doesn’t even know she’s being watched. One shoulder bare.

A knife beneath the softness of her. My thumb drifts over the screen, over the curve of her lips, over the place where her throat dips like a secret.

I exhale, rough, shoving the phone back into my pocket like it’s a sin I can’t afford right now.

The house is too quiet. Too still. Somewhere upstairs, Elias and Silas are probably still in bed plotting their next disaster, and the rest of the house feels like it’s holding its breath around them.

I don’t like it.

I move to the kitchen because I need something to do. Something to cut through the weight pressing in behind my ribs. The stove here is old, the kind that hisses and flickers like it’s made from bones and bad intentions. No coffee. No electricity. No fucking luxury.