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“No, you flirted,” Silas says, leaning against the doorframe with the kind of insufferable ease that only a chaos demon andborderline sex god could pull off. “You just do it like a cursed spreadsheet with trauma.”
“She messes with my brain,” I mutter.
“That’s the point,” he says, eyes narrowed, smile lazy. “You want her to.”
He’s not wrong.
She short-circuits everything I know about myself. About how I’m supposed to be. With Luna, I’m either entirely composed or completely wrecked—no in between. And when she smiled at me just now, like I wasn’t embarrassing myself by flexing harder than Silas, it cracked something open. Something soft and unbearable.
“Do we follow her?” I ask, adjusting the hem of my shirt like it’s going to give me answers. “We should, right? I mean—not stalker-style. But, like…casually.”
“Yes,” Silas says. No hesitation. No irony.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
I narrow my eyes at him. “You sure?”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” he says, clapping me on the shoulder. “Now come on, Captain Stalker. Let’s go casually loiter around the hallway like we have zero ulterior motives.”
We move.
And I hate how fast I do.
The house is still in pieces. Furniture wrecked. Walls cracked. The echo of too many disasters still vibrating in the bones of it. But she’s somewhere out there—softening the edges just by existing. Maybe she’s in the library. Maybe the hallway. Maybe talking to Riven and pretending she’s not glaring at Ambrose when he isn’t looking.
Whatever it is, I need to see her.
Need her to know I’m still here. That I’m not afraid of loving her out loud—even if I’m an idiot about it.
The kitchen’s the only place in the house that doesn’t look like it lost a war. It smells like bread and something sweet, like someone tried to make the place livable again. Probably her.
We find her standing at the counter—barefoot, hair wild, stealing a bite from a sandwich that looks entirely too gourmet for someone who claimed to be “just throwing something together.”
She glances up. And she smiles.
Not the kind that’s meant for everyone. It’s the soft one. The one that hits like a sucker punch to the ribs because it’s quiet and meant and real.
And my dumbass heart skips.
“Thought you two were going to sneak off and start a shirtless flex cult,” she says, licking a smear of something pink from her thumb, utterly oblivious to how my blood pressure spikes.
Silas moves first, slipping past me to open the fridge. “We were. But then we smelled food. And our love for carbs outweighs our narcissism.”
“Debatable,” I mutter, grabbing a slice of bread and throwing it down next to hers. “He flexed so hard I thought he was gonna rupture a pec.”
She bites back a laugh and turns to me. “You could’ve just asked for a sandwich. I would’ve made you one.”
“We’re ancient, remember?” I say, smirking. “Thousands of years old. Practically fossils. We can build temples, start wars, manipulate dimensions—but god forbid we make a decent sandwich.”
“Women power,” Silas chimes in, shoving a slice of cheese into his mouth. “And all that shit.”
She rolls her eyes, but the smile lingers.
And it hits me—right there in that fucking kitchen with the busted drawer and broken clock still blinking 3:33. This is what I want. Her, barefoot, smiling like she doesn’t have the world on her shoulders. Silas being an idiot. Me trying not to say something stupid and still saying something stupid.
She leans on the counter, her sandwich forgotten, watching us like we’re some chaotic exhibit.