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Chapter 31

Let’s Get This Over With

~DOLLY~

“Where are we?” I ask, standing on a hill in the center of a rolling field, gazing into the distance uninhabited by genie-made structures.

I’ve been here before. Or somewhere similar. The greenery spread over these hills resembles a carpet as luxurious as the one in Jeb’s apartment. A cool breeze flurries my hair around my cheeks.

It’s that place—the one without a name, where I’d end up if I ever just ran on and on and on.

“Be right back,” says Velis, pecking my cheek. He nods to Arrik before disappearing.

“I thought we were traveling to the city,” Beckham pouts, squinting at the high sun as if it’s been years since he’s seen it. He flares his nostrils at the fresh air like it’s an affront to his senses.

“Change of plans now that you’re here. If you run, there’s nowhere for you to hide,” Arrik responds.

Handcuffed to Arrik by one of his light-infused leashes, Beckham frowns as if he had been planning just such an escape.

I haven’t been around Arrik sans Velis since finding out the truth hiding in his heart. I wonder what he’s thinking right now. I wonder if he feels as nervous as I do .

When I catch his eye, it’s like he was just in the middle of counting my eyelashes.

I’m not looking forward to whatever this meeting with Mayree may reveal.

I’m scared.

“Aww,” Beckham says from behind us. “Look at the lovebirds— umph !”

Arrik swats him upside the beanie. They are all extremely rough with one another from years of deadly horseplay, but they all seem to be equally into it. Daddy needs to hire a manor therapist.

Velis returns between us, his hand on the shoulder of a squat woman with skin sagging from eons of gravitational pull and eyes large enough to scare off any locust or prey insect that might cross her path. She has that cursed fairytale box from our last mating test tucked under her arm.

“Well, don’t we look tan,” she says in my direction, and after scanning the handcuff holding the fugitive Reilhander son to the playboy Reilhander son, she turns to the newly appointed heir of the Reilhander sons, her wicked old lady eyes shining. “Silence fee’s gonna be more, kiddo. Much more.”

I kneel at a low table conjured from the void on an emerald hill, the sparkling Makayen sun casting a warm glow over us, genie boys scattered all around. The breeze ruffles their clothing. Velis sits on one side, his hand intertwined with mine beneath the table; Arrik on the other, his warmth radiating from his curled fingers, just inches from my knee. Across from me, Beckham smirks, picking up on the tension between us. Like the others, he seems to read me better the more time I spend with him, and the fiend is relishing my discomfort around Arrik right now .

I bet Jeb is so glad to be stuck at home.

Mayree stands and observes us, chin in her hand. “Your lines are more tangled than I realized. Farther ahead than I saw when it was you two alone, and farther back too.”

“Farther back? I first met Dolly when she was a toddler,” says Velis, a little defensive.

Beckham tips his head and furrows his brow to process what his brother just said.

“Farther back,” Mayree insists in her smoker’s voice, “but I don’t have an explanation.” She holds up a finger, and her collection of noisy bangles slides down her wrist. “Yet.”

“Mayree, the night of my coronation, you mentioned not letting Dolly go after we re-tethered. You got cut off.”

Mayree studies us for a moment, then turns her attention to the horizon. “He asked me for a read on you two earlier that night.” Her eyes frost over with that opaline magic, distinct to her witchy self, as if she’s searching the sky for answers, now cloudless and perfectly blue. “I remembered your positioning from our last reading—I never forget them. I searched for you on the scroll. But the farther I looked, the more I saw—multiple branching paths, new connections that didn’t fit the natural order. And many of them ended . . .”

Her words trail off, her wrinkled hand hovering over the distance that stretches before us.

Arrik cuts in, his voice quiet: “In death?”

The light fades from Mayree’s eyes.

Vel jerks forward, squeezing my hand. “Why? Whose?”

“His, or hers, and sometimes yours.” Mayree means Arrik, me, and Velis, respectively. “It depends on the choices made, the different outcomes. Fate normally follows a singular path for each being. But by forming unnatural connections, you’re forcing new outcomes that destiny wasn’t designed for. And this poor little human is at the center of it all. Shame on you both.”

This must be what they mean when they say causality, predetermined pathways, what fate will or won’t allow, and the balance of it all.

“ Ding , ding , ding ,” says a pesky voice in my head, the one I least desire in my head. Beckham winks at me from across the table.

Puke.

“So, what does that mean?” I revoke my attention from him, knowing it’s what he craves most.

“If I had to guess, your fate’s been tampered with,” Mayree concludes.

I don’t need to see them to feel it—the flares of two sets of eyes, one on either side of me.

I ignore them both, letting the busy wind and my listing hair shield my face from view.

It feels like the pieces of this massive puzzle are finally starting to fall into place, like we’re almost there.

Velis keeps his grip on my hand beneath the table. “What do you know about Celestials, Mayree?”

“Ha.” She opens the box now resting on a cart Velis brought over from her shop. “They’re as elusive as wood elves. Never seen one myself.”

Elusive?

Arrik casually leans over, removing his joint to tell me, “They came into the known realms only after being nearly hunted to extinction by demons. Our recorded history of them started much later than races like humans and greenies. They aren’t allowed to migrate here. It’s rare that a non-noble would ever meet one.”

A little unsettling that all these so-called ‘prey’ races are slowly being wiped out one by one.

Vel and Arrik are exchanging silent... exchanges, and I wonder if they’re having one of their secret brotherly telepathic discussions.

“Humans first.” Mayree is standing over me, holding the heavy arrow with either her super-djinn strength or her ability to resist the magic within. I set my palms beneath the relic, letting it drop into my hands like a dumbbell, and ease it down so as not to injure my knuckles.

For a moment, it’s as if even the wind has calmed down as the Reilhander family kneels around this table, like I’m a girl with her genie tea party.

My arrow remains where I set it, which is different from the direction it ended up in last time.

Inside my chest, there’s a loud, loud ticking.

Like a timebomb about to go off.

“And you.” Mayree drops a second arrow into Vel’s hand with far less warning, and it falls through his fingers with a damaging thud onto a table that’s going to go back into the imaginary space it came from anyway.

There’s a little wiggle, a moment of thick apprehension—before my arrow swivels against the face of the table. Arrik and Beckham watch with piqued interest as it twists itself to connect nose-to-nose with Vel’s.

Just like last time, they’re pointing directly at one another, forming a straight line.

Thank god.

But the thudding doesn’t retreat. It intensifies when Mayree picks up a third arrow from the box and hands it off to Arrik, who clearly learned from Velis. He curls his fist around it coolly, muscles flexed, and prepares to toss it onto the table.

“Wait!”

I can’t help myself. I’m holding his arm back, stopping him from revealing the truth.

Within Arrik’s gaze is a long, lonely tunnel. “You don’t want to know?” he asks softly, like we’re the only two on this hill, and like that’s an option.

I don’t answer him.

“ Do you already know? ” his voice whispers in my head.

And then Beckham breaks out in wicked cackling .

Velis shoots him a look that stops him dead. “Dolly.” His hand is on my back. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it.”

Velis nods at Arrik; Arrik nods at me. As Velis pulls me into his arms, Arrik lets the cursed object roll from his fingertips onto the table and swivel in a direction different from Velis’s.

I brace myself, Vel’s arms a warm shield from the hillside’s slight chill.

There’s no movement from my arrow still on the table.

My ramming heart rate, which had reached new heights, begins to wane.

Until my arrow slowly pivots in the other direction, like a compass finding its way. Tattooed knuckles curl over mine, pressing both our hands into the dirt as Arrik leans over the table. We watch as my arrow grazes the tip of his before realizing it’s overcorrected and swings back, stopping perfectly between the two.

No one says anything. Arrik’s hand is still gripping mine.

And then, to cut the silence, he says, “I get Master on the weekends.”

“Arrik,” snarls Velis.

“Fine, I’ll take her at night. You can have days.”

More wicked cackling from Beckham, who thrives on the chaos living inside and all around us.

“Would you two shut up! We don’t have time to mess around!” The hurt in Vel’s words stings. Despite what he said, seeing this in real time impacts him the same as me.

Unlike Arrik’s inclination to make light of it and Vel’s inclination to do the opposite, I have no reaction. I just stare at my arrow, pointed between theirs, like it doesn’t know which direction to go, and I can’t help wondering—

Did I do this?

Did I do this because of my mixed feelings? My inability to stop feeling Arrik? My... wickedness?

Velis pulls me into his embrace, his arms firmly, warmly, safely around me. “Mayree, check Beckham,” he commands softly .

Without a word, Mayree scoops up the arrow Velis originally tossed. As if magnetized, my arrow wins its battle to meet the tip of Arrik’s.

When Velis’s arrow stands alone, mine spins to meet his. When Arrik’s is alone, it does the same. But when both are there, my arrow splits the difference.

My heart hiccups, and a thousand dangerous, scary, and hurtful possibilities swirl in my mind.

Why is this happening?

Beckham eagerly takes the arrow, and I brace myself harder than ever before as he prepares himself like he’s rolling for a pair of lucky snake eyes after betting his last chip, while I pray to any and all deities that I’m not somehow magically connected to him too.

He seems to be praying for the opposite as he releases the arrow onto the table. His pivots to a direction distinct from either of his brothers before him. Mine stays firmly pointing at Arrik’s, but after a long stretch of seconds, it begins to wiggle, like it’s thinking about shifting. Velis grips the edge of the table as if daring it to go farther.

It doesn’t.

Mayree picks up Arrik’s arrow, and mine remains where it is, still shaking as if there’s a faint draw toward Beckham’s, but not one strong enough to change the direction entirely.

Both comforting and alarming.

Beckham is ruled out of whatever is happening between me, Arrik, and Vel, but it also highlights that something is definitely happening between me, Arrik, and Vel.

Arrik leans back on his palms in the grass as if he’s just gotten a new lease on life, while Velis searches Mayree for an explanation.

“Sorry, kiddo. Never seen anything like it. But then, humans aren’t my usual clientele.”

There’s silence thick as frosting.

But inside, that ticking timebomb is about to go off, and both genies sense it .

Arrik shoots a sharp look to Velis. “Take the reader home, now .”

Velis obeys, his eyes flicking warily toward me before he pops away with nosy Mayree, who cranes her neck to peer around him until the last second.

Just in time. I storm up from the table, squaring off against Beckham, who squints down at his arrow like he’s willing it to move. “Give us the journal, Beckham,” I demand.

“Now, why would I give up my only leverage?” His smirk grows. “We still have to go see the prince.”

I gather a handful of his shirt. “GIVE US THE JOURNAL, BECKHAM!”

“Aww, Master’s all flustered.” His sneer cuts deep, but I’m not the only one bristling.

Velis is back, flushed and fuming at my side, towering over Beckham. “Give it to her.” His tone is deadly.

Beckham’s grin falters, but his defiance doesn’t. “No.”

“Beckham!” I shout at him, and it’s like a shockwave that makes all surrounding djinn physically thrash backward. “This isn’t a game! This is my LIFE! It’s all our lives!” I push him away, releasing the gathering of his shirt. “This is my heart, you cruel fuck! And you have no place in it! Give it to us! You promised !”

The sound of my sobs is carried off on the wind as I sink desperately to my knees, unsure why this is affecting me so much when I thought I was mentally prepared for it, when I expected it, when fate wouldn’t let me wish Arrik and I would never become physical, when destiny forced me to save him outside Evangeline Tower, when he’s so clearly fucking in love with me!

Every thought hits him like realization anew—it hits all of them, and those blue eyes around me pulse with every punch.

Vel’s arm is secured around my body, like it wants to protect me from the truth. In a flash, Arrik is over Beckham to finish what we started.

Only—“What the fuck is wrong with him?”

He releases Beckham, who has tears streaming down his face to mirror my own, though he doesn’t seem to notice until Arrik calls it out.

It’s freaky, seeing him cry. Extremely unnatural on a face that’s only ever shown smug gloating or pure fury.

And he looks like he doesn’t know what to do with it, wiping the water away and marveling at the residue on his fingertips.

Empathy. He has it now. However small that seed may be.

And I am reminded of something Arrik told me after we first met, though I never thought it might apply to Beckham.

Hearts change. I should know. I saw a really strong heart change once...

I insert myself between him and his brothers, overcome with the conviction of a new approach, reaching out to him in a way that makes him flinch, like he’s never been touched kindly in all his life. “I used to think Arrik was creepy and gross.”

“ Hey .”

Beckham absolutely loves the attention. The smirk. The eyes. Every acknowledgment makes him feel like he’s won. “That’s because Arrik is creepy and gross.”

“No, he’s not,” I say like he’s stupid for thinking so. “Arrik is courageous, loyal, resourceful. He’s not creepy. And he’s not gross. He changed my mind through action. So did Velis. I thought he was a self-serving, cocky, immature asshole when I met him. But he’s the exact opposite. He’s one of the most resilient, deserving people I know. Even Jeb is warming on me a little. But you, Beckham. You’re so far behind through force of will. You’re horrible, and what’s worse is you actively choose to be. You did one good thing. Do more of them. And you may start to feel other, warmer, more tolerant feelings directed at you. Like that burst I’m sure you felt after saving Velis from a situation YOU put him in. If you want more of that, you have a much, much higher hill to climb than your brothers, so I suggest you get started.”

All three of them are silent, but in my head, Velis whispers, “ He’s not your responsibility to ‘fix.’ We’ll beat the journal out of him some other way. ”

I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. He can consider it my one and only piece of advice until he earns more.

Beckham stares at me for a moment, and then he snatches my wrist, compelling both Velis and Arrik to lurch forward.

But he only reaches behind his back with his free hand to retrieve a leather-bound book stamped with the imprint of a rose, setting my captive hand to the stubble of his cheek and basking in the relief he feels emanating from me as he presents me with his only leverage.

His eyes are wet and wide, like an insane scientist confused by the reaction of his latest experiment. He whispers, “If I play nice, will you be my new mother too?”

This time, I think he fucking means it.

The moment my fingers run over the journal, the open sky above us turns red.

“Uh-oh, Lolly,” a phantom voice cracks across the fields. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”