Chapter 110: Spring Break

POV: Niko

The wedding invitation had been sitting in his bag for three weeks.

He had moved it twice. Once from the inside pocket where Deacon had originally put it to the front zip compartment, and once from there to the small flat section at the back that he used for things he needed to have with him but could not deal with looking at. It had lived there since, occasionally surfacing when he reached for something else, a flash of cream-colored card stock against his hand before he pushed it back under.

He had told Reba he would think about it.

He had thought about it every day since.

He was thinking about it now, sitting on the edge of his bed at eleven thirty on the night of the Homecoming dance with his jacket off and his sketchbook open but untouched on his lap and the specific quality of quiet that came when Enzo and Mauricio were both still out and the room was entirely his.

Leona's voice in the corridor ran on a loop underneath everything else.

Your family has been absent from their covenant obligations for four years.

The Monroeson contribution to the covenant has been maintained minimally at best.

My daughter has been compensating for the gap your bloodline has left since she was fourteen years old.

He pressed his thumb against the edge of the sketchbook.

Fourteen.

Carly had been fourteen years old when she started carrying something that was not entirely hers. When the power had started accelerating in ways that were not typical. When the witch's call had started building toward the thing he had felt in that cafeteria, the thing that had dropped an entire room of supernaturals to the floor.

He thought about her at twelve, then at fourteen, then at every age between then and now, quietly and unknowingly absorbing the weight of an absent bloodline while going to school and running committees and becoming the person she was.

He had done that.

Not deliberately. Not knowingly. But his absence had done it and the distinction between intentional damage and incidental damage was very small comfort when you were sitting with the result.

He stood up.

He crossed to his bag.

He pulled the invitation out.

He held it and looked at it properly for the first time since Deacon had put it on the coffee shop table. The heavy card stock. The embossed lettering. Freida and Lucien. Spring Break. The Monroeson estate.

The house on the hill.

He had not been back there in four years. He had driven past it once and felt the cold of it from the road and taken the long way home every time since. He had managed four years of not going back and had told himself that was a choice he had made and was entitled to and would continue to make indefinitely.

He turned the invitation over.

He thought about the covenant.

He thought about Leona saying the solution involves both bloodlines and you are the Monroeson who is actually here.

He thought about Carly in that courtyard three days ago, arms crossed, telling him the truth about what it felt like when he chose Aurora over her, saying I fell into this knowing you were complicated and choosing it anyway. Saying I need time but not saying goodbye.

He thought about I miss you on the dance floor.

He thought about the drawing in her hand.

He thought about everything Leona had told him and what it would mean to do nothing with it. To continue to be absent. To let Carly keep carrying something he had accidentally put on her and never tell her why.

He sat back down on the bed.

He turned the invitation over one more time.

He pulled out his phone.

He found Reba's number and started typing before he could think himself out of it.

Niko: I'm coming to the wedding.

He sent it.

He put the phone face down on the mattress before he could watch for the response.

He looked at the invitation in his hand.

The house on the hill.

His father.

His mother, who had shown up at a school event and told him nothing about the covenant while apparently knowing everything about it for years.

His siblings, most of whom he had been managing from a distance for four years, some of whom he had built something real with in the space between then and now.

And Carly.

Who didn't know any of this yet.

Who was going to need to know all of it eventually.

Who had asked for time and space and was working through what she needed to work through and did not need him showing up at her door tonight with any of this.

He was going to have to tell her.

Not tonight.

But before Spring Break.

Before he went back to that house he was going to have to tell her what Leona had told him, and he was going to have to do it in a way that didn't feel like another thing he had held back when he should have shared it, because they had already had that conversation once and he was not going to make her have it again.

He owed her that.

He owed her a lot of things.

His phone buzzed.

He turned it over.

Reba: I already knew you would. I've had your place card ready for two weeks.

He stared at that for a moment.

Then despite everything, despite the covenant and the house on the hill and his father and all of it, he laughed. Quietly and briefly and into the empty room.

Then it faded.

He put the invitation on his desk where he could see it.

He picked up the sketchbook.

He started drawing.

He drew the dance floor. The red lighting. Two figures at the edge of it, close but not touching, a specific quality of space between them that was not distance.

He drew it until it looked right.

He put the sketchbook down.

He looked at the invitation on the desk.

Spring Break.

The house on the hill.

The conversation he needed to have first.

He had a plan. It was not a comfortable plan and it was not going to be easy to execute and there were several points at which it could go wrong in ways he had not yet finished calculating.

But it was a plan.

He turned the light off.

He lay back on the bed and looked at the ceiling in the dark and thought about everything and nothing and the specific feeling of being on the edge of something that was either going to be the hardest thing he had done in a very long time or the most important.

Possibly both.

He closed his eyes.

He did not sleep for a long time.

POV: Reba

She had known he was going to say yes.

She had known it for two weeks, since the conversation in the coffee shop, since the look on his face when she put the invitation on the table between them. She had known it the way she knew most things about her brother, which was before he knew it himself.

She had had his place card ready.

She was not going to tell him that part twice. Once was enough to make the point.

She put her phone down on her nightstand and lay back on her pillow and looked at the ceiling of her Silas Hall room and thought about what this was going to mean.

She had been thinking about what it was going to mean since Isabel had shown up at the banquet.

That had not been spontaneous. Isabel Monroeson did not do spontaneous. She had planned it, had timed it, had appeared at that specific event at that specific moment because she had calculated that Niko would be there and that she could engineer a conversation or at minimum a sighting and she had been right on both counts.

What Reba didn't know was what Isabel had actually said at the banquet. She hadn't been close enough to hear it. She had watched the exchange from across the room and seen Niko's face go through several things and seen Isabel smile and walk away and seen Niko disappear shortly after.

She had her theories.

She did not yet have confirmation.

She thought about the covenant. About what she knew of it, which was more than Niko knew and less than she suspected Leona McPherson knew. The founding families. The paired obligations. The gap that had been widening quietly for four years while everyone pretended it wasn't happening.

She had known about the covenant since she was fifteen. Her mother had told her, selectively, in the specific way Isabel told her children things — enough to make them feel included, not enough to give them leverage.

She had not told Niko.

She was not proud of that.

She thought about Carly McPherson on the dance floor tonight, the specific ease of her in a room she had built, the way she had moved through the crowd like she belonged everywhere she stood. She thought about the drawing Niko had given her, the one she wasn't supposed to have seen but had caught a glimpse of when he'd taken it out of his bag before the dance.

She thought about what it was going to mean to bring Carly into the orbit of the Monroeson family, even peripherally, even with the best intentions.

She thought about their mother's smile at the banquet.

She pressed her lips together.

She was going to need to have a conversation with Niko before Spring Break.

Not the soft version. The real version.

About what the house was like when he was not watching. About what their mother had been doing in the four years he had been gone. About things Reba had been filing away and not acting on because acting on them required saying them out loud and saying them out loud required deciding what to do next and she had not yet decided.

She needed to decide.

She turned onto her side.

She looked at the dark of the room.

She was the observant one in a loud family. She had always been the observant one. For most of her life she had used that as a way of staying safe. Watching and filing and waiting.

She was tired of waiting.

She closed her eyes.

She let the dark do what it did.

Tomorrow she would start deciding.