Chapter Ten

The next scheduled Christmas PR celebration event isn’t for another day, so I take full advantage of that and stay in bed.

I need to process… everything. I need to lie in silence and roll back through every memory of my father and every blip of knowledge I’ve been given on Christmas and our joy and try, try, to figure out how I missed this—and what I’m going to do about it.

But every time my brain slams up against that question, I only see scrolling headlines.

Riots. Robberies.

Dear Santa, Mommy left and I don’t think she’s—

No, shit, that wasn’t it. The kid lost her dad, not her mom.

I roll over and bury my face in the pillows and will the bed to eat me whole.

I’m asking myself to undo the foundation of stolen joy and performative acts my father has built Christmas on. Not to just let Iris and me out of this marriage or maybe not be a jerk to Halloween—but to stop manipulating people I didn’t know we were oppressing. And every time I start to think maybe I can try this, my whole body seizes up with dread, because the last and only time I ever tried to fix something, I broke an entire country. What if I collapse Christmas and these other Holidays?

Not to mention the fact that moving against my father at all isn’t just a familial dispute; it’d be treason. I’d joked about us having a dungeon, but what would the consequence be for getting caught doing something like this?

Hex didn’t expect me to fix anything. Maybe he was right—maybe I can’t fix this. But what am I supposed to do? Show up at the next Christmas event all smiles and pose with Hex for more photos like everything’s fine, like Christmas is holly and jolly and not actively ruining lives? Marry Iris on Christmas Eve then graduate next semester and flit off to grad school like any of this will help my Holiday?

My bedroom door opens. I groan into my pillow. “Wren, I told you, I’m taking a—”

“Not Wren,” Kris says. The door clicks shut behind him.

I sigh, body wilting into the bedding.

He sets something on my bedside table. I turn and see a tray of food, a sandwich and a steaming mug and a salad.

“What happened with Hex?” He drops onto the bed next to me with a bounce. “Iris and I need to know whether we should ostracize him and you’re not answering your texts.”

I push up onto my elbows. That’s the one good memory from last night. The one I’ve been dropping into when thinking about Dad gets overwhelming.

I sit up and face Kris, pajama pants tangling in the sheets. “Don’t ostracize him. Actually… that went great.” A totally involuntary smile creeps up on me. “Really great.”

And then I disappeared for the full day after. For warranted reasons—well, sulking. Not exactly warranted, then.

I’m not usually this bad at relationships. Lily might disagree. And maybe my roommate. And, like, one or two other brief romantic encounters that didn’t last longer than a month or two.

Shit. Maybe I am bad at relationships?

Kris pulls the tray onto the bed and pushes it towards me. “Good. Because we like him. He was at lunch and he’s a creepy son of a bitch, but he’s much, much funnier than you.”

I pick up the mug—cocoa. “I do not fall for such easy baiting.”

He grins.

“But I’m glad you like him.” I take a sip, let the warmth wash through me. “I like him too.”

“Understatement. Massive. Colossal. But why are you in bed?” He surveys me with more scrutiny. “Are you sick?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“Then what happened? Iris said you went to see Dad last night.” Kris’s voice twists. Bracing himself. “Did he do something?”

The cocoa leaves a too-sweet film on my tongue.

I know Kris would be as pissed as I am about all this. What’s stopping me from telling him?

Hex was so sure of our roles—he protects Halloween, I protect Christmas.

I’ve done a terrible job of protecting anything.

That awareness is a spotlight, swerving yellow and unavoidable onto the way Kris’s shoulders are set, ready to spring to action if I ask. My focus pulls back to the tray of food, to the unspoken way he knew to bring it, and yeah, I’d do the same for him, but… I don’t usually have to.

“You take care of me. A lot,” I state.

There’s a beat before Kris gives a dismissive shrug. The beat is long enough that I know he realized that well before I did.

“It’s what we do,” he says.

All the times he’s taken care of me crash through my mind at once. How he’s the one to come get me from school or trips or my wilder shenanigans. How he always comes to check on me like he has now, and leaps to do whatever he can to help.

“No,” I say. “It’s what you do.”

He looks away.

I hit on something.

His neck bunches and his fingers start picking at the hem of his jeans and I feel like I ripped open a wound I was unaware he had.

“What happened with Dad?” he asks again.

I set down the mug. “Nothing. What’s wrong? What did you—”

“It isn’t nothing, Coal. It’s never nothing .” His eyes pin on me, an abrupt show of despair that has me rocking back. “If it was nothing, you wouldn’t be in here hiding. He did something, again, like he always does, and he’s getting closer and closer to that something being the thing to—”

His lips slam shut.

He twists away, sucking his teeth, self-deprecation blossoming red stains on his cheeks.

The air in the room is too heavy. “Closer to what?”

“I do take care of you,” he whispers to the bed. He flicks the tray. “But I won’t be able to stop it, will I?”

“Stop—?”

“You leaving.”

My head dips to the side, mind working overtime to interpret what he said like he spoke to me in an entirely different language. But even that would be less difficult to figure out since our magic lets us understand every language—it does nothing to help me piece together what he means.

“Leaving? Why would I leave? Like to school again?”

His look cuts me off. “Not to school. Go to school—go to a hundred schools. I mean leaving. Because you don’t want any of this. Because Dad is forcing you into something shitty and controlling and you’ve never been okay with it, and you’re getting to the point where you’re going to realize that the only way to stop it is to go.”

I stare at my brother for what feels like hours. Days. So long that my eyes burn from being open, absolute, wrenching horror tearing long shreds into my soul.

“You think,” I start, a whisper, “that I’d leave you like she did.”

Kris doesn’t look at me.

I push out of bed. I can’t be still right now. My bare feet hit the floor and I shiver but I’m not at all cold, my skin is too tight, stifling, and I pace next to my bed before I cut around and stand over him.

“You honestly think I’d do what she did?” I gasp the question. I think I might splinter into pieces right over top of him.

Kris pushes a fist into the bed. “You fight him every chance you get. And you should—I don’t blame you for that. He’s wrong, about a lot of things, but I’ve been watching you all my life.” Finally he looks at me. And I wish he hadn’t—his eyes are glossy, and it kills me. “You’ve tried to buck these chains forever, Coal. Tell me you’ve never once dreamed about giving it all up.”

“I’ve never once dreamed about giving it all up,” I tell him immediately, I promise him.

Kris’s brows pinch.

“I’ve never considered leaving.” Even saying these words is unimaginable. I’ve never, not once, thought about running. The idea hasn’t been in my brain until this moment. “Not just because all this shit would fall on you—and I won’t put all this on you—but because she left me too. And what’s worse, what makes it so I will never forgive her, is that I had to watch her leave you. And Dad, even. And I have to watch her keep digging that knife in deeper every time she texts us, every time she gets it in her head to torment us. To torment you. I failed you, unforgivably, if you think for a second that I’m capable of hurting you the way she did.”

My whole face burns up with how much I’m trying to convince him of all this. Desperation builds in my body and I think it will fillet me right in half, but if that’s what it takes, I’ll let it.

The conversation I had with Iris comes roaring back on me. Where she hadn’t wanted to talk about the marriage competition stuff because she knew I’d make jokes about it. That’s what I do. I twist every conversation into either jokes or something light but whatever it is, it ends up being about me, about what makes me comfortable, about what I can offer, rather than what my friends need.

Kris has never talked to me about how Mom leaving affected him. I know he feels more deeply than I do, because I’m only ever furious with her; but he still hopes. He still reacts to her attempts to reach out as if her passive-aggressive narcissism could somehow hatch into maternal love. I know that about him, but I’ve only ever responded to his feelings from a place of my own rage, being pissed that she’s hurting him. I’ve never stopped to see his hurt.

He presses the heel of his hand to his forehead and drags in a shuddering breath.

“What was it like for you? When she left,” I ask. It’s stilted.

Kris glances up. That glossiness to his eyes has intensified. “You were there. You know.”

“I was. And I remember you crying. A lot. For weeks. I remember Dad—shutting down. And no one could really tell us why she was gone. I remember being mad at her.” I shake my head, restart. “I’m not talking about what I experienced. I asked what it was like for you .”

Kris looks down at his hands in his lap. “We don’t need to talk about this now. Dad did something to fuck with your head, and I came in here to help with—”

“Kris.” I cut him off so forcefully that he whips his eyes back up to me. “Please.”

It comes out of him in a jerky rush, “I don’t think I’ve ever been mad at her.”

He blinks, surprised by his own admission.

He looks down at his hands again.

A kernel of my own anger flares up, but I ignore it. “Why?”

He shrugs, picking at his thumb.

I sit next to him on the bed and pin my eyes to the far wall. His shoulders relax a little without my attention directly on him.

“I remember—” He stops, gripping his hands tight together.

I bump his shoulder but don’t say anything.

After a moment, he makes an aggrieved noise. “Why are you asking me about this right now? Fuck.”

I stay quiet. Just sitting next to him.

“I hate you sometimes,” he mutters.

Then, finally, “She’d been reading me a book every night before bed,” he says in a painfully delicate voice. “We’d only gotten a few chapters into it. I remember thinking, She has to come back to finish it. She wouldn’t just leave. The book isn’t finished .”

His words end in a topple. Like he’s trying to get them out before he can feel their impact.

“What was the book?” I whisper.

He chuckles and scrubs his hand across his thigh. “ Bridge to Terabithia .” Any humor gets strangled. “I finished reading it a few months after she left. When she was reading it to me, I thought it was a magical fantasy book. It never occurred to me that it wouldn’t end happily. I—” He sucks in a breath, and it takes me a beat to realize it’s a gasp of shock. “I don’t think I knew books could be sad until I finished that one. I assumed every story ended in happy ever after until— fuck .” Kris drops his head into his hands and hunches over. “Why are you making me drag all this up? You’re an asshole.”

I ignore that. Ignore his attempt to push the conversation back onto me because for the first time in a long, long time, maybe ever, I feel like I’m seeing my brother beyond his caretaker fa?ade. Feel like I’m seeing him.

“ Bridge to Terabithia is fucking sad,” I agree.

He looks sidelong at me. “You read it?”

“Movie.”

“Ah. That makes more sense.”

So not only did Mom break Kris’s childhood innocence when she left, she doubled down by introducing him to what is quite possibly the saddest kids’ book ever written.

Whenever she texts us, I immediately get furious. I never respond, and I hound Kris not to respond either. All that anger feels productive, like I’m able to do something against how fucking helpless she makes me feel.

But Kris wants her to be the one to do something, to come back and apologize and be better. He wants those happy endings she stole from him.

Tears prick my eyes. I dig down for some of my usual anger at her, that protective shield of defense, but I find nothing, just sorrow, sorrow for how much this hurt my brother.

He’s still picking at his thumb. I put my hand over his and squeeze, hard, until he looks up at me again, pensive and brittle.

“I’m not going to leave. Not you. Not Christmas. I hate what Dad’s doing, but I’m not going to give up, because I am not our mother. This is my home. You are my home, Kris.” My own words kick me mid-breath. “I don’t know what to do, but I’m gonna try, and I’ll be here, trying, even if I fuck it all up, because I was serious earlier—one day, I’m going to be Santa, and you’re going to be right there with me, and it’ll all be ours. Ours, Kris. That’s your happy ever after.”

He exhales, then he’s twisting into me and I throw my arms around him. We’re a tangled mess of a pain that’s almost fourteen years old—god, has it been fourteen years since she left? Screw her—but certain pains don’t age, they don’t shrivel up, they go dormant like a volcano, never losing their ability to be apocalyptically devastating.

Dealing with that pain was part of the reason I was always so… me. But this was another way that the pain has lived on, because my irresponsibility was hurting Kris all this time.

We’ll never be fully rid of it. Not of what she did, not of our duties to Christmas, not of my dad’s manipulation and all the shit he’s putting us through.

But I’m done letting my body play host to it. I’m done letting their choices be parasites on my future. I cling to my brother and make a promise to myself, to him, that this is the start of something new.

I have no idea what new is.

My eyes snag on a bundle tucked up behind my headboard and my mood immediately does a one-eighty.

“You,” I start, “absolute fucker.”

Kris yanks back.

I shove away from him, leap onto my bed, and grab the cursed object from behind my headboard. “What the hell is this?”

Kris is blotchy from holding back tears but he laughs so hard he chokes. “You haven’t found any of them yet?”

The goddamn Elf on the Shelf goes limp in my hand. “You actually hid one in my room?”

“Four. Four of them.”

“Kristopher.”

“I told you I don’t fuck around with grammar.”

I throw it at him. It smacks off his chest but he’s laughing again, eyes tearing for a way better reason now, and I can’t help it. I laugh too.

Even with that fucking possessed Christmas doll staring up at us.

Emotional hangovers are definitively worse than alcohol hangovers.

Headache. Dry mouth. Slight nausea. Intense exhaustion. The next day, I let Wren and her stylists doll me up for the Christmas event while I sink into my stupor, mind blank like I’m in a meditative preparation state.

I truly have no idea what version of me will appear at this event. I don’t remember what the event is —something outside, because I pull on layers the staff left out for me, finishing the outfit with a double-breasted red wool coat and stylish black leather gloves.

Sure enough, I’m led out front, joining Kris and Iris where they already wait on the palace’s front lawn with a few larger sleighs. Most are burdened with various members of our court under thick, cozy blankets; Dad’s in the lead sleigh with Iris’s father.

It’s another perfect arctic day, the dark sky clear but the lights so bright I duck my head and wince.

“That’s what you get for hiding in your room,” Iris says.

I jostle her with my shoulder. She’s in black tights and a long, chunky purple sweater, and I recognize the purpose of that outfit.

“Ice skating,” I say.

“I will be expected to participate again, I assume?”

I spin around.

Hex is coming out of the palace, the doors closing behind him.

I have to ask Wren whether he has a stylist or makes his own fashion choices, because I need to know who to blame for how goddamn distracting every single piece of his clothing is. He’s in a long leather jacket, black again, form-fitting and sleek and the collar is popped, which makes him look so much like a sexy goth vampire that I get hit with wicked visions of him biting my neck.

He slides his hands into his pockets, tugging the jacket down, showing a tie on his black button-up done with tiny jack-o’-lanterns. In Santa hats.

My lips pinch in a smile. “What—”

“Oh, it looks great!” Kris smirks at me. “Appropriate, right? I couldn’t resist.”

I start to laugh, then realize with a flash of concern that though I know the truth now, we’re playing my dad’s game with the press—and if anything, Hex should be wearing something that symbolizes Halloween and Easter . What if photos of him in that tie get back to his autumn allies? He’s probably considered that risk. So this tie is an intentional choice?

But I can’t scrounge up too much worry, because I like seeing him wearing something of Christmas.

I grin. “My brother gave you crazy Christmas clothes. You’ve officially been initiated. Congratulations.”

Hex weighs my words. Thinks about our kiss? I can’t figure out what’s going on in his head, but he finally lets half his lips rise up.

“I’ve been marked by you, it seems,” he says, and it sucks the air out of my body so fast that my ears pop. “By your Holiday,” he amends, slowly, enough that I know he intended the insinuation.

Holy shit. Is that why he took the risk of wearing this tie? To flirt with me? Mr. Don’t Risk Your Responsibilities for Me ?

It could be a middle finger to this whole arrangement. A subtle way of saying, I know what Christmas is doing with this blackmail shit.

That’s gotta be it.

Hex must be the last person we’re waiting on, because from my unexpected trance, I hear the lead sleigh kick off. Others follow until only one remains, empty, and I thank whatever lucky stars I have that we won’t be forced to ride with my father.

Iris and Kris start for the sleigh and I linger until Hex comes down the steps, the heat of his body pulling me around to walk alongside him.

“You’re wrong. I didn’t mark you,” I echo his unfair, wildly innuendo-heavy words that I cannot let go unaddressed. “ That ”—I bend closer and swing my hand up to touch the knot of his tie, a quick tap—“is from my brother and entirely innocent. You’ll know damn well when I mark you.” The barest pause. “If you’ll let me.”

Hex’s breath is a quaking white cloud in the air. His tongue dips out to lick his bottom lip before he rolls that lip in between his teeth, all so quick that it’s innocuous, except for the not innocuous reaction my body is having.

Ah. So this is how it’s going to be at every event between now and… my wedding.

Just like that, the fog is shattered.

Hex watches my expression change and his head cocks, but we reach the sleigh. Kris and Iris are sitting across from one another, and I pull back to let Hex climb up first and settle next to Iris.

Which pisses me off.

So this is how it’s going to be at every event. Ping-ponging from flirtation so hot I’ll need a steady stream of frost on my body to cool down, to roiling fury at the shitty game we’re dancing around.

Our driver glances down at me, now the only one still standing in the yard. “Prince Nicholas?”

I break out of my thoughts. “Yeah, I’m ready,” I say on reflex, then blink up at him. “Hey, Bart, your kid was trying to get into Yale? Dare I ask if my recommendation letter did a lick of good?”

Why on earth he asked me to write that letter instead of getting one from Dad, I’ll never know.

Bart smiles down at me. “It helped very much. She starts next fall. Thank you again, Prince Nicholas.”

I climb up into the sleigh with a headshake. “I had absolutely nothing to do with her success. Tell her congrats from me.” And good fucking luck. But she seemed legitimately excited by the prospect of Yale, unlike me, who didn’t get a choice; so maybe she will actually like it.

Bart’s pleased hum is cut by him snapping the reins, and we lurch off down the path.

Hex is directly across from where I sit next to Kris, and I feel his attention on me. It holds, and when I meet his eyes, he tips his head in some unspoken question I can’t read.

I smile at him. Because there are no photographers around—yet.

But the moment we get to the ice rink, in the center of North Pole City, we’ll be bombarded not just with reporters and journalists, but with our people. This is one of the few events that takes us out of the palace grounds, which Dad has drilled into our heads means that it’s more important we keep our public image pristine. Doctored palace photos are easy to control; but in-public events where some of the very people Dad hopes to manipulate are watching our every move?

It’d be the perfect place to do… something. If I had any idea what would help begin to fix things. But I highly doubt my usual manic acts of negligence will be of any use from now on. They were never beneficial, anyway.

“Do you skate?” Iris asks Hex as our sleigh bumps out of the palace grounds and swings onto a wide, snow-flattened road. Pine trees stand sentinel, each decorated in bulbs and strands of red ribbon garland, the path lit here by strands of lights instead of the massive floodlights.

Hex grimaces. His face sets quickly. “No. But I expect your father will insist I participate.”

“You don’t have to,” I tell him. “I won’t let him make you.”

I will not let him touch you again.

Hex smiles. It’s small and grateful. “Thank you. But I can, at least, try.” He pauses. Winces. “How hard is it, truly?”

Iris makes a squeaky laugh. “Well…”

I nudge her with my foot at the concern on Hex’s face.

“You two grew up doing it!” says Iris. “It’s not as easy—”

“—as walking. It’s walking. But on ice,” says Kris with a wide grin because he knows that sets her off.

“ It is nothing like walking ,” Iris snaps.

“Don’t worry,” I tell Hex. “We’ll help you.”

“Or we can get him one of those training aids.” Kris smirks. “The bar contraption that slides around. But he’ll have to squat down to use it since they only come in children’s—”

Kris’s words end in a garbled cough as I pulse my hand at his mouth and fill it with holly.

He hacks and spits it into his lap. “This stuff is poisonous!”

“Well, don’t eat it.”

He tosses it at me and I flick it over the side of the sleigh.

Hex grins, a soft amusement, like he’s shocked we’re this, irreverent teasing morons.

“I’d love to say you’ll eventually get used to their antics,” Iris says to him, “but it’s been more than a decade and I still find them both obnoxious.”

“Hey.” My eyes narrow in mock threat. “I’ll holly you too, just try me.”

“You have all known each other long?” Hex asks.

“Long enough that I’d also love to say that surely they’ll grow out of this phase, but they’ve both had the combined maturity level of a thirteen-year-old for the past eleven years.”

“So we’re twenty-four, at least,” Kris says.

Iris squints. “What?”

“Thirteen and eleven. Twenty-four. So we’re older than either of us—”

“That is not what I said.”

“Sure it was. A combined maturity level of thirteen for eleven years. Math.”

Iris cocks her head towards Hex and says, exasperated, “That guy got himself into Cambridge.”

“Cambridge?” Hex’s brows go up. “Really?”

Kris sobers. “Is that surprising?”

Bart guides the sleigh through a covered bridge, the clop of the reindeer hooves echoing off the aged wood. If he can hear our conversation over the noise of the sleigh, he doesn’t react.

“Not at all,” Hex says. “I had wondered which colleges your Holidays tended to prefer. You mentioned Yale too?”

“I’m at Cambridge with Kris.” Iris points at me. “Coal’s the only one who had his path predestined.”

Hex frowns.

I splay my hands. “My father shipped me off to his alma mater to reshape my image from the various humiliations in what I now refer to as my errant youth.”

Kris snorts. “That would imply that that time of your life is done?”

“I have been scandal-free for quite a while, thank you. But that’s not the point: the point is that I had it coming when Dad nixed my original college plans. But where do you go?”

Hex’s eyes flit over me. I don’t see any pity, more a considering, narrow concern, like he knows I’m downplaying it for his benefit.

But then his face relaxes. “There’s a reformatory in northern Ohio where they filmed The Shawshank Redemption .”

Iris, Kris, and I share a look. Then turn that look on Hex.

At our confusion, he says, like it should be obvious, “It’s one of the most haunted buildings in America.”

“And you—” I clear my throat. “Study there? Like, classes? At a… haunted reformatory?”

Hex holds my eyes for a beat too long, and just before I catch on, he cracks a smile.

“No. I’m messing with you. I go to UNAM in Mexico City.”

Iris chirps first. “Holy shit, you were scary convincing. I’m never playing poker with you.”

Hex nods sagely. “That’s probably in your best interest.”

“You shouldn’t joke about ghosts.” Kris shudders next to me. “Don’t draw attention to that kind of shit.”

Hex’s grin collapses. “By the very nature of being a Halloween prince, I draw the attention of that sort of stuff whether I joke about it or not. For instance—are you aware of the ghosts that haunt your palace?”

Kris’s gaze narrows in suspicion. Then widens again in concern.

Narrow. Wide.

Is he being fucked with? He really can’t seem to decide.

On a blink, Hex’s already dark eyes go completely black in such a startling switch from normal to something demonic that even I jump.

Kris honest-to-god squeaks.

Iris seems more amused by Kris’s reaction than by whatever Hex is doing.

“I can still hear them, even out here,” Hex says, his voice a little echoey, a little ethereal, those black eyes unfocused. “They wail for you, Kristopher. The ghosts… of Christmas past, present, and future.”

Another blink, and Hex’s eyes go back to normal, matched by a toying smile.

Kris’s discomfort vanishes with an immediate surge of red to his cheeks. “Oh, fuck off.”

I bark a laugh and put a hand to Kris’s chest. “Shit, dude, your heart is racing.”

“His eyes went black .” He smacks me away and frowns at Hex before pointing at his own eyes. “Halloween’s magic?”

My brows shoot up. “And the other explanation would be…?”

“I don’t—it could’ve—oh, you fuck off too.”

Hex looks like he’s weighing prolonging this torture with Kris. Finally, he relents with a smile and a nod. “Yes, it was magic. I considered creating an apparition flying alongside our sleigh, but—”

“No,” Kris says immediately, then clears his throat. “I mean, no, we don’t need any more demonstrations of Halloween’s magic. Thanks. Consider us sufficiently oohed and ahhed .”

“If you do create an apparition”—Iris leans over to Hex and feigns a whisper behind her hand—“have it look like a clown.”

Hex crooks one eyebrow, sizes up Kris, and makes a thoughtful, mildly devilish hum in his throat.

Fuck, why is that hot.

Kris sucks his teeth. “I hate everyone in this sleigh.”

Taking pity on my brother—and suddenly desperate to change the topic away from anything that makes me have to adjust how I’m sitting—I grin at Hex. “So what do you study at UNAM? Other than the occult. Or—no, no, wait.” I shift upright and hold my hands out like I’m keeping everyone from leaping out of the sleigh. “Everyone say their major on three.”

Iris rolls her eyes.

“One, two, three—”

Iris and Kris simultaneously say, “International Relations.”

I go, “Global Affairs,” and mime gagging.

Hex pauses, so we’re quiet when he says, “International Development and Management.”

“Wow.” I lean back on the seat. “We are a fun bunch. Look at us. So diverse. No one would ever be able to guess what family obligations we come from.”

“It is hardly surprising that we all have similar avenues of study,” Hex says. “What else would we do?”

“I tried to major in Theater at first.”

Hex’s face flies into such a look of charmed surprise that I want to keep talking and I’ve found that that’s an incredibly dangerous state for me to be in.

“Theater?” he echoes. “At Yale? You want to be an actor?”

“Oh, no. I did it because it made my father threaten to disinherit me”—among other things—“but luckily for him, the Yale Theater Department is apparently rather elite and not prone to letting wayward obscure royals fuck around to piss off their dads.”

“Then he majored in Classic Civilization,” Kris says with a shitty grin.

Hex’s surprise is shifting to all-out delight and I’m chasing it like a hunting dog. But like a new, untrained hunting dog that has no idea what he’s going to do once he catches it.

“You majored in Classic Civilization?” Hex clarifies.

“And Humanities. Then Burmese with a Dutch minor, and that set me off on a language kick—Punjabi, Russian. Somewhere around me switching from Latin to Czech, Dad cut me off from everything. Phone, money, magic. I caved after two days, he told me I’d get a degree in Global Affairs, and here we are.”

“Why did you do that?” Hex laughs, a too-quick burst of an airy chuckle.

“All the same reason: velociraptoring my dad’s fences.”

“ What? ” Hex rocks forward, his look saying he had to have misheard me.

Iris groans. “Oh, do not get him started. He’s way too pleased with himself and this analogy.”

I ignore her because yes, I am too pleased with myself and this analogy. “ Jurassic Park. The velociraptors would hurl themselves into the electric fences to test them for weak spots. Thus, velociraptoring my dad’s fences—testing him for weak spots. Where he’ll cave, what he’ll let slide. My life’s goal, really.”

“Imagine if you’d applied yourself to something useful,” Kris mumbles, but he’s smirking, and it’s the same joke everyone’s been making my whole life.

Only now, it yanks the smile off my face and I look up to see Hex’s own smile dimming.

“So yeah.” I force my grin back up. “I’ve trademarked that phrase and I will happily charge you a negligible fee if you want to use it.”

His lips cock. Not that teetering amusement again, not the joy I’d almost drawn out in him, the sun that had started to peek above the horizon.

“I will refrain from using that term without prior arrangement with you,” he says. His eyes stay on mine, studying my dip. Iris and Kris are oblivious to my shift, but he catches it, and I’m not sure what to do with that awareness.

The sleigh takes a turn, and North Pole City comes into view. We’re getting closer to reporters.

Hex’s eyes stay on me.

And I should look away.

But I don’t.