Chapter Eighteen

Wren is two feet from Hex’s door. Her fist already raised to knock.

“Wren!” I stumble to a halt as she turns.

Her face goes from business to sympathetic. “Prince Nicholas. Your father gave me orders.”

“I know. I know. I—let me tell him. Please. Let me be the one to tell him.”

Wren is one eyeroll away from making me go back to my suite, and I’m that same eyeroll away from dropping to my knees and fully begging her.

But she glances up the hall, to where a staff member is rolling a vacuum out of a guestroom.

And she nods.

I go rigid in her acceptance. “Th-thank you. Thank you .”

Wren steps aside, but not before she puts a hand on my shoulder. “We are quite proud of you, Nicholas.”

“What?” My head snaps back. “Who— why ?”

I am not ready to hear the word proud, not in the wake of all my dad’s shit, and it’s just as surprising to see her looking sympathetic, like she knows what happened. She just knows Hex is being sent home; why would she be looking at me like that?

“The staff, of course.” She pats my shoulder. “Seeing you come into your own has been a hope many of us have shared. Whatever is happening with your father… it is none of my business, of course. But I am sorry.”

“How much do you know?” It’s probably dumb to ask that. If she knew what Dad has been doing, would she be standing here under honor and loyalty like either my dad or I is worthy of those things?

“I know the reigning Santa has… intentions for Christmas,” she says. It’d be detached if not for the tight squeeze she gives me. “It is a mighty burden to be placed on you. You are not so alone here as you and your brother might think.”

Even an hour ago, I would’ve done something with that hint of her being on my side.

Not now. There’s nothing I can do.

Nothing, nothing, that word is sand between my fingers.

I nod absently and turn to Hex’s door.

She hesitates. Then leaves with a soft hum.

I try the knob and it’s unlocked and I push inside, immediately spotting him on the couch.

“Coal?” He rips to his feet. “Coal—what happened?”

He took off his coat. His hair is pulled back at the nape of his neck and he’s in a black vest over a white dress shirt with a simple band collar that gives him a priest energy, but no snarky quips pop to mind because it’s all too fitting, isn’t it? I’ve thought so often about how he drives me to worship and sin and here he is, manifesting that.

I sink against the closed door. “You look stunning. I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier.”

He comes around the couch. “You’re scaring me.”

“He found out.”

He stops four feet from me. I count the spaces on the patterned carpet. One-two-three-four.

“What? How? Are you—”

“People reported arrangements being made in the other winter Holidays. He suspected. Trashed my room. Found the letters.”

Hex closes that space, four, three, two —his hands go to my face, and I realize my eyes have been everywhere but on his.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Coal—”

“There were too many moving parts. He was always going to find out.”

“You knew this was a possibility. But there is enough power in those united winter Holidays that they should be able to force his hand regardless. Short of barricading them at the door, there is nothing he can do to stop what you have put in motion.”

A beat. And in that beat, I’m staring at the carpet. Just beside his shoulder.

“Coal.” He pulls on my chin, and I do finally look into his eyes. It centers me.

“He threatened to blame all this on you if I didn’t rescind my invitations,” I hear myself say. “He knows you’re involved. He knows I plotted with you against him. He’s sending you home and if I don’t stop this, he’ll tell the autumn collective you tried to overthrow him. He’ll destroy your Holiday.”

Hex’s face sets. Goes pale. “Coal. What did you say to him?”

His reaction is—it’s not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected. But he’s hiding his thoughts and emotions behind that wall again, the one I thought he’d finally let me through.

“Hex.” I try to close the remaining space between us.

He steps away. “What did you say to him?” he asks again.

“He was going to tell your collective that you tried to overthrow him. No matter how they feel about Christmas, what would they think about Halloween’s heir being so malicious? And the shitty thing is—you did help me do this. I wasn’t trying to overthrow him, but god, does it matter? Because I basically wanted that. And I got you involved, and I—”

“You agreed.” His fingers go to his lips. “To rescind your invitations. To stop the winter Holidays collective.”

“I’m not going to let him hurt you. I’m not going to let him ruin you or your Holiday. I’ll—” I’ll find another way, I almost tell him. But I won’t. I can’t, I can’t risk hurting people again—I inhale but nothing goes in, nothing, sand in my lungs now, nothing.

“Protecting Halloween is my job,” Hex tells me, his face reddening. “Your job is to protect Christmas. And you gave it up. For me.”

“Damn my job, Hex. What should I have done? Let him make good on all his threats to hurt your Holiday? I never had a chance of doing this. I never had a chance of—”

“You did have a chance, and you gave it up, because of me. I told you I didn’t need you to step in. I told you not to choose me over your responsibilities. It was the one thing I asked of you!”

He turns away, fingers on his temples, shaking his head at the carpet, at the air.

His horror slams into my gut, roils around and doesn’t fit. “Hex—”

“This is all so broken,” he whimpers, and I go rigid.

He shakes his head again, hands pulling back so they interlock behind his neck.

“I’m the reason your father has anything to hold over Halloween in the first place,” he says to the ceiling.

“What? What are you talking about?”

He turns a little until I can see the sheen in his eyes, the tears he’s trying to hold back. “My sister was the one who wanted to reach out to Christmas about an alliance. She was so—so idealistic. She saw Christmas’s reach and thought with that kind of strength… the people we could reach too. If we pooled resources, if we helped each other, because we oversee very different aspects of the year. It was a beautiful dream, who could deny it? My parents agreed. Cautiously. But negotiations turned sour—Raven’s hopes would never come to pass. I think I knew, before we tried. I knew she would be disappointed.”

I don’t move. I want to reach out to him but something in his posture keeps me at arm’s length.

“Then she died within days of those negotiations ending.” Hex licks his lips, swallows the scratch of a sob, and my heart breaks. “She died, and everything fell apart. Your father had threatened to tell our allies about our attempts at joining with Christmas, and my parents felt we could endure whatever fallout came. But me? It would have been her legacy. The last thing she did before she died, and it could have caused Halloween to be forced out of our collective. The one thing Raven held most dear would have been broken. I couldn’t risk it. So I begged my parents to comply with whatever your father demanded. I was the one who agreed to Christmas’s faux-engagement ploy. I’ve been the one letting all this happen from the start because she’s dead and no one else—no one else cared —”

He gags, hand flattening over his mouth, and I reach for him, but he bucks backwards.

“Hex.” I make his name a plea, asking to let me hold him.

I’d known his duties as Halloween’s heir were tied into his grief over his sister, but I hadn’t realized how much, and he’s hurting and I need to hold him.

All Dad’s blackmail. There’s no way he knew how deep it went for Hex, but hearing it, I hate my father all over again. This is what he’s doing; this is how he’s hurting people.

“Now you’re giving up your plans for your Holiday.” Hex shudders, cheeks streaked red, and he droops, exhausted and resolved. “I’ve let this go too long. Out of fear and anguish and—I can’t anymore.”

He meets my eyes, finally, they’re grieving and utterly wreck me.

“Do not bow to what your father wants,” he whispers, shaking. “Go through with the collective, Coal. Let him make good on his threats. Let him—”

“No.”

Hex flinches. “Coal. I’m telling you to do this.”

“I won’t let my father hurt you,” I say each word purposefully. That’s all I can see. Him, hurting, and everything zeroes in on it, my own grief crumbling away because this, this I can focus on. This I can stop.

“It isn’t about me—”

“Now it is. For me it is. I won’t let him hurt the man I love.”

Hex’s eyes grow wide. “The man you what?”

He has to know. This can’t be a surprise. Why is this a surprise to him.

“I love you,” I say, weak, wretched. “I’m in love with you.”

But all he says in the reactive stillness is, “You can’t.”

“I… I can’t?”

“You can’t,” Hex says again. He shakes his head, trying to negate what I’ve said, but it’s there, and we both feel it. “You—you have to go through with this collective. I have to face whatever repercussions come. What you’re doing—Raven would want that. She wouldn’t want me to keep cowering. You can’t base your decisions off me.”

“Why not?”

“Why not?” he echoes, like the answer is obvious, and there might be pity in the pinch of his brows. “I’m going back to Mexico regardless of what happens.”

“And then?” A cliff is coming. There’s a pause at the edge.

He watches me like he expects me to answer my own question, his eyes narrowing in growing aggravation. “Don’t make me say it, Coal, please.”

“Say what ?” I honestly don’t know, and my confusion only angers him more, lips thinning.

“You’re the heir of Christmas,” he says, barely contained. “I’m the heir of Halloween. How did you see this ending?”

He leaves it at that. As if it’s enough explanation.

It sure as hell is not.

“You never saw this working between us?” The words slice my tongue.

“We are both the heirs of very different Holidays,” he says, some of that anger held back behind caution. “As proven more now. We would have come to a moment of choosing between us and our duties.”

“And we would have chosen our duties, no question?”

His silence is answer enough.

“So this was just a fling for you?” I muster. “This was a dalliance ?”

I throw the word at him because he’s absolutely crushing me right now, and it’s a low blow, but it hits, and he closes his eyes, bracing.

“I have to think of Halloween’s future,” he says, “and you—”

“Are unworthy of being a part of that future. Is that it? Prince Coal, the joke, good enough to screw around with but too much of a screw-up to trust?”

His eyes fly open. “Don’t twist this,” he snaps like he has any right to be mad at me. “Don’t you dare hide behind your insecurities. That’s not what this is. You have to think—”

“ I’m hiding behind my insecurities? What about you?”

“What about me?”

I gape at him. He’s the most infuriatingly self-aware person I’ve ever met, and he’s truly asking me that?

“Who is putting this pressure on you to choose your duties over yourself? Who put the pressure on you to bow to my dad’s threats? It’s you. You’re the one choosing not to try to fight for us. You can stand here and tell me this was always going to end helplessly but I know this meant something to you, and I know you don’t think for one second that I’d have let you leave here on Christmas Eve or any time and be done with you. Could you leave here and be done with me?”

“I need you to have something that you can be proud of.” He bypasses all my questions, ignores them with a rising snarl. “I cannot leave knowing that you are stifled here when I have seen how capable you are of such resonant greatness. I need you to be happy .”

He says it like he’s accusing me of something.

My eyes shift through his. “Okay,” I say slowly. “I need you to be happy too. That’s what I’m—”

He rips his hand up, makes a fist, grimacing, breathless in a surge of such anger that I go silent again.

“The only thing that has mattered in my life for the past two and a half years has been Halloween. I have devoted myself to making it the best it can be for the people who need the joy we offer, because I’ve been consumed by how frantically needed our type of joy is. To find joy in fear and darkness, to scratch out some semblance of happiness in grief and absence. To look at something that is only terror and danger and find it beautiful, not in spite of the things that make it horrifying, but because of it. Since Raven’s death, I have understood my Holiday on a primal level I never could before, so I committed to it. It is everything.

“But since coming here, all I can think about, my every waking thought consumed and clouded by, is you. You being happy. You having what you so deserve. I need you to be happy, Coal. I need to know that you’re taken care of, or at least on the path to being taken care of, so I can be whole again. I need you to be happy so I can stop being plagued by you. I will handle whatever fallout comes from your father. It’s long past time that I did—please, please don’t give up on the winter Holidays collective.”

The pieces of his logic puzzle together in my head and it’s the most toxic tapestry of hope and agony.

“You don’t think you could do both—be with me, and do what Halloween needs you to do?” I am being depleted of emotion. “Look into my eyes and tell me that you’d never think of me again if you knew Christmas was secure and made me happy.”

He’s fuming. At himself. At me, for forcing him to this, and his eyes snap to the side. “It’s not that simple—”

“You love me,” I tell him. “You love me and you’re kidding yourself if you think everything we have would go away with you being content in my happiness over my duties. Because you know what, Hex? I won’t be happy without you. Christmas could be idyllic and I’d be miserable without you.”

“That.” He points at me. “That is where you’re wrong. We have responsibilities. Love doesn’t change who we are.”

“It changed who I am.”

He digs his fist into his stomach, I can see the effects of this in the set of his shoulders and the clench of his lips and I know I should feel pain too, but my body has gone numb.

I step closer to him. Just enough that he has to look up.

“Say you love me,” I beg him. Order him. He could change everything with those three words.

“Say you will continue with the winter Holidays,” he returns.

It would destroy him. His Holiday. It would only end in disaster because that’s what happens with me, disaster, and he thinks he can endure it now, but—but I can’t.

We hold. Waiting for the other to break. Giving it another moment longer, one more second, please, please —

“You said we have responsibilities to help bring the world joy.” I finally crack the tension, and Hex’s eyelids pulse, a wince. “But I’ve never had responsibilities beyond my own joy, and that’s why I didn’t think of Christmas’s future when my father was threatening everything I care about. I only thought of my future. I only thought of you. I was selfish and stupid, like I always am, like nothing’s changed, because apparently nothing has changed.”

Hex yanks in a breath that pinches into a moan, and this anger he’s showing me is his fa?ade. He’s hurting behind it, keeping up this shield, and I realize that, but it does nothing to stop the hole of blackness sucking up everything in my chest.

“Coal,” he tries, “this isn’t how I wanted this to—this isn’t—”

I pin my eyes to the wall behind him. One last shred of stoicism centers me, a lifeline thrown down into my abyss and I cling to it with all my strength. “My father is sending you home. You can leave now.”

“Not like this. Coal. Look at me —”

He reaches for me but I put my back to him and get the hell out of there, slamming the door behind me.

Wren is in the hall.

I blow past her. “He’s packing.”

She says something. My name, maybe.

I run, shoulder crashing into walls as I take turns too quickly, staff flying out of my way with startled cries. I get back to my suite and throw myself inside and lean against the closed door, forehead to the wood.

“Coal?”

Shit, they’re still here. Iris and Kris. Shit, shit—

A hand on my shoulder. My brother. He grips tight, and it’s all I can take.

I slide to the ground, on my knees, and finally fall apart.