Chapter Eight

The library of the Claus Palace is a work of art, it really is. Towering mahogany shelves of books with glinting gold spines are accessible by sliding ladders that rim the dark, cozy walls, with more reasonable- height shelves segregating the room throughout. One end is a massive gray stone fireplace, the mantel decked out with a tiny porcelain Christmas village, and cushioned chairs and a table are set in front of it, loaded with a relaxed dinner spread of all the Christmas trimmings.

Roast beef and juicy ham and candied sweet potatoes and cranberries broiled over triple cream brie all combine to assault me with a sweet, savory barrage of dinners of Christmas past. Like that smell alone could cocoon me up and transport me to this exact dinner when I was a kid, when I hadn’t seen beyond the magic yet and could still be consumed by it.

We had a break between the end of the race and dinner. I showered and changed into a Christmas sweater that looks like it’s stripes of holly and candy canes, but on closer inspection it’s rows of red and green robots blasting each other to bits—I don’t know where Kris finds these things. I’d hoped freshening up would cleanse what happened, but I’m stuck in some kind of Groundhog Day, which is borderline treasonous, given that that’s not even sort of a Holiday I have any dominion over. But here I am again, feeling like I messed up things with Hex; here I am again, not knowing how to apologize, knowing I need to.

Kris drops into a chair next to me and takes a gulp from his drink. Beer in a wine glass. We’re chic. “So. That sleigh ride was. Something.”

I pick at the plate of food I’d grabbed before giving up and shoving it onto a nearby end table. Shit, I must really be morose if Renee’s cooking is losing its appeal.

This isn’t a formal dinner. Dad even opted out—something about overseeing a new reserve tank for the Merry Measure; it’s overflowing with joy, he’d been sure to say, loudly, as we left the stable yard. So the people milling around now—some of our court, not everyone; more intimate—eat as they like, chat idly.

Hex might not come.

Iris joins us, licking brown sugar sauce from a spoon. “I’m going to poach Renee from you one day.”

I don’t react to that. Not to what Kris said either. Kris and Iris share a look and pivot to me more purposefully and shit, I do need new friends.

“What’d you do?” Iris asks.

“Nothing.” I swing on her. “I thought you were on my side, Iris. I told you what I needed from you.”

I hear my words as I say them, and my eyes roll shut on a pained wince. I shouldn’t be asking anything of her. I should be trying to win her trust—did I ever really have it?—to get her to tell me what she’s thinking now and if she wants out of this whole arrangement. Because if she does want out, I—

—don’t actually know what I’d do. Throw some kind of gigantic hissy fit at the next event? Set up a stupid prank where I figure out a way to melt the ice skating rink or put permanent dye in cookie frosting so everyone’s mouths are green for a month? Yeah, that’ll help.

She bats the spoon at me. “I changed my mind once I saw the way he looked at you.”

That’s more distracting than if she’d socked me in the throat. “He looked at me? How did he look at me? Wait, no, god— Iris. ”

I sink back into the overstuffed armchair, shaking my head, wanting so badly to make a joke out of this. But it’s not funny. At all.

She balks. “You’re actually angry.”

I bolt forward, so aware of the people nearby—there’s only one reporter, this one from Christmas Inquirer. He snaps a few not-exactly-covert photos of me and Iris, and even though the conversation we’re having is basically an argument, the headlines will be shit like Prince Nicholas and Princess Iris cozy up over a quiet firelit dinner; will she choose him over Prince Hex?

I glare at the reporter long enough that he shifts uncomfortably and swivels his attention to a member of the Christmas court.

“Yeah, I’m mad,” I say to Iris. “This is already a shitty situation for all of us and I cannot mess it up more. He doesn’t deserve this, you don’t deserve this, and I won’t—”

Iris’s eyes snap over my shoulder. “Prince Hex.”

I lurch to my feet, startling her backwards, and spin to see Hex, far enough away that I know he didn’t hear anything, but close enough that my body shakes with him being in the same room as me.

The gold firelight pulses across him. He’s in a black button-up and black pants with his black boots, a short black tie hanging around his neck, a simple yet effective display of his Holiday in one color. His hair is pulled back again, showing the strain in his jaw when his eyes meet mine.

But he looks down at Iris. “Princess.”

“Help yourself.” She waves at the table by the fire.

He crosses the room to the food. Taking a longer route, circling around, to avoid coming too close to me, moving with such graceful intent that the air around him barely rustles.

Iris tugs on my hand. “What did you do ?”

“One of them fell off the sleigh,” Kris whispers at her.

“ What ?” She yanks on my arm and I drop back into the seat. “Coal! You let him fall off?”

“I didn’t… no, I did, I definitely did.”

“Is that all? He feels angrier than that.”

I cut a glare at Kris before he can say anything. My brother lifts his hands. “I saw nothing.”

Iris pokes my chest. “What. Did you. Do ?”

“ Nothing .” I grab her wrist and drop my voice so low I’m not sure she’ll hear me. “I did absolutely nothing, and that feels like everything, and I don’t know what to do, Iris. I needed you to keep me away from him, goddamn it—”

Her eyebrows bend. “Oh my god, Coal. You’ve got it bad .”

“You need to talk to him,” Kris says. “Clear this up.”

“Talking to him doesn’t tend to go well.”

“Figure it out.” Kris bumps my shoulder. “It’s a long month. You can’t avoid him. The palace isn’t that big, and this tension is gonna get old fast.”

The strain on my face is a full-on conversation with no words spoken.

Oh, THIS tension is gonna get old? What about the tension between you and Iris, HMMMM? What about THAT tension, that we’ve been living with for YEARS, brother of mine?

Kris ducks his head, swirling the beer around his wine glass in silent surrender.

But honestly. He’s right. This month will be hard enough on all of us without me making every interaction worse.

I drop my head into my hands. Then quickly realize how that looks to everyone else around and sit up, but I hate that too, I can’t properly freak out in my own home because lord forbid someone might see.

Hex is at the table, eyeing the food, an empty plate in his hands.

I surge to my feet.

Pause.

Then lean over Kris like I’m going to whisper something to him, and at the last second, I go, “Ball tag,” and hit him in the groin.

“ Shit —” He rocks forward with a suppressed groan.

I walk away, my steps a little lighter, as Iris sighs defeatedly and mutters something about not knowing why she’s even friends with two idiot white boys.

I refocus on Hex, and I know he feels my gaze on him because he turns to me seconds before I stop next to him.

“Prince Nicholas,” he says.

“Coal,” I correct.

His lips twitch. “Coal.”

“Can we talk?”

“Aren’t we?”

“Not here.”

“In… private?” Hex pushes his chin over my shoulder, at the guy from Christmas Inquirer.

Ah. Yeah. Iris’s two supposed suitors sneaking off to talk? It was headline-grabbing enough that we were in a sleigh together; this is downright scandalous.

I look around. “Four rows back. By the window. In five minutes? We can stagger.”

As soon as I say that, I hear how much it sounds. Like I’m planning some secret tryst. Which I definitely am not. But talking candidly in Claus Palace requires feats of insanity.

And this guy makes me want to be insane.

But Hex sets down his plate. “Five minutes.”

My gut twists, pulse detonating like fireworks, this is not a tryst. “Good.”

I spin on my heels and duck across the room before I can think better of all this.

I could try to avoid him for the next few weeks. It’d been my original plan—to not get anywhere near him so I didn’t make a fool of myself. But apparently I’m destined for that fate no matter what I do, so might as well be up-front about it.

The bulk of the library is silent and dim, the light from the fireplace in the sitting area creating a cozy atmosphere. I weave through shelves, deeper into the narrowing embrace of books on Christmas’s past and traditions and lore, and I realize this was a huge mistake, because the flickering, distant firelight is romantic. By the time I reach the far wall, looming windowpanes showing the arctic scene swathed in starlight and navy blue–black sky, I’ve talked myself out of all this.

I’ll go to my room. He’ll know I chickened out but I’ll save us both the embarrassment of whatever dumb thing I’ll do next.

But I don’t go.

I stay, because the books in this row are judging me.

Kris and I had private tutors up until we hit our teenage years. And these books are well worn with our fingerprints—the history of Christmas. Our family. Past Santas, dozens of them, all leading back, back, back to the origin of the Clauses. How all this started because one guy wanted to spread cheer among his village during the deepest, darkest part of winter, so he became famous for leaving secret gifts and mysterious acts of charity to crack joy into a time of year that used to be deadly and miserable.

I’d loved that story.

Another memory comes charging out in full Technicolor—shortly after Dad had taken me on that brief training introduction where he’d showed me the globe, he’d asked me what we were learning about in our studies.

I’d exploded all over him about our origins. “Isn’t it awesome? We’re destined to do that too! We bring joy to the whole WORLD!”

I’d been, maybe, seven? Seven and bright-eyed and Mom hadn’t left yet, and so Dad was bright-eyed too. I remember him bending down to me and smiling —I haven’t seen that smile in years, maybe since then.

He’d put his hand on my head. “I’m proud of you. You’re taking all this to heart.”

My throat gets tight and I shake it off with a sniff.

Shit, I’m melancholy tonight. It’s the damn dinner smells—leave it to the olfactory sense to conjure up the worst nostalgia. That part of my brain is aching with how all these triggered memories—childhood dinners and unadulterated excitement and learning about Christmas—are a lost golden age I’ll never reclaim. But the rest of me knows, fucking knows, I’m romanticizing it. These memories only feel idyllic because I hadn’t been able to comprehend reality at the time.

That’s really the golden age, isn’t it? That’s what my brain is longing for, a time when I only saw the sparkle. A time when I loved this unabashedly because I hadn’t realized that the sparkle was a distraction layered over a complex concept full of cracks and mold, and the day you see beyond the glitter for the first time is the day you officially grow up, no going back.

I feel a presence to my right, at the end of this aisle, and I turn to Hex.

We’re in beams of muted firelight that cut through the shelves, the hazy ivory hue of stars from the windows behind me. The crowd is a muffled background noise, giving further gravity to how alone we are now, and I groan.

“I keep doing this,” I admit.

He glances over his shoulder, and with a flick of his hand, rings glinting, he lets a burst of magic fly. Holiday magic takes on the traits associated with the joy that produces it; some of Christmas’s manifests in snow and lights and creating silly little gifts or candy. So it makes sense that Halloween is this but intensified, shadows and mystery with an edge of spookiness. Hex uses it to coat the end of this row in a heavier sheet of darkness, giving us privacy should anyone come near where we are.

“Doing what, exactly?” he asks.

Is he going to make me say it? Well, that’s why I asked to talk with him, isn’t it? To say all this, to get on the same page, once and for all, and stick to that page even if it kills me.

I hang my head into my hands and rip my fingers back through my curls, sending them springing around my face. “Okay. Look. I’m sorry. Again. I have a problem, it seems, and even though I promised I wouldn’t put you in that situation again, I did.”

Hex sips in a breath. It’s so faint I barely hear the scratch of it on his throat.

“I don’t want to make things awkward for you,” I say. “I keep— ugh, god, I can’t even say what I keep doing because I feel like that will make things awkward for you more, and I’m misreading all these things from you and building them up in my head to mean something they don’t. You’re having a hard enough time being… being used as a marriage pawn. I don’t want to make it harder on you.”

I barely say the last few words. My lungs are swelling shut. Closing, closing, because he isn’t a marriage pawn, he’s a straight-up pawn, and Hex stands there, thumbs in his pockets, eyes narrow in silent consideration, totally unaware of how much we’re screwing over him and his Holiday.

His brows pulse together. The only change on his impossibly pulled-together front.

“You aren’t making it harder on me,” he says.

I rock forward. “Ha. Sure. I threw you from a sleigh. I almost let my brother see us… close. And now! All I wanted was to talk to you, and look where I had us go .” I point at the starlit sky and the rolling hills of ivory and the cozy bookshelves and the pulsing light of a crackling fire like all of it is solely responsible for being so picturesque that we might as well be standing in a romance novel.

One edge of Hex’s lips lifts. Is he smiling?

I will not survive you smiling, so help me—

“Your palace lends itself to a certain atmosphere,” he says. “That’s hardly your fault.”

I point at him. “No. No. Don’t make light of this—you should be mad at me.”

“I should?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Why?”

He frowns. “That tone will serve to get me angry with you. I’m not an idiot. Don’t speak to me as such.”

And he talks like a poet, a cadence in his words that’s half song.

It cracks my chest apart. Decides something for me that I hadn’t known was an option.

“It’s a lie,” I say.

Hex’s frown deepens. “That I’m not an idiot? Excuse me?”

“No! No.” I step closer. Too close for how I know I have to cap myself, but my hands are shaking and if I don’t say this now, I’ll combust. “Your presence here, this competition over Iris. It’s a lie. I’m set up to marry her regardless of what happens, which is a whole other story because neither of us wants it at all —that doesn’t matter, what matters is we’re moving forward with that alliance. You’re just here to appease Halloween—”

“I know.”

I go stiff. Bend towards him. “You… know? Know what, exactly?”

Hex steps around me, moving to the window, as far from the fire and other guests as he can get. He stops at the cold glass and folds his arms, gazing out at the tundra.

He looks back at me.

I stumble after him and steady against the window, facing him, but he stares out at the ice and snow and stars.

“I know this competition is fake,” he says to the glass. It fogs with his breath. “I am, as I said, not an idiot.”

“How—how? When?”

“All my life. My parents knew from an early age that I wouldn’t be an idiot—”

“Not that.” My voice drops. Normally, I would be losing my mind that he’s teasing me—but I need him to explain, now, I’m on the edge of one of those hills out there, seconds away from toppling end over end into a dark, icy expanse.

Hex’s jaw swells below his ear, and I’m caught on the knot of tension as he stays pointedly looking outside.

“After the Halloween envoys returned,” he says.

“ That long? You’ve known for that long, and you still came here? Why?”

“A few hours after the conversation they had with your father, another message was sent over—a stronger ultimatum, your father called it. He would push through the marriage between his son and the Easter Princess”—he doesn’t look at me, every word laid out carefully, every movement composed—“and Halloween would be kept in line while it happens.”

“What?” An electric current of shock zaps through me. “He—he threatened you?”

He gives another easy shrug, but I’m starting to see that these acts of supposed dismissal are deeply meaningful for him—whereas I flail around at the slightest spurt of emotion, he keeps such a tight lid on his reactions that even a shift of his head, a pulse of his eyebrows, is a sign that he’s restraining himself with everything he has.

“Not directly,” he says.

“How? Why? He doesn’t—we don’t—” I cut myself off, too many words trying to get out. I palm my face and breathe before looking at Hex’s profile. “Tell me. Please.”

But he responds with a question. “How much of the world’s joy does Christmas monopolize?”

The pivot has me shaking my head. “Um—fifty-seven percent, last I checked.” And by checked I mean heard my father raving about it.

Hex’s eyes, finally, slide to mine. “More than half. In a single Holiday. And with Easter now too, stretching out from just one segment of the year? Christmas has almost endless resources. A relentless grasp on the world. And there are things, even in our society of joy and goodness, that can become threats. This competition is a cover to make my presence here acceptable.”

There is no air in this room, in the space between our bodies, and I steady myself on the window ledge, bearing down on it for dear life.

“You’re our prisoner,” I state.

Hex convulses. “That’s a bit overstating things—”

His eyes dip to the side. Surprise breaks his severity.

I follow his gaze.

To see that I’ve blasted ice across the glass, down the wall, a sheet of sparkling, geometric frost spreading out beneath the tense fingers with black and orange nails.

I yank away, staring at my hand in disbelief.

Hex is studying me. Again, still, maybe he’s always studying me, always watching my reaction and assessing options and planning, analyzing. He has to be, doesn’t he? If all this is a bigger scheme than I knew.

He must be exhausted.

“What is he threatening you with if Halloween doesn’t go along with this?” I ask.

Hex’s surprise shifts into… awe. “You honestly don’t know.”

He should be furious, hurt, raging at me, but he’s looking at me in this stunned wonder and I can’t make it fit with anything we’ve said. He has no reason to look at me like that.

“Of course I don’t know,” I snap, but not at him, not at him, and he seems to understand, because he lets me fall apart and doesn’t flinch. “I don’t know anything, apparently. I didn’t know that Christmas was in the business of making threats so potent that other Holidays would willingly concede to any demand and send us a prisoner as collateral —”

“I’m not a prisoner, Coal. It isn’t as—”

“Can you go back home of your own free will without something awful happening?”

His lips stiffen.

“So you are.” I’m shaking. “A prisoner. We have a prisoner. And it’s you —and I was— oh my god —”

Feeding into the tension between us was bad enough when I thought we were lying to him about competing for Iris.

But now that I know he’s trapped here—and I was coming on to him —

“Oh my god,” I can’t say anything else, hands going into my hair, “oh my god, I’m so sorry—I’m—”

I drop to my knees.

I can’t hold myself up anymore.

And I don’t deserve to, I don’t deserve to stand there and have him watching me with empathy, like he should in any way feel bad for me, not after everything we’ve put him and his Holiday through.

“You deserve so much more than this, ” I say to his legs. “You and Halloween both. And Iris too, because fuck. We should not be treating any of you this way; my father was… he’s insane. I’ll fix this. I’ll—”

“I did not tell you to get you to fix this,” Hex says. Is it a whisper? I barely hear him speak, and I sit on my heels to look up at him.

His profile is washed gray-white in starlight, the other side sheathed in darkness, his lips softly parted. His arms are still crossed, but his fingers are arched and tense against his elbows, the lines of his body taken from lax resignation to something razor-edged and alert. It makes me so aware of the fact that I’m on my knees before him that a bolt of effervescent lightning spiderwebs from my head down to my gut and pins me in place.

“The deal Halloween has with your father is under control,” he says, his usual detached tone marred by hesitation. “If you are unaware of the details, all the better, honestly. You don’t need to be involved. You don’t need to fix anything.”

“But we’re better than this,” I tell him. “Christmas is better than this. And I will not let my father ruin Halloween. I won’t let him touch you, ever again. I promise.”

I make jokes. I’m a smartass. I don’t talk like this, with weight, but every second of a life spent being the comedic relief has been saving up sincerity for him.

Hex’s arms drop from around his chest, rip down like some invisible force jerked him open.

He’s quiet for a long, agonizing moment, his face unreadable.

“Trying to decide if a promise from the disreputable Christmas Prince has merit?” I ask, and I smile, but this has smothered any joy I could have clung to—

Hex falls to the ground in front of me.

Something deep beneath my belly button wrenches, hard.

I surge up to match him, balancing on my knees. There’s maybe two inches of space between us, and my breath comes in a pinched gasp, disbelief and apology and unworthiness all lassoing around my neck so I hold there, strung in place.

He smells like sweet oranges with a hit of something spicy, a living version of this cocktail Renee made one year, a cinnamon bourbon old-fashioned with br?léed oranges. Burnt sugar and heat from the spice and sunshine brightness in the citrus, it makes my mouth water, but I am stationary. I exist in this moment to be at his will, the spark of his exhale on my tongue.

“I do not expect you to fix this,” he tells me again.

I almost promise I will. I almost promise him everything. I’m jerked back and forth between reality and wishes and I’m getting intoxicated on the way the air tastes like him.

“It is my job to protect my Holiday and the people who depend on it”—he’s talking faster; he’s unhinging, and I feel like I’m privy to something holy in watching him lose control—“and it is your job to protect yours. I can take care of myself. Do not risk your responsibilities for me.”

I can’t promise that.

But he doesn’t make me.

“I can take care of myself,” he repeats, and I finally clock what that softness in his tone is: he’s nervous.

The reverberations of a moan rattle in my chest moments before it splinters the air. It silences him.

A sway forward, a plunge, and he kisses me—again.

All it takes is him closing that distance and the lightest swell of his mouth against mine, and I grab the back of his neck and devour him. I’ve been starving, for a year and a half, I’ve been living in a suspended state of hunger, all normal appetite wrecked by one single drunken kiss. And it was so dumb, wasn’t it? To be obsessed with one kiss ; so I’d ignored it and carried on because he was gone, he was basically a figment of a drunken dream, and I’d never get that kiss again. I’d have to learn to live without it. Without him. To be okay going back to grays and beiges when I now knew that the world could exist in magenta and aquamarine and violent auburn.

But he’s here. His lips are on mine again, no alcohol fog, no uncertainty about who initiated it or who wants it. I’m ravenous and he is my only satisfaction, his lips separating for my tongue, the taste of him minty and hemmed in that spicy-orange smell and it is vital, vital that I re-memorize every divot of his lips. And I’m absolutely shredded in two, half curling with desire; half knowing I’m well and truly fucked.

One kiss from him damn near shattered me, and that was when I was able to play it off as something I’d built up in my head. But now that I know his lips feel as perfect as I’d been imagining, that all of this is as effortlessly cataclysmic as I’d hoped and feared?

Scalded. Ruined. Eviscerated.

I make a completely unselfconscious whine of greed and with it almost comes a tidal wave of stuff that’s theatrically poetic but batshit to say to someone I hardly know. Things like, I’ve missed you, I know that’s insane, we’re barely friends and Tell me you’ve thought about me a fraction as often as I’ve thought about you, even just once and Please, please, begging for way more than I have any right to.

I get some grip on myself and peel back enough to fill his mouth with, “You taste as good as I remember.”

A little gasp escapes him, but in the second where his shock might give way to discomfort—was that still too forward? Probably, fuck—he echoes that greedy whine, echoes it, a resonant warble high in his throat.

He pushes into me and bites at my tongue and I mewl in his mouth, hand clenching at the base of his hair, riding the motion of his chest forming against mine. I grab onto the ridges of his spine, arching over him, feeling the bow of his ribs as I bend him backwards, and I think I could lay us out on the floor, I think he’d let me. But the mere thought of that has me so painfully aware of the way our hip bones align, the hard connection where each inch of our bodies touches, that I have to break the kiss and gasp for air.

I rock my forehead to his, noting his fingers twisted in the front of my sweater, knuckles white in the low light, pale, pale skin against the silvery black of his rings.

He didn’t tell me what it is my dad has over him and his Holiday. I start to ask him again, but I don’t want it here, in the air with us both on our knees, so I nip at his mouth and feel, see, taste the way he smiles. He runs one hand up my arm, across my shoulder, and touches my neck. That millimeter of skin on skin makes me forget my damn name.

“Coal!”

I tense. Hex shoves back, but my arms stay around him, one of his hands stays knotted up in my sweater.

“ Coaaaal ,” Iris singsongs, her heels clacking on the library’s polished wood floor. “They want pictures before the night ends. Are you back here… reading? You should read later.”

She’s walking slowly, talking loudly. Giving us warning.

Hex climbs to his feet, grabbing onto the window ledge, leaving a handprint in the melting frost I made. My own hands fall limp in my lap, and I hold there for one long, rattling breath before I can stand.

He bats his fingers and the shadow wall falls. No word, nothing at all, and he walks away, angling for another row of shelves.

“Wait—” I shoot after him but he twists a look back that holds me in place.

His cheeks are flushed and his hair is ruffled—I did that, I did that —and he’s smiling at me, and I want to grin back. The urge rises.

But all I can see are the shackles we have on him. Those words dragging him down, threat and kept in line.

“Good night, Coal,” he says, and he darts off into the shadows as Iris slides to the entrance of this row.

I run my hand across my open mouth, but there is no schooling my expression now, no restraining the way the past few minutes have unmade me.

When I show Iris my face, she goes from coy to shocked in two seconds.

“What happened?” she asks, eyes launching around, but he’s gone, and I’m fuming.

“Tell the reporter to shove his camera up his ass,” I say as I move around her. “I need to talk to my father.”