Poison

Hadley

The headache got there first.

It sat behind my eyes like something with weight to it, something that had been put there rather than grown, and for a while I didn’t move. Just breathed through my nose and did the math on how many drinks it would have taken to feel like this. Whatever the number was, I’d clearly hit it and kept going.

I rolled onto my side. Wrong move. The room tipped hard enough that I shoved my face into the pillow and stayed there with my eyes shut, waiting for my stomach to give up on climbing out through my throat.

The pillow smelled wrong.

That took longer to land than it should have. My sheets smelled like the lavender detergent Aunt Elara made the laundry staff use, because nothing in this palace was permitted to just smell like fabric. This smelled like cedar. Woodsmoke. Something underneath both of those that was unmistakably, infuriatingly male.

And underneath that, faint, hours old and warm from skin — cinnamon and cognac and vanilla.

Me.

I’ve worn the same perfume since I was fifteen. It was in the pillowcase and it was in the sheets, and it did not get there by itself.

I opened my eyes.

Dark. Full dark, the kind that presses, and my body understood what it meant before any part of my brain caught up. My chest seized. Both hands went out flat against the mattress on either side of me, searching for edges, for a wall, for the shape of a room I could put myself inside — and there was nothing under my palms but sheet, and the dark stayed dark, and for two full seconds I was six years old and there was no door anywhere in the world.

Then the curtains moved and let through a strip of moonlight, thin as a blade.

I breathed out. My hands were shaking. They always shook afterward and it always took longer than it should to stop.

Not mine, those curtains. Mine were grey — chosen at sixteen, after Aunt Elara vetoed black on the grounds that it made a room look like a wake. These were black. Aggressively, unrepentantly black.

The moonlight caught the old silver ward-lines cut into the stone beside the window, the metal gone dull down in the grooves. They’ve renovated around those for four hundred years. Nobody touches the wards. Even Aunt Elara has limits.

I lifted my head and something behind my right eye lit up like a struck match. I put it back down.

“Fuck,” I told the pillow, and even that came out too loud.

I gave it a minute. Tried again slower, and this time the room resolved itself in pieces, one at a time, like it was being assembled specifically to ruin my life. A wardrobe with one door hanging open. A duffel bag half unpacked on the floor. Boots kicked off wherever they’d landed. A leather jacket thrown over the back of a chair by someone who had never once put anything away properly in his entire life.

None of it was mine.

Then the photograph on the wall.

A white wolf on a ridge, coat too bright against the mountains behind him, and I knew that photograph before my brain caught up with knowing it, because when I was fourteen I had drawn a crown and an extremely detailed penis on the glass with permanent marker after its owner ratted me out to Maddox over a broken window. The marker came off. The crown left a ghost of itself in the corner that only showed in certain light.

It was showing now.

Ghost.

Oh, no.

I looked down at the blanket. Looked around the room again. Gave myself one more second to build a version of this that didn’t end where I already knew it ended.

Nothing came.

I turned my head slowly, the way you’d approach something that might still be alive, as though moving carefully enough could change what was on the other side of the bed.

Killian.

Asleep on his stomach, one arm shoved under the pillow, hair falling into his face the way it never used to before he left. He looked different than the man who’d gone to the Academy three years ago. Twenty-five now. Broader. Harder. More ink on his arms than I remembered, the lines of it disappearing under the sheet at his shoulder. The kind of presence that made a room rearrange itself around him without anybody deciding to.

Everyone had noticed it last night.

I’d noticed it more than I wanted to.

Right now he just looked dead to the world. Genuinely unconscious. Not a twitch.

I envied him so much it hurt.

My heart had started going hard enough to make the headache worse, and I lay there trying to construct any explanation that didn’t require what my eyes had already told me. I’d been sick. He’d found me somewhere stupid and carried me up here the way he used to when we were kids and I’d done something requiring adult intervention. That was it. That was all this was.

The theory lasted exactly as long as it took me to look over the edge of the mattress.

My dress was on the floor. One shoe near it, on its side. The other one gone.

My bra was tangled up with his shirt at the foot of the bed, one strap hooked through his sleeve like they’d landed together, and I made myself look down at what was under the blanket and then I couldn’t breathe properly at all.

I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted something metal.

I don’t know how long I stayed like that. Long enough for the room to get lighter at the edges. Long enough that I could feel my own pulse in my throat, in my hands, in the soft skin behind my knees. There was a version of me that would have laughed at this. That version was somewhere far away and I could not reach her.

Because I couldn’t remember.

Not I was drunk and it’s fuzzy. Not it’s coming back in pieces.

I couldn’t remember.

I made myself go back through it, deliberately, the way you check a room for something you’ve lost. Killian and Jaxson arriving right before sunset, the whole palace losing its mind for hours beforehand because the crown prince apparently couldn’t come home without half the kingdom watching him do it. Aunt Elara crying. Uncle Alaric pretending he wasn’t going to. Maddox hugging Jaxson first out of pure spite and Killian telling him to fuck off inside thirty seconds of walking through the door.

I remembered laughing at that. I could still feel where it had sat in my chest.

Avery next to me while we waited, in the blue dress. Changing my own dress twice because she hated the first one and then said the second made me look like somebody’s grandmother. Music. Too many people, too much perfume, the ballroom too warm even with the tall windows standing open to the spring night, the lunar crest above the doors catching silver every time the chandeliers moved. Maddox stealing something off my plate and nearly losing a finger over it.

Then midnight.

It came in flashes.

The palace clock starting to strike.

Somebody shouting over the music before the first chime had finished — EVERYBODY SHUT THE FUCK UP, THE CHILD IS LEGAL — and Aunt Elara’s voice going across the ballroom after it.

Champagne up my nose.

Then nothing for a second, and then:

Aunt Elara’s arms round me. The smell of her. Her mouth against my hair. Happy birthday, sweetheart.

Uncle Alaric kissing the top of my head, telling me eighteen looked suspiciously similar to seventeen.

Gone.

I pushed at it and it came back somewhere else.

Maddox with his glass up. To Hadley. Eighteen years old and somehow still not imprisoned.

Give me time.

You’ve got a whole year.

Jaxson saying something about that not being how birthdays work. Avery’s hand on my arm, laughing. The chandelier. The crest. Somebody’s elbow in my back.

Killian.

That one arrived whole and stayed, and I don’t know why that one and not the others.

Black shirt. Sleeves shoved up past the elbow. One corner of his mouth going.

And I had to look further up than I used to. That’s the piece that stuck — not the height, I’ve always had to look up at him. It was the extra inch of it. My eyes landing on his collarbone before they found his face. And a tattoo running down the inside of his right forearm that wasn’t there when he left, black lines close together, something old.

I don’t know what it means. I have known that arm my entire life and I don’t know what’s on it now.

Ancient now.

I’ve been eighteen twelve seconds.

Your best years are behind you.

Fuck off.

I hit him in the chest. He caught my wrist.

No.

Not my wrist. My waist.

I hugged him. That’s what happened — I put my arms round his neck because he was finally home and because it was my birthday and because three years is a very long time when someone has been in every one of your memories since before you can remember anything.

His hand settled against my back.

And then went still.

And for half a second his face dipped into my hair.

You smell really good.

Did you just sniff me?

No.

You absolutely sniffed me.

You’re drunk.

I’m eighteen.

Those are unrelated facts, Princess.

And then something about Ghost.

There was something about Ghost.

His face changed. His eyes came up off mine and went somewhere over my shoulder and then came back, and something in them had sharpenedd, like a man who’d just heard his own name called from a very long way away and couldn’t work out from where.

His hand was still on my back.

His fingers closed.

Killian—

Pain went white behind my right eye and I sucked a breath in through my teeth, and when it cleared the rest of it had gone with it.

Nothing.

There was the party.

And then there wasn’t.

No stairs. No hallway. No door, no handle, no moment of deciding. No walking. Nothing between a crowded ballroom and this — waking in a bed that wasn’t mine, next to a man I had known my entire life, with my clothes on his floor and my perfume in his sheets and no memory of putting either of them there.

Something in me went very cold and very quiet.

I’d lost hours before. Everyone had. You drink too much and the night comes back in slices, jokes without setups, faces without rooms. This wasn’t that. There were no slices. There was a wall.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until colour bloomed behind them, and I thought, very clearly, in a voice I didn’t recognise as mine: something happened to me and I don’t know what it was.

Then the nausea came back, and it had nothing to do with the drinking.

I looked at him again. Half hoping he’d wake up. Half praying to every god whose name I could remember that he wouldn’t.

Killian slept light. He’d always slept light. When we were kids I couldn’t get past his door without him knowing about it — he’d call out my name into the dark before my foot had finished the floorboard. At sixteen he caught me lifting his car keys out of the pocket of the jeans he’d left on his chair while he was supposedly unconscious. I made it two steps.

I had knocked around this room for three minutes and he hadn’t so much as changed the rhythm of his breathing.

“Killian.” Barely a whisper.

Nothing.

Some part of me registered that as wrong and filed it somewhere I couldn’t reach yet.

I needed to be gone before that changed. Questions could wait until I had underwear on.

I pushed the blanket back and grabbed it again immediately when the cold hit skin, face burning for an audience of exactly nobody. I checked him once more. Then I slid out and crouched for my dress.

My foot caught something. I went sideways into the little table by the armchair, and whatever was on it wobbled, and I grabbed and missed, and a metal water bottle hit the floor with a clang that seemed to fill the entire wing of the palace.

“Shit — shit—”

I snatched it up like retrieving it fast enough could undo the noise, and spun toward the bed.

He moved.

I stopped breathing entirely.

His forehead creased. His arm dragged across the sheet, fingers curling into the space where I’d been lying a minute ago, closing on the warmth I’d left behind and staying there.

“Had—”

I went very, very still.

His face smoothed out. Nothing else came. His hand stayed where it was.

I stood in the middle of his room with the water bottle pressed against my chest like a shield and waited for my heart to come back down out of my throat, and I thought about how he had reached for the exact place I’d been. Not toward the door. Not away.

He’d almost said my name.

Or he had said it. Or I’d invented it, because clearly the night hadn’t handed me enough to carry yet.

Either way.

Leaving.

I set the bottle down with exaggerated care and found the dress. One shoe. The other had vanished into whatever dimension takes single shoes, because my belongings had chosen tonight to start actively working against me. The bra was gone too — not under the dress, not under his shirt.

I glanced at the bed. Please do not be under him.

I’d have sacrificed it. Genuinely. It had served me well and it deserved a better end than this, but I’d have left it.

Then I saw a black strap hanging out from under the foot of the bed and nearly wept.

It didn’t come when I pulled. I pulled harder. Still nothing, and when I got down on the floor and looked, one of his enormous boots was sitting directly on top of it. The man had been home less than a day and had already colonised every square foot of floor available to him.

The clock on the nightstand said 3:30.

Perfect. Precisely the hour at which every good decision in history has been made.

Three and a half hours since somebody put their arms around me and told me happy birthday.

I gathered everything as quietly as physics allowed, gave up on the bra and stuffed it into a shoe. My hands were shaking badly enough that the zip took four tries. And when I’d finished I stood there a second longer than I needed to, looking at him.

Three years.

I’d counted down the weeks like an idiot. I had a list on my phone — an actual list, added to over months — of things to ask him. Stories he’d conveniently left out of every letter. I’d pictured us staying up half the night talking, the way we used to before the Academy took him, sitting on the floor of his room with the door open and Aunt Elara shouting at us to sleep.

We’d managed the staying-up-half-the-night part.

The rest of it I had no claim to at all.

I slipped out and eased the door shut before the latch could click.

—-

Empty corridor. Small mercies.

I moved fast, shoes in one hand, keeping to the wall past the big windows, my bare feet going numb against the stone. Every so often the floor tilted and I had to stop and put a hand flat on the wall and wait for it to settle.

I was almost at the corner to the family wing when a voice stopped me cold.

“Hadley?”

Every muscle in my body locked at once.

For one very tempting second I considered pretending I hadn’t heard, then remembered I’d have to explain the deafness by breakfast.

I turned.

Avery, a few metres off, in an oversized sleep shirt with her hair a mess around her shoulders, a mug held in both hands. Far too alert for whatever hour this technically was.

Her eyebrows went up as she took in the whole picture of me. Bare feet. Shoes in my hand. The bra hanging half out of one of them.

“Don’t,” I said.

She didn’t.

She put the mug down on the little table against the wall and came the rest of the way toward me, and when her voice came it was nothing like the one she’d said my name with.

“Are you okay?”

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

“Hads.”

“I woke up in Killian’s bed.”

She went still.

Nobody spoke. Somewhere below us a door shut, and someone laughed, and the sound came up through the stone and disappeared again. Avery looked past my shoulder, down the corridor I’d come from, like she needed to check it for herself.

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“I mean I don’t know, Avery.” My voice climbed and I hauled it back down. “I woke up there. Ten minutes ago. I don’t remember going upstairs. I don’t remember his room. I don’t remember —” I looked down at the bra sticking out of the shoe, and something in my chest folded. “Anything.”

“Does he remember?”

“He’s unconscious.”

“You didn’t wake him?”

“Would you?”

She thought about it for maybe half a second. “No.”

Something that wanted to be a laugh got most of the way up my throat and turned into the other thing instead. I got my hand over my mouth in time. Barely.

Avery took my arm. “Come on.”

“Where.”

“Your room. Before a guard walks through and you get to explain the underwear situation.”

I looked down at it. “Fuck my life.”

“Tomorrow. Tonight you’re showering.”

She steered me and I let her, because thinking had become more effort than I had left. My room, when we reached it, was exactly as I’d abandoned it — the rejected dresses over the chair, makeup scattered across the dresser, one earring on the floor by the wardrobe — and something in my chest came loose at the sight of it.

She shut the door. “Sit.”

“I’m not a dog.”

“Hadley.”

I sat.

She crouched in front of me and studied my face like there was something written on it. “You’re pale.”

“I’m always pale.”

“Paler.”

She got the water bottle off my nightstand and pushed it into my hands. I drank half of it before I trusted myself to talk.

“Why are you even still here? Why didn’t you go home?”

She frowned like the question didn’t make sense. “Because you wouldn’t let me.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You took my keys. Told me I’d been drinking and I wasn’t driving anywhere, then threatened to hand them to Maddox if I argued.”

That did sound like me. And somewhere in the wreckage I found the faintest impression of it — her reaching for something over my head while I laughed and held it out of reach. Keys, maybe.

Maybe not.

“I don’t remember that.”

Her amusement dropped a notch. “At all?”

I shook my head, and it hurt.

“Shit.” She sat down beside me. “You really don’t remember anything.”

“No.”

“You put me in the blue guest room. The one near the stairs.”

“You hate that room.”

“I hate the mattress.”

I waited to feel the click of it — the small internal confirmation you get when someone hands you back a piece of your own evening and it fits. It didn’t come. She was describing a night that had happened to somebody else.

“Do you feel sick?”

“Yes.”

“Dizzy?”

“Yes.”

“Anything hurt?”

“My head.”

A pause. Slightly too long. “Anywhere else?”

Heat crawled up my neck before I fully understood the question, and then I did understand it, and something in me went small and cold and about eleven years old.

“I don’t know,” I said.

She didn’t push.

Somehow that was worse than if she had.

I sat there with the bottle in both hands and my thumb working a dent into the metal, and I said, to the floor, “I should remember. Shouldn’t I.”

“You were drinking.”

“So was everyone. Maddox was drinking. Maddox could tell you what colour the ballroom curtains were.”

“You barely drink. Maybe it hit you harder.”

“Three hours, Avery.” My voice cracked in the middle of it and I hated that more than anything else in the entire night. “It’s not blurry. There’s nothing there. There’s a party and then there’s his room and there is *nothing in between*, and I keep going back for it and it’s like —”

Like putting your hand out in the dark and finding the wall closer than it should be.

I didn’t say that part.

“Hey.” She got hold of my wrist. “Stop.”

“I can’t.”

“You can. Not tonight. Tonight you’re going to shower and sleep and let your body come back online, and tomorrow if you still want to take this apart, I’ll help you take it apart. Piece by piece. I’ll sit there while you do it.”

“And if there’s nothing to find?”

“Then there’s nothing to find.” She squeezed once. “But you’re not doing it at half three in the morning with a concussion’s worth of headache.”

I looked at her. She looked back, steady, and her hand didn’t move off my wrist.

“Okay,” I said.

“Say it properly.”

“Okay, Avery.”

“Better.”

I let my head fall against her shoulder and closed my eyes. We’d done this a thousand times. Whispering under blankets after Aunt Elara had told us twice to sleep. Her hand in mine through the worst hour of my parents’ memorial, palms slick with it, neither of us letting go.

“I don’t want Killian to know I panicked.”

“He won’t.”

“What if he remembers?”

“Then let him bring it up first.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

She shifted under my cheek. “Then maybe nothing happened.”

I lifted my head. “My bra was on his floor.”

“Okay. Then maybe something did.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“No,” she agreed. “It isn’t.”

She reached over and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and her expression was so gentle that I had to look away from it.

“Shower,” she said. “I’ll make you something for your head.”

I got up, found clean clothes, and stopped at the bathroom door to look back at her.

“Ave?”

“Mm?”

“Don’t tell anyone.”

Something moved across her face. It was gone before I could name it. “Who would I even tell?”

I didn’t have an answer to that. She knew where I hid chocolate from Maddox. She knew I still slept with one of my mother’s shirts on the bad nights, that I’d worn it to sleep three nights running the week of the anniversary. She knew exactly how frightened I’d been the day Killian left for the Academy, even while I stood on the drive smiling and telling him I was thrilled for him.

If there was one person on this earth I never needed to ask twice, it was her.

“Sorry.”

“Go shower, Hads.”

—-

I stood under the water until it ran cold.

Washed my hair twice, because somewhere in the middle I lost track of whether I’d already done it once. Scrubbed my arms until the skin went red and then kept going, and I knew exactly what I was doing and I did it anyway.

The perfume came off last. It always does — it sits in the skin rather than on it, which is the whole reason I’ve worn it since I was fifteen. I stood there with the water going cold across the back of my neck and it was still there, faint, underneath everything. The same thing that had been in his sheets ten minutes ago.

I tried to walk the night backward from the things I knew were true. The ballroom. The music. Maddox and the plate. Midnight, and Aunt Elara’s arms, and Uncle Alaric calling me his birthday girl even after I had repeatedly informed him I was an adult now. Maddox raising a glass to my future criminal record. Black shirt, sleeves shoved up, lines of ink I didn’t recognise on an arm I’d known my whole life.

Ancient now.

His hand at my waist.

You smell really good.

Every path dead-ended in the same blank stretch of nothing, and every time I hit it my chest did the thing it does in the dark, that old animal lurch, checking for a door.

Eventually I stopped trying.

When I came back out, Avery was gone.

A mug sat on my nightstand with a note folded underneath it.

Drink this. All of it. And stop thinking before you hurt yourself. Love you, idiot. — A

I almost smiled.

The tea smelled floral, with something sharper underneath that I couldn’t place. One of Aunt Elara’s herbal concoctions, probably. The woman swore by them and every single one tasted like boiled grass.

This one was no different.

I drank all of it.

Then I climbed into bed and put my hand out for my phone, because some part of me still wanted to know whether he’d messaged, and my palm came down on bare wood.

I patted along the nightstand. The lamp. The book I hadn’t opened in a month. No phone.

I tried to think where I’d had it last and the thought slid sideways out from under me, and I lay there for a second with my arm still hanging off the edge of the bed, waiting for it to come back.

It didn’t.

Tomorrow. It could be tomorrow. All of it could be tomorrow.

I closed my eyes and went back one more time for the end of the night. Music. Someone laughing close to my ear, too close, warm against the side of my face. Killian’s hand around a glass. His eyes finding mine across a crowded room and staying.

After that, nothing.

Eighteen years old for three and a half hours, and I had no idea what I’d done with any of them.

I held onto the last image as long as I could — his eyes, the glass, the noise — and somewhere between one breath and the next, that went too.