After lunch Nua and I go up to the library.

It’s unlocked again. Last time we were here, when Ava was dead, Miss Lilly had locked the doors before she left and did not open them again the whole few weeks we were alone with her. I wonder if she ever went in herself, to look through Ava’s office, since Ava said she was looking through her laptop too. When Nua and I go up now, it’s open, and he breathes a sigh of relief, and then takes a deep breath when we go inside.

He looks up at the bookshelves, and then we go around to our chairs. “There should be a fireplace here,” he murmurs, sitting down, and I smile a bit, curling up in the other one. “It seems small, after the one in the city.”

Nua smiles too. “I spent all my time in here when I first got here. I didn’t even go to the room to sleep at night because I thought she’d come in.”

“Bayan still found you for breakfast, though,” I say, and he laughs. “Yeah. It got obvious, after a while, that she didn’t want any of it. She just, she was with Keol all the time, and she hardly ever talked to me. So I started, you know, sleeping in a bed for the first time in my life.”

“The first time?” I ask in slight surprise, but he doesn’t answer before a noise reaches us from the back of the library. I remember again that Ava’s office is in here, but after a few moments Abigala appears through the bookshelves. She’s talking on the phone, and she doesn’t even notice us, just slips out into the hallway and closes the door behind her.

I stare at it, twisting my mouth, and Nua says, “Hey.”

I look at him.

“You okay?”

“I spent all this time trying to get back to her,” I say softly. “And now I don’t even.”

Nua doesn’t say anything even after I trail off, and I sigh, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes. “I don’t know. She said she was looking for our mom and dad, but she hasn’t told me anything, I don’t know if she even is. I don’t know where they are.”

“Ava will help,” says Nua softly. “Help us, not them.”

“It’s just, everything’s crazy,” I murmur, and he half-laughs, half-sighs. “I ran back to my wife’s house. I know.”

I look at him for a moment, and then he stands, going to the bookshelf near us. I untwist myself a bit to look. “Did you ever read any of those fancy stuffs, the economics books and law ones?”

“Oh, nah,” he says with a laugh. “I tried, at first, thought I might as well learn something, but they almost put me to sleep.”

“How many books have you read since coming here?” I ask, and he shrugs, looking up at the shelves. “A few.”

“Yeah, a few,” I say with a snort. He had a different book almost every week back when we were all here, me and him and Bayan and Ava and Keol. I suppose not all of us, though, Penny wasn’t here.

“I never knew Keol couldn’t read,” he says, interrupting my thoughts, but it seems he was thinking the same thing as me. I look over at him again. “Did you two get along?”

“No,” says Nua, turning back to me. “Didn’t I tell you that?”

And I smile a little bit, and he does too, and comes back and sits down again with a sigh. “This house was ice cold, before you came.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I murmur, and he shrugs. “Nah, but you were here. You were new and exciting.”

He grins when he says it, looking at me, and then he laughs, leaning his head back. “God, it was good, though. You made her talk to you, and Keol talk to you, and you had a problem you didn’t want Miss Lilly to know, you made Ava have to show us that she’s not the same as her mother.”

“Wish we could go back to then, then?” I ask, and he smiles again, but it’s not so happy. He thinks a moment. “I don’t know. I wish Keol was still here, to make her smile like that.”

“The whole time for her,” I say softly. “It was either Keol or Penny. She could never have both.”

“I never had siblings,” says Nua quietly. “I never really. This sounds like a bad book, but I never really saw…love. But I’ve seen the way she looks at you.”

I smile a bit. “Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Like how she looked at Keol.”

“She doesn’t look at anyone like that anymore.”

“She looks at you.”

And I look at him, and suddenly there’s something in the air between us, and finally I say softly, “Is that okay?”

“Yeah,” says Nua with a slight laugh, and there’s a bit less pressure in the air and a bit more, at the same time. “Yeah, it’s okay, I just. I don’t know. It’s different. She slept with you.”

“You don’t want to.”

“No,” he agrees, looking at the ceiling. “So I guess the fact that she didn’t sleep with me is more telling than if she did.”

“You don’t have to sleep with someone to love them,” I say softly, and Nua looks at me again. “No. You don’t.”

And he stands up, cutting through the air between us, and puts his hands on the arms of my chair. He leans forward, and I look up at him, his hair falling in front of his face. It almost reaches me from his head, and his eyes bright blue stare into mine. I nod. He kisses me.

Heat rushes into my mouth where he touches me with his and flushes through my cheeks, my face, my neck, my whole body, his hand is on my shoulder and my fingers are tangled in the ends of his hair, and suddenly I can feel him, he’s there, he’s always been there, how did I ever live without him, how have I shared a bed with him for months and never thought to do this before — but of course I’ve thought to do this before, it’s just taken this long to happen.

And then he pulls away, and I open my eyes, and he smiles a bit, leaning back slightly. “Okay?”

I don’t say anything, I can’t, I just open my mouth, and he smiles a bit again. He lifts his hand to touch my face, and then lets it fall. “We’ve been sharing a bed for eight months, Aber, you can’t hide anything from me.”

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I smile, and he does too, and then he takes my hand.

We go back up to Ava’s bedroom, but she’s not inside. It’s just Penny and Sloan and their dogs, sprawled happily asleep on the lush red carpet, and he looks over at us when we go in. “Where’s Ava?”

Nua shrugs. “We left her with you.”

“Oh,” he says. “I left her with Bayan.”

“Then she’s probably with Bayan,” I say, and Sloan laughs a bit. I think of when we danced to the radio, she and I took a few turns before Nua and I ended up together again, and I look at him now. He glances at me, his fingers still in mine, and I remember that Ava ended up with Bayan before she turned off the radio.

Nua lets go of my hand now, though, and goes to join Penny and Sloan on the couch. Our arrival woke Chloe up, she stands and stretches and then goes over to him to lick at his fingers. Nua grins, petting her, and then Ava appears in the doorway. She comes into the room, and Bayan shuts it behind her. We all look at her, and she looks at Bayan, and he nods. She sighs. “I’m going to work tomorrow.”

We look at her a bit more, and then I say slowly, “What does going to work mean?”

“Well,” she says with a slight grin, “Your sister kind of took over everything that my mother wanted me to do. Especially once I left. But now I’m back, so. I guess we have to work something out.”

“So you’re going into your job with her,” says Penny, no emotion to his voice, and Ava tilts her head. “Don’t know yet. But I will be going into the city tomorrow.”

Bayan looks at her with his Bayan look, and she notices. “What?”

He doesn’t say anything, and she sighs, going over to sit down on the couch as well. Nano puts her head in her lap, and she pets her. “You should all figure out what to do with Sloan once you’re alone in the house.”

“Yeah,” says Sloan after a moment. “I’ve gotta get back to Shan sometime, with an update.”

We stay in Ava’s room until dinnertime, where Taymer brings dishes out to us in the dining room. It’s the first time I’ve seen him; he’s young, younger than Bayan, who sits between Penny and Sloan and hardly eats. Miss Lilly thanks Taymer before he goes back into the kitchen, and I wonder if she stole him from an agency too.

Afterwards we go back up to Ava’s room, where she’s suddenly got the idea in her head that we should switch beds, or rather that Nua and I should take the couch with her while Sloan and Bayan and Penny take the bed. They haven’t had a real bed to sleep in in years, and Penny tries to argue, saying that it’s her bed, and she answers that it’s her couch, too. They can’t hold out for much longer, and so we switch places. Nua takes a pillow and curls up on one side of the couch, and Ava and I around the curve on the other. Bayan curls up with his head on the pillow too, and Penny takes the middle of the bed, like his sister. Sloan rolls away from them like Nua does as Ava stretches out her legs, her toes touching the armrest at our feet.

“You’re so tall,” I murmur, my eyes closing. She laughs slightly, rolling to her side so I have more room. I’m lying against the squishy back of the couch on my right side and Ava does the same, her head against my shoulder and her back against my chest. She wraps my arm around her so she won’t fall off and yawns. “Night.”

Penny makes a noise, but no one else responds. Bayan and Nua and Sloan are all asleep already, and it doesn’t take long for me to drop off too.

But in the middle of the night I wake up suddenly.

Penny’s snoring on the bed and there’s a light in the room, one that keeps flicking on and off. I slowly open my eyes and see Ava sitting up in the chair next to the couch, opening and flicking and closing and opening her lighter, over and over again. She doesn’t seem to notice that I’m awake, and is just looking around the room at all of us. After a moment she stands up and moves over to the bed.

A minute later I see her out of the corner of my eye again. She leans over Nua, brushing her lips gently to his forehead, and then she comes over to me. I close my eyes, but as she brushes my hair back and leans forward I hear her breathe against my temple, “Follow me.”

I don’t move, but she just backs away, and I hear the door open and then shut quietly. When nothing moves for a few seconds I sit up. She’s gone.

I go out of the room myself. The light in the hallway is lit, and I see her turning the corner at the far end. She doesn’t acknowledge me as I follow her down the stairs, but soon I realize she’s approaching her mother’s office, and I stop around the corner.

She closes the door behind her, and after a moment I move towards it slightly.

“Mother,” I hear her say, her voice muffled through the wood. “It’s late, why are you still up?”

“I was wondering the same thing about you, dear,” says Lilly. I hear a chair scraping against the ground and footsteps, and then Ava says softly, “I just have one more question for you.”

Lilly doesn’t say anything. Ava asks.

“How many times did you rape Keol?”

I feel a shiver run down my spine, and it’s deathly quiet in the room for a few moments before her mother laughs slightly, a lilting sound that chills me to my bones. “Ava, did you ever even tell him that you loved him?”

Ava doesn’t answer.

“Or did you just keep reaffirming your hatred for each other over and over?”

“We didn’t have to say it,” says Ava, so softly that I can almost not hear her, and her mother laughs again. “No, you just didn’t want to say it, because you didn’t want to admit it to yourselves. Or to me. Did you really hate me that much, to deny yourselves that?”

“Yes,” answers Ava. “You gave away my brother, your son. You killed our father. You enslaved a child, you took away our best friend, and you hurt the men that I love. Especially him. You hurt him before you killed him too.”

“I gave Keol to you, Ava,” says her mother softly. “But he was never really yours.”

“He doesn’t belong to you,” says Ava. She sounds like her teeth are clenched. “None of them belong to you. And they don’t belong to me, either. You don’t have the right.”

“I have every right,” says Lilly, her voice low. “You were the one going against me, not the other way around.”

Silence again, and then I hear another slow and lilting laugh from my mother-in-law. “You loved him so much,” she says quietly, “and yet you still wouldn’t listen.”

Ava doesn’t answer. I take a step away from the door, but after a moment I hear voices again. A paper wrinkles as Lilly says, “You need to go back.”

“I don’t need to do anything.”

“If you don’t want your precious boys locked away to starve again, you do,” says Lilly, and I hear Ava let out an angry exhale. But then she takes a deep breath in again, and steadies herself, and says softly, her voice breaking,, “Can I please have it?”

I do not know what she is asking for, but Lilly seems to, because I hear a drawer open. But then she says, “You’ll go?”

She must nod, because Lilly says, “Good.” She kisses her daughter on the forehead, and then goes back to sit behind her desk. “Good night, darling.”

A moment later, Ava slips out of the room and closes the door softly behind her, then leans her forehead against it. “You’re particularly good at eavesdropping, aren’t you, Aberworth.”

I smile slightly as she turns to me. “One of my many talents.”

She grins at the ground, her hand in a pocket, and she takes a step towards me. “Aber.”

“Ava,” I say quietly, reaching my hand out for her. I slip my fingers over her cheek and then slide my hand around her neck and pull her close to me. Our lips meet. After a moment, though, she pulls away.

She takes a deep breath, then swallows and pulls her hand out of her pocket. She’s clenching her fist, but when she opens her fingers, there’s a ring sitting in the center of her palm, the same as the one that circles her thumb, and my and Nua’s ring fingers.

“Is that…”

“Owen’s,” Ava finishes with a slight smile when I trail off, curling her fingers around it again. She looks at me, her eyes sad. “Go back to bed, Aber.”

“Are you coming?” I ask quietly, and she opens her mouth, then touches my hand. “I will.”

I turn and move back towards her bedroom, but she stays standing in front of the door. She doesn’t follow. I go back alone. The room is still asleep when I slip in, but as I lie down on the couch again Nua shifts and says sleepily, “Where’d you go?”

“Bathroom,” I murmur. He doesn’t answer. I watch the door for the rest of the night until my eyelids droop heavy and I give in to sleep. She doesn’t come back.