Page 4

But before I can lose myself too deep in them, a tremor at my feet distracts me.

The ground shudders. Faint, but I feel it like a change in the air, a break in the serenity I’ve found out here, and I wait for it to expand into something that makes sense. Something as timeless as the rhythm of an engine carrying through the earth.

A vehicle.

Coming this way.

A second later, headlamps cut across the far edge of the top field, pale light hazing through the dark, moving closer at a steady speed as I step back from the break to track it.

Has to be someone Folk knows.

Or it wouldn’t have got past the Rebel Kings guarding the lane. But I hawk-eye it anyway. This is my land more than it’s ever been my brother’s, and he only brought his whole life back here today because I said he could.

The vehicle draws nearer. I study the shape of it like I do people’s mouths. Absorb the lines and angles before the make and model are decipherable, and it doesn’t take long to deduce it’s a car I’ve already clocked today—an old Passat with dinosaurs all over the backseat.

What I didn’t clock earlier?

The driver.

But as the Volkswagen pulls into the driveway and the engine cuts, I know who it is before he even steps out.

Oscar.

He unfolds his big body from the seat and stretches his arms, muscles flexing beneath the same linen shirt he wore this afternoon. Fawn-coloured against his tanned skin. Open at the neck and a little way down his chest, revealing the ink I was so taken by earlier. His solid presence enchants me. The way he moves without wasting a thing, elegant for a man that size, and given that my brother brought an army of graceful giants to his wedding, it says something about Oscar that I see it in him a thousand times more.

I can’t look away.

He doesn’t know I’m here.

I watch him reach into his car and lean across the front seat with an arch of flexibility.

He comes back with something small in his hand. A pouch he unzips with practiced fingers and works quickly with the contents, head dipped, brow furrowed.

I frown, trying to place what I see. The object in his grip as he presses it into a set of abs that wipe my brain clean of just about everything. It takes a minute to click what he’s doing. And when I do, yeah. Now I should look away.

Should.

I don’t.

I watch Oscar take a hit of insulin and tuck the pen in the pouch. Watch him reach into the car again and retrieve a bag he opens one-handed and upends into his mouth while shutting and locking his car. Already moving, resetting himself, and⁠—

Stop.

This is private.

The thought arrives late. But it blows through the trance Oscar’s abs have put me in. I ease back, dropping my gaze, halfway to disappearing before he ever knows I was here. But that feels wrong too and I pause in the dark, in the relentless quiet, and make a different choice.

I step out of the shadows in the same moment Oscar senses my presence and turns his head.

He finds me.

For a second, neither of us moves. But in the murky light I catch a flicker of recognition. As though he wasn’t expecting an audience…

And yet somehow, I’m exactly where he thought I’d be.

2 OSCAR

His name is Poet. Like his brother Folk, and his sister Finch, even his name is a world away from anyone I have ever known.