The Fae King’s Debt

Three

Eight miles away from the Ashworth kitchen, where the cracked crystal sat cooling on the table and the percolator hissed its bitter warning into the air, a sedan pulled to the curb outside Harker University's Science Building. The passenger door swung open, and Ophelia Ashworth stepped onto the sidewalk with the unhurried confidence of someone who had not yet learned that the world could break its promises.

Her hair caught the midmorning light that particular shade of red that exists only in autumn, somewhere between copper and dark amber, pulled into a loose knot at the base of her skull that already threatened to come undone. She wore a field jacket two sizes too large, its pockets sagging with the weight of a field notebook, a trowel, and a half-eaten granola bar wrapped in wax paper. Her boots were scuffed past any respectable polish, the leather softened by months of kneeling in creek beds and crawling through underbrush.

Elias leaned across the console from the driver's seat, one hand still resting on the gearshift. He had the kind of face that arranged itself easily into a smile broad jaw, steady brown eyes, a nose that had been broken once during a pickup soccer game and had healed slightly crooked, giving his whole face an asymmetrical warmth. He reached for her hand, and she gave it, their fingers lacing together in a gesture so practiced it had become automatic.

"Pick you up at four?" he asked.

"Four. And don't be early this time Dr. Whitman keeps us late when the dissections run long."

"I won't be early."

"You were early on Thursday."

"Thursday was different."

"You come early and start blowing up my phone because you get bored seated in the car by yourself " She squeezed his hand once, then released it, shouldering her bag.

But as she turned away, she paused. Her eyes narrowed not with suspicion, not yet, but with the particular attentiveness of someone who studies living things for a living and has learned to read the small tells. Elias's fingers had moved to his jacket pocket, touching the fabric from the outside, pressing against something flat and rectangular. He withdrew his hand too quickly.

"What was that?"

"What was what?"

"Your pocket."

He smiled too easily, too smoothly. "Mints. Want one?"

She studied him for a beat longer than the question warranted. Then she shook her head, stepped back, and shut the car door. Elias waited until she'd reached the building's entrance before pulling away from the curb, and through the lobby's glass walls she watched his sedan signal left.

She was still standing there, one hand on the lobby door, when Maren Castillo came barreling through the stairwell with the force of a woman who had never once in her life walked at a measured pace. Maren was small, dark-haired, perpetually out of breath, and Ophelia's closest friend since freshman orientation, where they'd bonded over a shared horror of the icebreaker game and a mutual, immediate decision to leave it.

"Oph …Ophelia, wait, hold on …" Maren caught her elbow, panting. "Okay. Okay, I'm fine. I'm fine. I ran from the parking structure because I saw you and I need to talk to you about Saturday, which is your birthday, which is in four days, in case you've forgotten, which you haven't, but I'm reminding you anyway because …"

"I haven't forgotten my own birthday, Maren."

"You forgot it last year."

"I didn't forget it. I was in the field counting salamanders."

"You were in a creek. On your birthday. Counting salamanders." Maren released her elbow and fell into step beside her as they moved toward the stairwell. "So. Saturday. What do you want? And before you say 'nothing,' I want you to know that I've already ordered the cake and your mother has been texting me about peonies at six in the morning, which your mother is an intense woman, and I say that with love."

Ophelia laughed a real one, sudden and warm. "She's been planning for weeks. I think she's more excited than I am."

They climbed the stairs together, Maren recounting the peony text thread in unnecessary detail, and Ophelia listened with half her attention while the other half circled back to Elias's pocket. The way his fingers had pressed the fabric. The quick withdrawal. The too-smooth smile that had followed, practiced in a way his usual expressions were not.

She'd found the receipt three days ago, tucked into the visor of his car when she'd reached for a parking pass. A slip of white paper, crisp and recent, from Hartwell & Sons Fine Jewelry a shop she'd walked past a hundred times downtown, its window display always catching her eye with the way the light bent through the cut stones. The total at the bottom had been enough to make her breath catch. She hadn't mentioned it. She'd folded the receipt back into the visor and sat with the question of it like a stone in her shoe, turning it over each time it shifted.

They reached the second-floor landing, and Ophelia stopped walking. Maren took two more steps before noticing, doubling back.

"What?"

Ophelia leaned against the railing, crossing her arms over the field jacket. "Can I ask you something weird?"

"All your questions are weird. Go."

"Elias is hiding something from me."

Maren's eyebrows rose. "Hiding something like .. cheating hiding something, or "

"No. Not no, I don't think that." She shook her head, pulling at a loose thread on her jacket cuff. "I found a receipt. In his car. From a jewelry store. Hartwell and Sons, downtown. And it was Maren, it was a lot. The total was a lot."

Maren's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"How much is a lot?"

"Enough that he's been saving for months. Maybe longer."

The stairwell was quiet except for the distant hum of a ventilation system and the muffled percussion of footsteps on the floor above. Maren stared at her, and Ophelia watched the information travel across her friend's face confusion first, then calculation, then the slow widening of her eyes as the pieces rearranged themselves into a shape Ophelia had not yet allowed herself to consider.

"Ophelia."

"What?"

"Your birthday is Saturday."

"I'm aware."

"Your birthday is Saturday, and your boyfriend has a receipt from a jewelry store, and you're standing here asking me if he's hiding something?" Maren's voice climbed half an octave. "He's going to…Oph, do you think he's going to…"

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to. The word propose hung between them in the concrete stairwell, enormous and impossible and suddenly, terrifyingly plausible.

Ophelia's hand found the railing behind her and gripped it. "That's..that's a leap. It could be a watch. People buy watches at jewelry stores."

"Who buys a watch at Hartwell and Sons?"

"People with good taste."

"Ophelia."

"Maren."

They stared at each other. The ventilation system hummed. Somewhere above them, a door opened and closed. And then …simultaneously, as if the thought had been too large for either of them to hold alone… their faces cracked open into something wild and disbelieving, and they both screamed, the sound ricocheting off the stairwell walls and echoing up through the building's bones, loud enough that a professor on the third floor paused mid-lecture and looked toward the ceiling.