Chapter 55: Through the Fog
There’s something about building a raft shirtless with a bunch of drunken nobles and sexually-frustrated outcasts that makes a man reassess how he got here.
Sweat stung my eyes, wood splinters dug into my palms like tiny accusations, and my pants had slid so far down my hips I could practically hear my underwear begging for a union rep.
I was still riding the high of the greenhouse turned bonfire, still vibrating with leftover adrenaline, and every single moment since had felt like we were rewriting scripture with our own blood.
Trees fell. Ropes tightened. And every time a nail was hammered, I imagined the Tower flinching somewhere, deep in its writhing spine of lies. I wasn’t just escaping this floor—I was evicting it.
"Are you sure this is going to float?" Leo grunted beside me, hauling another log into place. His biceps flexed in a way that would’ve made any straight noble question their loyalty to legacy marriages, and I watched two of them nearly walk into a tree while ogling him. "Because this wood is weirdly...squishy."
"It’s tropical," I muttered, wiping my brow with a piece of someone’s discarded shirt. "Everything here is squishy. The fruit, the air, the morals—"
"I saw a man licking a bush earlier," Miko added, walking past with a perfectly carved oar balanced over one shoulder like a fashionable war crime. "He said it tasted like orgasms and honeycomb."
"Sounds like Aria’s last attempt at a poem," I muttered, but my voice faltered as I looked over to where he was kneeling over bindings, tying knots with a precision that could only come from years of either military training or very specific types of self-bondage.
"I heard that," Aria called sweetly without looking up. "And for the record, orgasms and honeycomb are a tragic combination. The sugar alone—"
"Stop," I said, holding up a hand. "We’re building rafts here, not lube commercials."
"We can multitask," Willow chimed in from her pile of nobles, one of whom she was currently using as a chair while another massaged her feet and another braided her hair with vines and small golden charms. "Sex and survival go hand in hand."
Somehow—gods help us—we kept building.