Survival Of The Fittest

This was her plan though, wasn't it? This was all she had.

"No," Ivy said, too honestly, before frowning and backtracking. "I mean—let me look at the map." As though she hadn't half-memorized it by now, as though its contents meant much to her, but the least she could do for Myles was pull her intellectual weight. Try to look at things objectively. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, both out of exhaustion and to clear another wave of tears that were threatening to fall, and then she looked.

"Not the village," she said, uneasy, "or the inner circle," she wanted to have a reason that wasn't bad memories and it wasn't hard to find one, "too many people, too risky," maybe she shouldn't bring up how much time she'd spent in both. "The woods, maybe? I spent a night out there a few days ago, it was... mostly quiet," she didn't want to go back there, she remembered the stench of wet rubber with a wrinkled nose, it was the smart thing to do, though, wasn't it?

"Somewhere where we can disappear for a while, anyway. Plenty of places that would work for that." She wanted a mattress and a pillow under her head, she wanted to be held. Myles hated it just as much, she knew. The two of them would be happiest holing up in the manor house on the hill and shooting anyone who so much as glanced in their direction but they couldn't do that, could they?

"Oh," that reminded her, "what did they give you, anyway?"

Myles huffed a little about the woods; camping had never been his idea of a good time, and that was doubly true now that he'd spent most of a week trudging around the wilderness. It wasn't like he had anything better or anything that outweighed Ivy's concerns about the sheltered areas, though. The woods were big enough. He'd gotten lost in there plenty already.

Anyway, there were fewer people by the day for them to run into.

Ivy's question had him glance around on reflex, regardless. Adonis could wander back at any moment, and given how these things tended to go, it was probably just better to assume that he'd show up at the worst possible time. Instead of answering right away, Myles got to his feet and offered Ivy his arm.

"Come on, let's get moving," he murmured. "I'll show you on the way and explain everything else." Admitting the whole embarrassing plan in front of her and all the cameras... ugh. But it was better than Adonis stumbling in and hearing how Myles had played him, successfully or not.

He had Ivy. They could plan together. Things had always been better that way.

He just had to keep not thinking too far ahead about how it would all turn out.

((Myles Roux continued in C'est La Vie))

"Yeah. Okay."

The secrecy threw her for a moment, but considering his glance around at her words she supposed she understood. He'd said Adonis had literally just been here, right? So he could come back. So he... didn't know what Myles had? When they'd been together this whole time? Either Adonis was stupider than she'd thought or he'd come up with some clever bullshit excuse as to what or where his weapon was. Or both. Smart as Myles was it wasn't the sort of trick she could imagine anyone with a brain in their head would fall for in these circumstances.

She barely knew Adonis. In a weird way she wanted him to be smarter than that. Because if he did it meant he had a reason to kill Tristan, some sort of plan, something she could be angry about, some reason he died that wasn't just bad luck or the whims of fate or some stupid mistake, but if he'd done it maliciously Myles wouldn't have stayed with him, would he? That sort of foresight was the kind of thing you didn't want in a bodyguard. Myles knew that. Which meant it was bad luck, or a stupid mistake, and Tristan had died for nothing, and they were all going to die for nothing, and what did the specifics matter, really, but it felt a little like they did.

All of them except one.

Ivy followed Myles out of the clearing, burying the implications, whispering dark things at the back of her mind.

>> Ivy Langley continued in C'est La Vie