EMBER’S POV

We all turn.

Knox has been silent through all of it, arms crossed, jaw getting harder by the minute, and now he pushes off the wall with the specific energy of a man who has reached his absolute limit.

“No,” he says. “I am not drinking poison to smell like a diseased beta, I am not wearing a surgical mask to hide a fictional weeping rash, and I am not sending my fiancée onto a floor full of rogue men she’s supposed to be—shopping for. Absolutely not. Find another way in.”

“There isn’t another way in,” Nathaniel says.

“Then we find a different night. A different angle. Something...