Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
The fire roared back to life.
It came without warning, the way it always did in these dreams, erupting from nothing into everything.
Flames crawled up the walls of Norman House like living things, black and orange tongues licking at the wallpaper her grandmother had chosen thirty years ago, devouring the crown molding her grandfather had installed with his own hands.
The heat pressed against her skin, searingly close, impossibly real.
Smoke clawed at her throat, thick and acrid, filling her lungs with the taste of everything she'd ever loved burning to ash.
Somewhere down the hall, someone pounded on a door. The rhythm was frantic, desperate, fists against wood in a pattern that meant help me, help me, help me.
Someone screamed.
She tried to move toward the sound, but her feet wouldn't cooperate.
The floor had become something liquid and uncertain, shifting beneath her with every step.
She couldn't find the doorknob. She couldn't see past the wall of smoke that had descended like a curtain between her and the people who needed her.
Her hand swept through empty air, searching, grasping at nothing.
The pounding grew louder. The screaming grew closer. And she couldn't reach them, couldn't save them, couldn't do anything but stand there choking while her grandparents' house collapsed around her in a symphony of cracking timber and shattering glass.
"Sabrina."
The word cut through the roar like a blade through smoke. Clear and steady and utterly out of place in the chaos.
Her eyes flew open.
Dark room. A ceiling she didn't recognize, painted some neutral color that caught no light.
Her lungs dragged in air that didn't burn, didn't taste like destruction, didn't coat her throat with the residue of everything she'd lost. The sheets tangled around her legs like restraints, damp with sweat that had soaked through the thin cotton of her borrowed sleep shirt.
Her heart slammed against her ribs so hard it hurt, each beat a physical impact that reverberated through her chest and up into her throat.
Not Norman House. Not the fire. Not that hallway filled with smoke and screaming.
Colby's spare room. Colby's house. Safe.
"Hey." The voice came again, closer now, cutting through the fog of residual terror. "Sabrina, it's Colby. You're safe."
She blinked toward the doorway, her eyes struggling to adjust to the darkness.
His shadow filled the frame, broad and solid, backlit by the faint glow from the hallway nightlight she'd noticed when she'd gone to the bathroom earlier.
He looked like a sentinel standing there, like something that had been posted to guard against exactly this kind of moment.
"I thought I heard..." He stepped into the room, careful and slow, his movements deliberate in the way of someone approaching a spooked animal. "You were calling out. Something about a door. Can I come in?"
Her throat worked, trying to produce words through the tightness that still gripped it. She nodded, then remembered he probably couldn't see the motion in the darkness.
"Yes," she managed. The word came out scratched and raw, as if she'd actually been breathing smoke.
He moved to the side of the bed, not reaching for the overhead light switch.
Instead, the small lamp on the dresser clicked to life, throwing soft amber light across his face.
His hair was rumpled from sleep, sticking up at odd angles.
His beard was twisted at places that showed he'd been sleeping on his side.
His T-shirt was twisted slightly at the hem, like he'd rolled out of bed and come straight here without stopping to adjust anything.
He'd heard her. He'd come.
Her hands shook against the sheets, tremors she couldn't control radiating up through her wrists and into her arms.
"I'm okay," she said, but her voice came out ragged, too high, and not okay at all. The lie hung between them, obvious and pathetic.
He sat on the edge of the mattress, close enough that she could feel the warmth radiating from him, but keeping a careful distance.
Like he was giving her room to bolt if she needed it.
Like he understood that sometimes the thing you needed most was space to fall apart without someone trying to put you back together before you were ready.
"Talk to me," he said. Not a command. An invitation.
She stared at his shoulder because his eyes felt like too much. Too warm, too steady, too likely to break down the walls she was barely holding up.
"The fire," she said. "I was back in the hallway.
The one on the second floor, near the guest rooms. I could hear people.
Someone was pounding on a door, and someone else was screaming, and I couldn't find the doorknob.
The smoke was everywhere, and I couldn't see anything, and I couldn't..." Her chest seized, a physical constriction that stole the rest of her words. "I couldn't get them out."
He shook his head once, a small but definite motion. "You did get them out."
"It didn't feel like it." She tapped her temple with shaky fingers. "Not in here. In here, I failed. In here, they're still trapped behind doors I can't find."
His gaze softened, something shifting behind his eyes that looked almost like recognition. Like he understood exactly what she meant, had maybe lived through his own version of this particular nightmare.
"You're not there now," he said quietly.
"I know that," she snapped, frustration bleeding through the fear, and then immediately winced at her own tone. "I mean... my brain knows. Logic knows. But my body didn't get the memo. My lungs still think there's smoke. My heart still thinks I'm dying."
"Bodies are stubborn," he said, no judgment in his voice. "They remember things longer than we want them to." He paused. "Scoot over?"
She blinked at him. "What?"
"Just a little." His mouth tipped into something wry and gentle, a half-smile that somehow made the darkness feel less oppressive. "I'm not leaving you in here shaking like that. But I'm not assuming anything either."
She shifted toward the far side of the bed without consciously deciding to do it. Her body moved before her brain caught up, drawn toward the steadiness he offered like a compass needle finding north.
The mattress dipped as he eased onto it, sitting next to her rather than lying down. His weight felt solid. Grounding. Real in a way the nightmare hadn't been, in a way the smoke and the screaming and the doors she couldn't find had failed to be.
"Put your hand here," he said quietly, patting his chest over his heart.
She stared at him. "What?"
"Right here." He tapped again, the soft thump of his palm against cotton. "Match your breathing to mine. It helps sometimes. Gives your body something real to sync with instead of the panic."
She hesitated, caught between the urge to reach for him and the years of conditioning that told her needing comfort was weakness, that asking for help was failure, that showing vulnerability was an invitation for someone to use it against you later.
But Colby wasn't Gavin. Colby had never been Gavin. And she was so tired of being afraid of things that might not even be dangerous.
She slid her palm over the soft cotton of his shirt. His heartbeat thumped against her skin, steady and strong, a rhythm that didn't falter or race. Warm. Real. Alive.
"In," he said. He drew in a slow, deliberate breath, his chest lifting under her hand. "Out."
She followed his pace. In. Out. In. Out. His rhythm pulled hers along, patient and unhurried, until the jagged edges of her breathing began to smooth. The tightness in her chest loosened by degrees, the iron band around her ribs unclenching one notch at a time.
Her fingers curled slightly, catching in the fabric of his shirt without meaning to. The soft hairs of his beard brushed the backs of her fingers. She realized she was leaning closer, her shoulder brushing against his arm, drawn into his orbit by some gravity she hadn't known existed until now.
"Sorry," she muttered, starting to pull back.
"For what?" he asked.
"This." She gestured weakly at the bed, the room, the shaking that still hadn't completely stopped. "Middle-of-the-night rescue. Again. You're going to start thinking this is all I do. Wake up screaming and need someone to talk me down."
"That's kind of my thing," he said. "Middle-of-the-night rescues. I'm practically a professional."
She let out a sound that might have been a laugh if it hadn't been so watery, so close to tears. "I didn't even smell smoke this time. My brain just invented it wholesale."
"That's because there isn't any," he said. "Just my questionable laundry and whatever that candle is that Bree left in the bathroom."
Her mouth twitched despite everything. The tight band around her chest loosened another notch.
He watched her quietly for a moment, his dark eyes steady in the lamplight. "You want to tell me what else that nightmare dragged up? Because I don't think it was just the fire."
She swallowed hard. Of course, he'd noticed. Of course, he'd seen through the surface to the rot underneath.
"Gavin," she admitted. "He was in it, too.
Not in the fire, but... his voice was there.
In my head. The way he used to look at me when something went wrong.
Like he was already writing the closing argument, already building the case for why everything was my fault.
" She pressed her lips together. "Combine that with flames and screaming and doors I can't open and. .. yeah."
Colby's jaw tightened, a muscle flexing his beard moving ever-so-slightly. "He's not here."
"He was on the sidewalk," she whispered. "Today. This afternoon. He exists. He's real. He's in Copper Moon, and I don't know why, and that terrifies me more than the fire does."