Chapter 12 Solomon #2
The drive into town took twelve minutes. She sat in the passenger seat with her knees drawn up, feet on the dash, watching the trees blur past the window. I didn’t tell her to put her feet down. I liked the way she made herself comfortable, claiming space in my car as if it were hers.
I pulled to a stop near the old storefront block where her shop used to stand. Mira reached for her seatbelt and clicked the release.
Nothing happened.
She clicked again but the buckle jammed.
“Hang on.” I leaned across the center console.
My hand found the clasp and my fingers worked the mechanism, but the angle put my face inches from hers. Her scent flooded my senses and my body locked on to her.
Our hands brushed over the buckle. Her fingers were warm, smaller than mine. The touch sent a current up my arm and into my lower region.
I looked up.
She was right there.
Eyes wide, lips parted, and I could count the copper flecks in the brown contact she wore over her blue eye. Her breath came out uneven, a soft exhale that I felt against my jaw, and my gaze dropped to her mouth without permission.
One inch. Maybe less.
The bond roared in my chest, howling, pressing against my ribs, demanding I close the gap. My hand tightened on the buckle. Her pulse jumped in her throat.
A tap on the window shattered the moment.
I straightened. A police officer stood outside, gesturing for us to move the car. We’d stopped in the middle of the lane.
“You can’t park here, sir.”
I cleared my throat. Mira turned her face toward the window, and even through her disguise I could see the flush climbing her neck. Unlike the usual, she was a loss for words or quips.
I pulled forward, found a proper space, and parked.
Neither of us mentioned the seatbelt.
***
The bookshop was a skeleton.
What remained of the walls stood blackened, gutted to the studs, the support beams exposed to the sky. The debris had been partially cleared by the construction crew, but the bones of the building still held the ghost of what it used to be.
Mira stopped at the threshold. Her hand came up and pressed against the scorched door frame, fingers tracing the edge.
“This was my dream, you know.” Her voice came out quiet.
“I picked this town and rented this space, did all the painting myself at dawn because I couldn’t sleep, hand-selecting every book on every shelf.” She stepped inside, her boots crunching on debris. “It was supposed to be a restart of my life.”
She kicked at a charred piece of wood and watched it crumble.
“Now I’m basically homeless. If it weren’t for you three, I’d be sleeping on the pavement.”
I watched her move through the wreckage, cataloguing the loss.
“We can have it rebuilt.”
The words came out before I’d cleared them in my head.
She turned. “You’d do that for me?”
“I’ll do anything for you.”
The sentence landed between us with weight. Her eyes searched my face, looking for the catch. She wouldn’t find one. I meant every word every time I say it out loud. Especially to her.
A beat passed. The space between us held still, charged with everything I wouldn’t say and everything she wasn’t ready to hear.
Then, bells jingled outside.
An ice cream truck, parked down the street, the tinny music drifting through the empty storefront.
Mira blinked and the moment broke. She took a breath, stepped back from whatever edge we’d been standing on, and the practiced casualness slid back into place.
“Do you want ice cream?”
The pivot was so abrupt it took me a second to track. But I knew to let it go. For now.
“Sure,” I replied.
She led us outside and across the street to the truck. The vendor was a teenager who looked half-asleep, barely glancing up from his phone.
“What do you want?” she asked me.
“Whatever you’re getting.”
She shrugged and turned to the window. “One of every flavor. Stacked.”
The teenager looked at her then the cone options and back at her. “Every flavor? That’s nine scoops.”
“Yes.”
“On one cone?”
“Do you have a bigger cone?”
He did not. Mira got a cup instead, and watched with visible delight as he piled nine different colors into a paper bowl until it looked structurally unsound.
I handed over the cash quickly and she beamed at me before walking away with her tower of sugar, spooning a bite with the focus of a woman conducting serious research.
I watched her. She stood in the afternoon sun with ice cream on her lip and her disguise firmly in place, and she was still the most luminous thing on the block.
Bright underneath all the dark, burning through every layer she’d built to contain herself.
But all of a sudden, the sensation hit without warning.
Eyes on us.
More than one pair.
My spine straightened. The ice cream, the sun, the warm afternoon dissolved into tactical awareness. I scanned the street. Storefronts, parked cars, pedestrians.
Nothing obviously wrong. No scent markers or visible threat.
But my instincts didn’t lie.
They’d kept me alive through wars and assassinations.
Someone was watching. And underneath the surveillance, faint but unmistakable, the distant click of a camera shutter.
Not Hudson. Or not just Hudson.
The sensation was wrong, too dispersed. One stalker created a focused point of attention, a single beam of malice aimed at its target.
My blood froze.
“Hey, what is it?” Mira was watching me, spoon halfway to her mouth. She’d noticed the shift in my posture immediately.
Of course she had. Hypervigilance recognized hypervigilance.
I turned to her and kept my expression neutral.
“I think we should go. It might rain.”
She looked up at the sky. Cloudless, bright, without a trace of weather for miles.
Her gaze came back to mine.
She knew I was lying. She also knew that I wouldn’t lie without reason, and that calculation played out behind her eyes in under a second.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Mira tossed the ice cream in a nearby bin without argument and fell into step beside me, close enough that her shoulder brushed my arm. The contact was deliberate. She was telling me, without words, that she trusted my instincts even when they made no sense.
I guided her back to the car, hand hovering at the small of her back without touching. My senses stayed wide open, cataloguing every movement on the street, every shadow in every doorway.
The eyes followed us.
All the way to the car, down the block.
And as I pulled onto the main road, checking the mirrors every three seconds, one thought pressed against the front of my mind.
We were missing a piece.
A piece bigger than Hudson.
And whatever it was, it already knew exactly where to find her.