13. Chapter thirteen
Chapter thirteen
Kieran
M y head jerks toward the balcony before I even mean to. My neck aches from the sudden twist, but I can’t stop staring.
He’s here. For real this time. Alive. Whole.
Something inside me cracks when I take him in. He’s leaning against the frame like it’s just another night, like the world isn’t smeared across my sheets and my skin. Arms folded, that crooked grin slicing his face, eyes glinting in the starry night.
Those dark, intense eyes are on me—only me. Not on the mess in this room, not on the body on my bed, not on the godsdamned ceiling. Only on me.
Relief punches through me so hard it almost knocks me over. Relief, then fury, then something wild I can’t name because none of it fits inside me right now. My chest heaves, my throat burns, and all I can do is clutch the dagger like it's proof I didn’t dream any of this.
My lips part. No sound comes out. My voice is gone, swallowed whole.
Max tilts his head. “Guess you don’t need me as much as I thought.”
I shake my head. Not in denial, just because I don’t know how else to make the room move, to make myself real again.
He’s in front of me in a heartbeat, closer than I thought possible, and a whole-body shudder wrecks through me as the adrenaline finally crashes down.
He’s here.
The dagger clatters to the floor. My hands fly to my face, fingers sticky, useless.
He doesn’t rush me. He just wraps both hands around my neck, thumbs gliding—slow, deliberate—over my raging pulse.
It grounds me, centers me, calms me in ways I never thought possible. The panic thins at the edges, like someone pinched the static out of the air.
“Easy now,” he murmurs, voice low. “Breathe with me.”
His thumbs keep that steady rhythm against my pulse as I comply, each stroke dragging me back into my own skin, back into the room.
Inside I’m raging, spinning, a storm tearing itself apart without knowing which way is up, which way is out.
My chest can’t keep pace, my thoughts crash into each other, wild and useless.
But his eyes, his eyes are calm. Like the demons Tass spoke about, that darkness swirling in the night sky is diminished. For now.
“Was that your first time taking a life?”
I nod, let out a shaky breath, and force myself to focus on those strong fingers, that steady gaze anchoring me.
“It’s normal to feel raw, to feel like the ground’s gone out from under you. The first one always cuts the deepest, or so they say.”
“You kill all the time,” I blurt before I mean to.
His lips press together for a beat. “Not entirely true. It’s Walkers. Mostly. And I lost my humanity a long time ago.”
I look into those dark depths and the word liar hangs on my tongue, bitter and useless. I shake my head. I know how he thinks about himself, I just don’t believe it.
Because he cares. He might not say it, but he shows it. He shows it to me.
He can be a sociopath or whatever he calls himself for all I care. It’s not like it matters, anyway. In this world, we don’t have the luxury they had in the old. It doesn’t matter if you deviate from the norm. Because we all do. We all deviate. Normal doesn’t exist.
The only thing that matters in this fucked-up world is survival, and our therapy? Our therapy is violence.
And shit, part of my therapy is probably him, because when his lips find mine, soft and urgent, all the stress leaves my body, draining out like poison, becoming something else—something I can almost survive.
“Relax. Breathe.” He kisses me again, just a sweep of his lips. “It’s okay. You did nothing wrong.”
“I killed someone.”
“Someone who was meant to lose his life anyway.”
“How do you know he’ll be turned soon? He could be Touched for months, years.”
He strokes my cheek with the back of his hand, and with every slow pass my shoulders loosen a fraction.
“I don’t. But I like to think someone as vile, as rotten as him is close to changing.
Otherwise…” He exhales, eyes narrowing, steady.
“It was defense. Nothing more. You survived. That’s all that matters. ”
And I choose to believe him. I have to.
“We need to go. Now. Give me your clothes and get in the shower.”
I do as he says, still dazed, stripping bare, only now realizing my pants are still bunched halfway down my ass. Heat rushes to my face, and I blink, fumbling, but he says nothing about it as I head into my little bathroom.
I just kinda wish the first time I got naked in front of him had gone a bit differently.
When I come back out of the shower, skin rubbed raw, fresh clothes on, the body is gone. The bloody sheets are wrapped tight around it, my ruined clothes probably bundled inside.
In one swift move, too strong to be normal, he hoists the body over his shoulders in a brutal carry, strides to the balcony, and just… tosses it over the railing.
The dull thud below makes my stomach twist, but he doesn’t even flinch. He’s already hitching a leg over the edge.
“Come. I know where to go.”
“Where?” I slip into the flip-flops I rinsed and dried. His glare flicks down at them, a muscle ticking in his jaw.
“You know what? I don’t want you to survive that moron just to die falling off the damned balcony. Take the fucking stairs after you’ve locked your door, go round the block. I’ll meet you there.”
“Can you carry him alone?”
He scoffs like I just insulted him. “Not the entire way. But I have my methods. Keep to the shadows of the wall.”
So I do. I step outside, lock the door with shaking fingers, and hurry down the stairwell. By the time I round the corner, my pulse is pounding so loud it’s all I can hear. Then a three-tone whistle cuts through the night. Low. Precise. Him.
He’s already there, a dark shape in the alley.
Doesn’t say a word, just jerks his chin for me to follow.
The brute’s body hangs over his shoulder like it weighs nothing, and my stomach flips at the thought of how fucking strong you have to be to haul something like that.
I stay close, my heart hammering every step.
We move fast, hugging the wall, and after five minutes, maybe less, we reach a gate tucked into the stone. Max stops and leans close, voice barely above a whisper. “Grab my radio, please?”
He’s so calm. Too calm. Like this is routine, like carrying a corpse through the city at night is just another Tuesday. I know he does it for my sake—the steady tone, the easy words—but it’s still surreal as hell.
I fumble the radio from his black cargo pants, and hold it up. He mutters into it, something clipped about a Walker spotted less than a click from here. Static hisses back.
And sure enough, the watcher at the gate stirs, unlatches the lock, and hurries past us, disappears into the city. Before I can blink, we’re slipping through and the forest swallows us whole.
We move in silence for a couple of minutes, then Max breaks left, heads off the path and through the bushes, up where the ground climbs.
“I need you to be my eyes and ears for a bit. Can you do that?” he asks without turning.
“Few people wander here; there can be Walkers that wash up outside the walls. There’s a reason we patrol so much.
The north is closest to the mainland, and Walkers show up in these woods all the time. And since my hands are a bit full…”
I nod, determined, not that he can see it. “I got this,” I say, because saying it makes me feel a bit bolder.
“I know you do. And you need to do something else. Can you grab the radio again?” His voice is as calm as I’ve ever heard it, like he’s soothing a frightened animal.
I murmur a high, cracked yes.
“Good. Grab it and switch to channel nineteen.”
It takes me a beat in the dark, but I manage. “Now what?”
“That’s the line Tass and I use. And now Sami as well. Tell her I’m fine but we’re going off-grid for a couple days. She knows what that means.”
Off-grid. There it is again. My chest tightens, but I nod, thumb hovering over the radio. “Should I… say hi?”
“Go for it,” Max says, and I do exactly that.
The radio coughs to life. “Hey dickweed. This better be good—aren’t you at Kieran’s?”
I swallow. “Hey, Tass. It’s me. We’re fine, but… we’re going off-grid for a bit.”
Tass laughs; it’s a happy cackle. “Ohhh. He’s showing it to you already? I told you he would! Have fun, Kieran!”
Heat flashes through me, but I force the words out fast. “We’ll be back in a couple of days; can you say I’m sick at the bar? Thank you.”
I click the radio off before she can say anything else. The silence after feels heavy, too heavy.
“What does that mean? Why does she say ‘have fun’?” I mutter.
His lips twitch. “She thinks I’m taking you away to fuck your brains out in my little hidey-hole. Which I’m more than happy to do. But not right now; not like this.”
I trip over a root, nearly stumble, and try not to focus on the fuck your brains out part. “Hidey-hole?” I ask instead.
“Yes. Hidey-hole. You’ll see. Now you need to do another thing for me.”
“What’s that?”
“Grab that dagger of yours. And when you see something move in the shadows, throw it.”
I cock my head, tugging it free from my hip. “You assume I can throw it? We haven’t started that part of training yet.”
He chuckles, dark and certain. “Oh, I don’t assume anything. I know it.”
When I don’t answer, he goes on. “When you had your little fit in the bar with that guy—well, this guy.” He taps the corpse on his shoulder with one finger. “I saw the dagger in your hand. You were perfectly poised to throw it at his head.”
“Heart, actually,” I say, heat crawling up my neck.
“Knew it. My golden boy, full of surprises.”
I fucking blush. He’s carrying a dead body on his shoulder, we’re hauling it through the woods to dump it somewhere, and he can still make me blush. Of course he can.