Chapter 14
Fourteen
Sloane
Iwoke in a haze.
First, I noticed the warmth. For it was everywhere, surrounding me. For a few seconds, I didn’t question it. Didn’t think about it, just existed inside it.
Then I noticed the rise and fall beneath my cheek. Slow. Rhythmic.
Breathing.
Not mine.
My mind lagged behind my body, still caught in that oppressive, disoriented space between sleep and waking. My head throbbed—the dull, swollen ache that comes from crying until there’s nothing left, and my limbs seemed loose.
Then it hit me.
Callan.
My eyes flew open, and heat came rushing up my neck and flooding my face as everything crashed back in sharp, vivid detail. The way he’d held me, the way I’d let him; the way I’d pressed into him like he was the only thing keeping me from falling apart.
The rest of it—his hands, I groaned, his mouth. His fingers inside me. The way I’d said his name. The sounds I’d made, oh God, the way I’d come apart, with his eyes locked on mine the entire time.
My stomach dropped. What the hell had I done?
This was Callan. The same man who’d corrected my work in front of colleagues, who’d made me feel like I had to earn every inch of ground I stood on in this building.
And last night he’d held me like I mattered, as if I were worth being careful with.
It made little sense.
I knew he was already awake.
His breathing hadn’t changed, hadn’t shifted the way it does when someone wakes up, which meant he’d been lying here, conscious, with me draped across his chest, and he hadn’t moved.
His arm was still around me, his hand resting at my waist, warm through my shirt, steady and unmoving.
He was watching me.
I froze.
For a long moment, neither of us moved or spoke.
Then I looked up.
His eyes met mine; they weren’t guarded, nor sharp or calculating or closed off the way they’d been for years. They were quiet, steady.
Funny enough, that terrified me more than anything outside those walls.
I tried to sit up as panic surged through my chest—not fear, worse. Exposure. The sudden, overwhelming awareness that he had seen me. All of me. Every ugly, broken, desperate piece, and I couldn’t take any of it back.
His hand tightened around my waist, only enough pressure to pause me.
“Shh,” he murmured.
Low, rough with sleep. A voice I’d never heard from him before now.
“Sloane, don’t.”
I hovered there, caught halfway between pulling away and staying where I was; to put distance between us, rebuild whatever wall I could before this got any more complicated than it already was.
My body, the treacherous bitch, didn’t listen.
“Just rest here with me,” he said.
His thumb sliding against my side, stroking.
“Don’t worry,” he added quietly, his eyes still on mine. “I don’t hold what happened against you as anything more than a moment of complete lunacy in a world that seems to be falling apart rapidly.”
The words should have relieved me; they should have been exactly what I needed—a door left open, an exit offered freely, permission to pretend none of it had happened and go back to whatever version of normal we could cobble together.
Instead, something in my chest ached because he was letting me off the
hook, offering me a way out.
But he wasn’t letting go.
“Lie here,” he said softly. “Just rest.”
His heartbeat was steady beneath my cheek. I could feel it through his shirt, strong and even and real. The most real thing I’d felt in two days other than fear.
My body won the argument, and I felt myself settle back against him, the tension draining out of me despite every alarm going off in my head. My fingers against his shirt, the warmth of his skin underneath, the solid weight of him.
He let his breath out, and his arm stayed around me as we lay there.
Too close. Too aware of each other. Too aware of what had happened and what it meant, neither of us willing to say it out loud.
* * *
After a while, I forced myself to sit up.
Callan let me go immediately.
No resistance this time, his hands fell away from me, deliberately, as if he were being careful not to make it seem like a loss.
Oddly, it felt like one anyway.
The warmth disappeared the second I moved, and I hated how acutely I registered it; my body tracked the exact moment his hands left my skin and felt the absence like something important had been taken away.
I stood; bad idea.
My legs buckled slightly, weak and shaky beneath me, not just from hours on a couch that was never meant for sleeping, but from everything. The adrenaline crash. The crying, the grief that had emptied me and left nothing behind but trembling hands and body.
Heat crept up my neck again, involuntary and immediate.
The way he’d looked at me, the way his fingers had felt, how my body had responded to him like it had been looking for that—for years—and I’d never known it.
My pulse kicked up at the thought, and I shut it down. Hard.
Not now, I told myself as I started pacing back and forth across the office carpet. My hands moved while I talked—gesturing, fidgeting, needing somewhere to put the energy that was building inside me with no outlet.
“This is insane,” I muttered, raking a hand through my hair.
“How long can we actually stay here? I mean—logistically, we’re in a decent position.
Food for days, maybe weeks if we’re careful.
Water’s not an issue; we have the generators, the hurricane shutters. We’re basically locked inside a vault.”
I gestured vaguely at the surrounding walls.
“But what if they get in? What if the generators fail? What if the food runs out faster than we think? What if—”
“Sloane.”
His voice cut through the spiral.
I kept pacing.
“What if this isn’t just local? What if it’s everywhere? What if the military levels the whole area? What if no one’s coming? What if—”
“Sloane.”
His voice was louder this time.
I stopped mid-stride and turned toward him.
He was still sitting on the couch, watching me with an expression I wasn’t used to seeing on his face, not irritation, but concern.
“Stop spiraling,” he said quietly.
I opened my mouth to argue—to tell him this wasn’t spiraling, this was reality, this was rational thinking based on what we’d seen with our own eyes hours ago—but he spoke first.
“You’re thinking ten steps ahead of something we don’t even understand yet.”
I exhaled through my nose. “I watched someone get torn apart, Callan. I think spiraling is pretty fucking fair.”
His jaw tensed, but he didn’t argue.
He stood slowly instead and walked toward me, not crowding me or reaching for me, but closing the distance enough that I knew he was there—his presence, his steadiness, the calm that radiated off him—it made me want to lean into it.
“We’re in the strongest structure within a five-block radius,” he said evenly. “Reinforced exterior. Steel shutters rated for Category 5 storms. Controlled access at every entry point. We’ve got food, water, and backup power that will run for weeks.”
He held my gaze. “That’s not nothing.”
My chest rose and fell too fast; my heartbeat felt like it was in my throat.
“I can’t calm down,” I admitted.
Quiet. Raw. The admission I never would have made to him before yesterday.
His face changed, a softening I almost missed.
“I know,” he said.
He reached out, his hand moved toward my arm—hesitated, hung there in the space between us. I saw the brief war behind his eyes.
His fingers wrapped around my wrist. Light, with just enough contact to pull me out of my own head and anchor me to something outside of it.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did.
“Right now,” he said, his voice steady and low, “we’ll make a plan, not for the end of the world, but for today, just today.”
His thumb rested against the inside of my wrist, over my pulse. I knew he felt how fast it was going.
“Today we inventory the food supply and anything else of use. We secure every access point again—every door, every hatch, every panel. We conserve power wherever we can, and we move through this, one thing at a time.”
The steadiness in him was infuriating but what I needed.
“You can fall apart later if you have to,” he said quietly. “But not right now. Right now I need you here.”
My breathing slowed; his voice had reached the part of my brain that was spinning out of control and dialed it back.
“Okay,” I whispered.
His fingers lingered on my wrist, half a second longer than it needed to, as his thumb pressed against my pulse one more time—deliberate, I was sure of it now—and he simply let go.
His hand dropped to his side, and the air between us didn’t settle.
I sat at one of the long cafeteria tables with the building blueprints spread out between us, the paper curling at the edges from the humidity that lived inside this building year-round.
The overhead lights cast everything in a flat, muted glow that stripped the color out of the room and made the cafeteria less like a place where families ate overpriced sandwiches and more like a command center.
Callan stood across from me, one hand braced on the table, the other holding a pen he’d been using to mark access points on the floor plan. His sleeves were pushed up to his elbows. His jaw was ridged; he looked like a man working a problem, which, in reality, was what we were doing.
Working a problem.
“Okay,” I said, forcing myself into clinical mode. If I treated this like a project—like a crisis response plan with deliverables and action items—then perhaps I could keep functioning. Maybe I wouldn’t see that woman’s arm reaching up between the bodies every time I closed my eyes.
“We secure all lower-level doors,” I continued, tracing a finger along the blueprint. “Even the submerged service access points on the exterior. Especially those. If one of them gets into the water intake system—”
“It won’t,” he said. “The intake filters are industrial grade. Nothing larger than tiny particulates gets through.”
“Still,” I pressed. “We should double-check.”
He nodded once. “Agreed.”
I shifted to the next section of the layout.