Chapter 4
CLOCHE
Harper
THE NIGHT IS OVERCAST, THE stars and moon hidden behind thick clouds. There’s no breeze, just a sticky warmth that settles on my skin. Everything seems heavier than it should be. The darkness beyond the reach of my headlamp. The silence. My heart.
I pull my phone from my pocket as I walk along the path that leads to Arthur’s dumping ground along the Ballantyne River, which snakes past the outskirts of Cape Carnage on its way to the sea.
It took a few hours, but I finally mustered up the courage to take my phone off Do Not Disturb mode after Nolan didn’t appear at the cottage like I thought he might.
And then, I mustered up even more courage to look through the latest notifications from the Sleuthseekers Discord.
More speculation about the deaths of Sam and Vinny.
More talk of coming to town. More fury that churned up a torrent of worry in my guts.
Finally, I set the phone down and stared at the chessboard in my living room until I forced myself to move.
I was quietly hoping Nolan would come by to argue with me about my text telling him to leave.
But he hadn’t. Maybe he finally gave up trying to make us into something we could never be.
After everything that’s happened, I’m not even sure he’ll be safe if he gets away, though it’s his best shot.
So I hope he left. It’s not what I want—it’s what we both need, I keep telling myself.
But that mantra settles with sharp edges in my thoughts. It pierces every time it repeats.
I pocket my phone, a long breath slipping past my lips.
That’s when I hear a rustling in the woods to my right.
I halt and pan my headlamp over the bushes and trees. I can’t see anything through the thick wall of the woods. Not even the movement of branches and leaves.
With a final pass of my light over the forest, I resume my trek down the path.
I fall back into a rhythm, rounding the last corner before the stretch that leads to the road, when I hear it again.
I stop dead. I don’t even breathe. Just down the path are animal prints in the drying mud. It’s hard to tell when they were made—it could have been moments ago, or it could have been hours. But I recognize the bear tracks immediately.
A branch cracks to my right.
“Bear,” I say in a firm voice. I keep my eyes on the woods as I let my backpack slide from one shoulder. I pull the collapsible shovel free of its straps and click the handle into place. Nothing moves around me as I curl trembling fingers around the bear spray in my pocket. “Hey, bear.”
There’s another rustle of leaves, and though I squint into the dark, I see nothing.
“Bear . . . ” I withdraw the spray canister from my pocket. “You should know that I taste like regret and broken dreams.”
Silence.
The road is within sight. I can’t outrun a bear. I should stand my ground, wait until it either makes an appearance or moves off. My knuckles blanch as I secure my grip around the handle of the shovel.
I flip the actuator tab and the safety clip on the spray. “I’ll take your silence as tacit agreement that I’m not worth eating.”
My heart hammers, blood roaring in my head. Every beat of my pulse feels like a march toward a torturous end.
“Fuck it,” I hiss, bolting down the path.
I don’t look back. I can’t hear if the bear follows. I’m not sure if I even scream. I just aim for that road and run.
My boots crunch on the gravel shoulder. I race across asphalt. I’ve just hit the opposite shoulder when a dark form emerges in front of me from the bushes next to the trail that leads to the floodplain.
I don’t even think. I just fire my spray with my left hand and swing with my right.
A pained cry breaks the night a moment before my shovel connects with Nolan’s face.
“What the fuck,” he cries as he falls to his knees, hands splayed over his face.
“Oh my god, I’m sorry—”
“Why are you always spraying me with shit?”
I kneel at Nolan’s side and drop my weapon and bear spray, rummaging for my water bottle. My hands are still trembling as I pour the contents across his brow. “I thought you were a bear.”
“Clearly not.”
Though I douse him with the entire contents of my bottle, it’s not enough to stop the pain. Nolan lets a string of curses fly as I hook a hand around his elbow. “Why are you like a bazillion pounds of muscle?” I grit out as I tug him up to his feet.
“Why are you so violent to me?”
“You came here to kill me,” I say, wrapping his heavy arm over my shoulder and guiding him toward the path that I doubt he can see. “I guess your whole ‘make no mistake, if I go down, I’m taking you with me’ speech really hit home.”
“If I remember correctly, that’s when you sprayed me in the face with that Piss-Off! shit. It actually burned even worse than this, by the way.”
I pat his chest and he growls. “Small blessings, Nolan.”
Conversation falls away to simple instructions and a slew of expletives as we make our way toward the river.
When we get to the bank, Nolan ditches his backpack and strips off his shirt and dives into the water.
He comes up only long enough to take a breath and go down again, over and over.
The immediate need to fix his pain and the guilt for injuring him fade the longer it goes on, replaced with something else: fear.
Nolan is here. He didn’t run like I’d asked him to. And I’m going to take a guess that his shit mood from earlier today has been somewhat . . . amplified.
That fear is absolutely confirmed when he rises from the river and turns, his chest glistening with every ragged breath, a trickle of blood from his nose illuminated by the lantern on the shore.
His eyes never leave mine as he stalks from the water.
I should probably apologize again. Or help him out of the water, maybe, though the way he marches through it with his soaked pants slung low on his hips makes me think he doesn’t really need my assistance.
I can’t do anything but stand motionless anyway.
It feels like all my organs fall like stones to my feet.
And those feet should probably be running.
But they’re glued to the silty floodplain.
I’m trapped by the ferocity of his gaze, too afraid to move as the predator draws closer, too enthralled by the danger that closes in.
“What—”
He swipes through the blood on his lip—
“The—”
More trickles from his nose to replace it—
“Fuck.”
He stops within reach, but he doesn’t touch me. He just seethes, staring down at me with such unwavering intensity that I struggle not to shrink beneath the weight of his glare.
A long moment of silence passes between us. My bottom lip slides between my teeth. This nervous habit often draws his attention. Sometimes even his touch. But not this time. And I get the sense he’s prepared to wait me out.
“You’re here,” I finally say with forced nonchalance.
Nolan snorts a mirthless laugh but doesn’t reply.
“I’m . . . surprised.”
His head tilts. “You’re ‘surprised’?”
I nod once.
“Right. Because you texted me and told me to leave.” He leans closer, as though trying to imprint the words into my brain with his relentless fury. “Texted. Me.”
I swallow, nearly succumbing to the urge to back away. “ . . . Yep.”
Nolan closes the distance between us in a single step, halting so close that I can smell the river on his skin. “Say it to my face.”
“Okay.” I square my shoulders and lift my chin. “Get the fuck out of Cape Carnage before the Sleuthseekers show up.”
A beautifully vicious smile erupts on his face and he finally breaks his stare to search the shadows behind me, just for a breath. He shakes his head. Then his eyes are on me again, his glare even more brutal than it had been a moment ago. “No.”
The air thickens. I take an unsteady breath, but it still feels like I’m drowning from the inside out.
I can’t have this, I tell myself. It’s not what we both need. It will hurt me. It will hurt us both.
Every thought cuts deeper, until my chest is scraped clean.
“You should leave,” I whisper, my voice caught in a painful knot. “You should—”
There’s a sudden heat as Nolan’s callused hand envelops my throat. My eyes snap back to his. “Stop fucking telling me to leave. I’m not going anywhere,” he growls.
“But—”
His free hand presses across my mouth, his palm hot and damp against my lips.
“Please, Harper.” There’s so much more than anger and frustration in those two words.
There’s despair. Desire. Maybe even fear.
I can feel the surge of his pulse against my skin.
My eyes drift closed as Nolan’s touch whispers along the length of my jaw. “Just stop . . . ”
Time grinds to a halt. When I open my eyes, all I see is Nolan. The words he’s about to say burn their indelible mark on my heart before they even make their way into the night.
“I am in love with you, Harper,” he says.
My cry is lost to his palm. When I grip his wrist to pull his hand away, he doesn’t budge. When I shake my head, tears falling from my lashes, he follows the motion, not letting go.
“I don’t want to hear it. You can’t change how I feel.
” Nolan’s focus drops to the tears that glisten on my cheeks.
“I don’t want you to say anything in return,” he whispers, like he’s hoping a softer voice will hide the pain I can still hear in his voice.
“I fucked up from the start with you. I know I’ve got work to do to make up for it.
I don’t expect you to feel the same way, and even if you do, I don’t want to know. ”
My head tilts, my silent question etched between my furrowed brows.