Chapter 26
A Crisis, With Amenities
JULIETTE
The room behind the library had exactly three virtues: a lock, a shower, and a silence so thick it felt structural. I woke to it the next morning, gray light filtering through the high window, its timber shutters cracked just enough to admit the smudged light of the savannah.
The night before, after the guest chaos had peaked and then flatlined, those whose suites sat within the secure perimeter had been escorted back in pairs.
But the western tents remained a hard no, which left me relegated to the library wing with a borrowed blanket and a flat pillow.
It was a strange, displaced transition—going from the heat of Nick’s hands to the distinct luxury-travel experience of waking up in the equivalent of a storage closet.
My alternate life was three miles away in a bush suite I couldn’t reach. My laptop. My notebook. My fantasy novel with the cracked spine. My phone charger. My sense of order. All the small, stupid things I’d planned to hide behind while pretending I had any control left over this trip.
A sharp knock at the door broke the silence. Two raps, hard and efficient.
I pulled the thin blanket around my shoulders and opened the door.
Nick stood in the corridor, looking like he hadn't slept at all.
He waited only long enough for me to step back before coming inside, a porcelain mug in one hand and a folded piece of lodge stationery in the other.
His attention moved over the messy knot of my hair and the rolled cuffs of the lounge pants before finding my face and staying there.
“Morning,” he said.
It sounded rough, dragged over no sleep and too much radio static.
He handed me the mug. Heat bit through the porcelain into my palm.
"Sarah's in the lobby," he said, his voice a low vibration in the small room. He pressed the note into my free hand. His handwriting was blunt, the ink heavy.
Coffee. Stay in the cleared lodge area. Sarah has the manifest. Don’t make me come find you. —N.
"I can read, Nick," I said, my voice dry. "And I'm already holding the exhibit A."
His mouth moved. Not quite a smile. More like the memory of one trying to survive on stubbornness and no sleep.
“The note is for when I leave,” he said.
I looked at him properly then. The dark bruising beneath his eyes. The way the light found the copper threaded through the brown of his beard. The mud dried along one cuff where he must have knelt somewhere he had no business kneeling before sunrise.
“Did you sleep at all?”
“Enough.”
“That means no.”
“That means I’m upright.”
“Nick.”
His gaze flicked to mine, sharp enough to cut off the concern before it found softer ground.
“I can’t take that from you right now,” he said.
Naturally. The man could face armed criminals in the bush, but basic human worry was apparently where courage went to die.
He glanced at the small wooden desk where a lodge-branded toothbrush sat in its plastic wrapper—a reminder that I was currently a guest in the most utilitarian sense of the word.
“Cloud cover’s low. Humidity’s coming. If we get a flight window, I need the airstrip cleared before anyone moves. Stay put until then.”
"Is that a request or a briefing?"
“It’s the current reality.” He paused at the door, his hand lingering on the latch. Mine tightened around the mug. “Don’t make me chase you down, Juliette.”
The warning should have landed harder. It didn’t, because his hand came up before he seemed to think better of it.
His thumb brushed my cheek once, warm enough to undo me and brief enough to deny it.
Then his hand dropped.
“Please,” he said, quieter.
He didn't wait for an answer. He turned and walked down the stone corridor, his boots heavy and certain, leaving me alone with the cooling mug and the shutters.
I leaned against the doorframe and took the first bitter sip. My spine remembered its job. Nick did not soften easily. He brought coffee, warnings, and the kind of attention that looked a lot like orders until you noticed the hand beneath them.
Naturally, Nick Mercer’s version of tenderness had teeth.
I dressed quickly, pulling on the trousers and fitted cotton T-shirt Sarah had found in the lodge’s emergency guest supply.
The bottoms were a half-size too large, requiring me to roll the waistband, but they were clean.
I used the generic toothbrush—it tasted aggressively of artificial mint—and smoothed my hair back into a knot with no ambition beyond keeping my hair out of my face.
By the time I reached the lobby, the remaining guests had begun filtering back from their temporary rooms and cleared suites with the brittle optimism of people who had been told movement might happen soon.
A few had made it out yesterday before the route closed again.
The rest of us had become names on a manifest Sarah couldn't close.
Naomi stood near the beverage station, one hand wrapped around her phone and the other around a mug she hadn’t touched.
Owen was speaking quietly with another staff member near the transfer board.
Graham paced by the windows, wearing the expression of a man personally offended by weather, wildlife, and aviation.
Alina sat near the fire with a plate of fruit balanced on one knee, her croissant untouched beside it.
She looked composed enough to be frightening, which meant she was either handling the delay beautifully or planning someone’s professional death in silence.
Even the Brussels couple looked defeated, sitting in silence while they shared a plate of fruit.
I walked toward the desk. Sarah looked up, her eyes rimmed with red. She didn't say hello. She just held up a finger, finished a sentence about seat availability, and dropped both receivers into their cradles.
“Tell me you have a miracle in your pocket,” she said.
“I can help you sort the chaos,” I said. “Not a miracle, but close enough before breakfast.”
Sarah let out a breath that was half-laugh, half-sob. “I would currently accept divine intervention or a second version of myself.”
“I’m not divine, but I am bossy and underutilized.” I lowered my voice. Sarah had held the lodge together all night. The last thing she needed was a guest sweeping in to perform competence at her. “You already know the facts,” I said. “What you need is one clean version everyone can repeat.”
Sarah looked at me, her gaze shifting from the blinking phone lines to the manifest in my hand. “I’m a lodge manager, Juliette, not a crisis counselor.”
“If one guest hears soon and another hears pending assessment, they’ll fill the gap with panic.”
“I can’t promise them a timeline,” Sarah whispered, her grip tightening on a ballpoint pen. “Not when Nick is still calling the shots on the road.”
The pen in her hand bent slightly. If it snapped, I couldn’t promise I’d blame her.
“Then let's rank them by immovable connections, international routing, family obligations, and then who has the least flexibility to absorb another night.”
“Nick won’t clear specific times,” Sarah warned.
“We don't need to give them them times. We give them a process. People behave better when they can see the next step, even if they hate it.”
I pulled the manifest toward me. My hands moved with familiar efficiency. This was the part of crisis I understood. Not the fear beneath it, not the waiting, but the small mercy of giving chaos a list.
I slid the draft toward Sarah. It was the "unified script"—a printed notice for the guest boards and a direct briefing for the front desk staff.
Mara Khaya has paused outbound transfers while the ranger team completes a precautionary route assessment, I wrote, my handwriting precise and unyielding.
This is not typical of guest operations, and all guests remain safely within the main lodge zone.
We will provide updated transfer windows once the route is cleared.
I slid the paper toward her. “Read that.”
Sarah scanned it. “'Not typical.' It sounds like a legal disclaimer.”
“It’s a reassurance. It tells them the world hasn’t ended. It’s just stalled. And don’t over-explain the wildlife part. The second you make it sound mysterious, they’ll assume the giraffes have formed a militia.”
Sarah’s mouth twitched—the first sign of a smile I’d seen in twenty-four hours. “I’ll get the front desk team to start the briefings.”
“Good. I’ll start on the rerouting list in the meantime. Give me the guests who have connections within the next six hours.”
I took over the far end of the desk. For an hour, I was no longer a woman who had been backed against a door in a staff room. I tracked flight numbers, calculated travel times to Johannesburg, and drafted guest language designed to soothe without promising.
Nothing I couldn’t put in a column. Dangerous illusion.
The side door near the library creaked open. My pulse betrayed me before his boots crossed the threshold.
Rude.
Nick walked in, trailing the smell of wet earth and diesel.
His shirt was wrinkled. Copper-brown stubble roughened his jaw, and the scars across his hand stood out pale against his skin.
He was speaking into the radio at his shoulder, his voice low enough to make my better judgment lose interest in the morning’s agenda.
“—clearance on the eastern drainage. I want Daniel on the salt lick and Elias holding at the gate. No one moves until I’ve seen the tracks myself.”
At the edge of the reception desk, Nick stopped long enough to take in the neat stacks of guest names, flight numbers, and transfer notes.
His gaze moved to me without surprise, only a flicker of something tired, approving, and far too intimate for a lobby full of stranded guests.
The morning had left marks on him: mud at his hem, rain in his hair, that hard, focused stillness he wore when stopping was not an option.
“Update?” Sarah asked, her voice tight.