XLI
Sleep didn’t come.
Every time I drifted, something dragged me back—the throb of bruised ribs, the memory of Heaton’s cool hands steadying me in the Nova, the knife hidden beneath the porch like a promise I was pretending not to need.
I turned my face into the pillow and breathed through the ache, waiting for the world to hold still.
Then the bond in my chest ruptured.
A white-hot detonation flared behind my sternum, violent enough to send me rolling off the mattress. I hit the floorboards in a tangle of sheets, lungs seizing as if the air had turned to lead.
It started as heat.
Wildfire.
A searing pulse that prickled across my scalp and down my spine. My skin broke out in a cold sweat. I tried to gasp, but my throat locked around a despair that wasn’t mine—a crushing, borrowed weight that made me feel small and exposed.
I curled into a ball on the rug, forehead pressed to the wood.
Stop.
But the bond didn’t have a volume knob.
It was sensory overload.
I felt the sharp, metallic tang of his fury. I felt pride being shredded by shame so old it had roots. A thousand voices of doubt and rage poured through the wire.
Scared. Confused. Angry.
I clawed at my chest, nails snagging the lace of my camisole. It felt like my heart was being used as a drum, beaten by a rhythm that wasn’t mine.
Then, right at the peak of the fever—right when I thought my pulse might snap—the connection stalled.
Like a train hitting a wall.
The wildfire didn’t go out.
It was punched back.
Something massive slammed down behind my ribs, an invisible barricade so abrupt it left me breathless. The heat vanished, replaced by an agonizing, pressurized silence.
I stayed on the floor, shaking so hard my teeth rattled.
His emotions had dammed up like a river, but I could still feel the pressure. Water vibrating against the barricade. A low, bruised thrum at the back of my mind.
Heaton had shut me out.
He’d realized I was feeling it all—every dark, broken piece of him—and slammed the door so hard it bruised.
But before the seal was perfect—before the dark took him completely—something slipped through the cracks.
Not a feeling this time.
A visual, crisp and clear as a shard of glass, forced its way through the closing gap.
The scene wasn’t mine.
I was standing in a canyon at dusk, the air cool and smelling of damp earth and sage. I wasn’t in my body; I was a passenger in his, caught behind his eyes, feeling his hesitation like a knife pressed to the throat.
Longing.
Terror.
Then I saw her.
A girl stood before us, her black hair whipping in the canyon wind, her blue eyes pleading. She was beautiful, ethereal, and so, so sad.
She wasn’t a ghost.
She was alive.
“Please, Heaton,” she whispered, her voice echoing not in the room, but directly through my mind. “Follow me. There’s another way out. Away from all of this.”
Heaton’s face was a mask of conflict. He took one step toward her, hand lifting, fingers brushing hers—
Then the door slammed shut.
The memory vanished.
The pressure in my head receded completely, leaving a hollow, ringing silence behind. I stayed on the floor, gasping, the ghost of his touch and the echo of her voice staining the white noise of my mind.
The room fell still.
Only my heartbeat. Only my ragged breath.
Moonlight cut across the floorboards, silver and indifferent, as if it hadn’t just watched something dismantle me from the inside out.
I stayed there for a long time, one hand pressed flat against my chest, waiting for him to leave my circulation.
But the thrum remained, different now.
It wasn’t just his chaos. It was a question.
Who was she?
I dragged myself back onto the mattress and curled into the center of the bed. Sleep eventually found me, but it wasn’t rest.
It was a heavy, suffocating descent. Like drowning in a dream that belonged to a man who had forgotten how to wake up—
and the girl who had tried to lead him back.
By dawn, I didn’t feel hollow.
I felt re-strung.
I hauled myself out of bed, expecting the usual knife-twist in my chest, but the pain had been sanded down to a dull, lingering heat. Before the mirror, I peeled back my camisole.
The mottled purples and angry yellows had faded to a faint sunset smudge.
I was healing at a rate that defied biology.
It wasn’t medicine. It was him.
He was siphoning trauma out of my cells, or knitting me back together because he couldn’t stand the static of my pain in his head.
Maybe both.
Down the hall, Penny’s hair dryer droned over the muffled pulse of a pop song, fighting to reclaim the morning. It was a happy, domestic anchor against the heavy indigo silence still clinging to my room.
I dressed on autopilot: a bruised-plum sweater, dark jeans, boots that had seen worse. I didn’t braid my hair, letting it fall in dark, unruly waves.
A curtain to hide behind.
The back door groaned shut behind me, the sound swallowed by the vast quiet of the estate. I circled the house, boots scuffing through silver frost that clung to the dead grass. The air bit at my cheeks, and skeletal branches clawed at a pale, washed-out sky.
Then I cleared the corner of the house.
And the world gained its color back. At the edge of the gravel drive, the Nova waited. Its black paint was so deep it seemed to drink the morning light, making the peeling face of the estate look even more faded by comparison.
Heaton was propped against the passenger side, one hand in his pocket, the other resting on the roof beside him. His dark jacket hung open to reveal the clean lines of his shirt.
A pose so natural it looked staged.
His gray eyes weren’t scanning the horizon. They were fixed on the corner of the house I had just come around.
Waiting.
He looked perfectly, infuriatingly fine.
Untouched by the psychic storm that had rattled my bones only hours ago.
“I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”
I didn’t stop until I stood in his space, close enough to catch the citrus and clove still clinging to his jacket. My heart gave a chaotic thud, and I knew, with a surge of annoyance, that he could feel every treacherous beat.
“You’re driving me to school now?” I asked. “Is this part of the protection plan, or just a new way to annoy me?”
Heaton didn’t move, but his eyes dropped from mine to my mouth, then back again.
A slow, deliberate smirk touched his lips.
“I’m driving because the Nova has better heaters than that battle wagon of yours.”
He pushed off the car, not closing the distance so much as erasing it, forcing me to tilt my head back to meet his eyes.
“And because yesterday, you didn’t exactly look like someone who wanted me to stay away.”
The memory hit like an avalanche.
The morning before. The Nova leaving. Me standing in the drive, body leaning toward the space he’d left behind with a clingy dysfunction that terrified me.
“I was tired.”
A low, melodic huff of laughter slipped from him, making my skin prickle.
“Is that the story we’re sticking with?”
He leaned in, face close enough for me to see the darker silver flecks in his eyes. His gaze tracked the flush climbing my throat before he tapped the center of his own chest.
“Don’t lie to the one person who can feel your pulse, October.”
I rolled my eyes. “God, you’re arrogant. Does the ego come with the car, or is that a lingering personality trait?”
He didn’t flinch. If anything, the slow, dangerous smile that spread across his mouth said he enjoyed the bite in my voice far more than he should have. He took another step, crowding me against the frame of the car until the icy draft of him pressed through my sweater.
“Damn, October,” he said, voice dropping into a rougher register. “Dead Time really did a number on you. You’re awfully mouthy for someone who was shaking on the floor four hours ago.”
My bravado faltered.
“And you look suspiciously put-together for a man who had a mental collapse in my ribcage.” I forced my chin higher. “If I were shaking, it was because your existential crisis has a lot of kickback.”
His cool fingers slid beneath the dark fall of my hair. He didn’t tuck it back. He let his thumb linger at the nape of my neck, tracing the sensitive skin behind my ear until my breath caught.
“I leave you alone for less than a day,” he said, eyes darkening, “and the bond gets ideas.”
“Ideas?” My voice shook with adrenaline. “Or memories?”
His thumb stilled.
I held his stare.
“Who was she, Heaton? The girl in the canyon. Black hair. Blue eyes.”
The temperature dipped.
“You don’t know when to stop, do you?”
His thumb pressed into the side of my neck, right over the artery, a pressure point that made my head swim.
I didn’t back down.
“Who was she?”
“Madeline, look at me.”
His voice dropped low and intense.
“I didn’t know it could bleed through like that. I’ve never had a connection this raw. This unfiltered.”
He closed the last inch between us, his shadow swallowing the morning sun as he pinned me against the cold steel of the Nova.
“I’ve reinforced the walls. Layered them.”
“I don’t want walls,” I countered. I leaned into his chest until the heat of my body was a direct challenge to his frost. “I want the truth.”
His eyes sharpened.
“Who was she?”
For a moment, he only stared at me.
Then a slow, chilling realization settled over his face.
“There it is,” he whispered.
“What?”
“The part of you that just can’t help itself.”
His eyes stayed on mine.
“You hear don’t and immediately start looking for a way around it. You see something dangerous, and instead of backing off, you lean in.” He shook his head. “That reckless little need to know is going to get you killed.”
He gave a short, humorless laugh.
“So, yes. It looks like you’re stuck with me until I figure out how to better manage this.”
His words were a dismissal.
A non-answer.
My blood didn’t just boil; it flash-froze in my veins.
For half a breath, something almost soft crossed his face. Then his thumb trailed from my neck to my lower lip, dragging just enough to reveal the frantic hitch in my breathing.
“But if the walls crack again . . . ”
He leaned in, his breath a cold draft over the sensitive curve of my ear.
“I promise the next thing you feel from me won’t be terror.”
The air between us was so charged it felt like it might combust.
He didn’t pull away. His thumb lingered near my mouth as if he were waiting for me to shatter or spark. The weight of it settled between us—the quiet, terrifying realization that we weren’t just partners.
We were a closed circuit.
The rest of the world was nothing more than a blurred, irrelevant background.
Until the background started shouting.
“Holy mother of—is that a Nova?”
Penny burst around the corner in a whirlwind of chaos, juggling three overstuffed bags, a lopsided ponytail, and a half-eaten granola bar clenched between her teeth. She skidded to a halt on the gravel, freezing mid-chew as her eyes landed on the midnight-black beast idling in the driveway.
Heaton didn’t flinch. A muscle in his jaw flexed as he straightened, his hand sliding from the nape of my neck to the top of the car door in one fluid motion.
His shoulder remained a firm line against mine.
“Okay—wait.” Penny squinted, pointing the granola bar at the hood. “This isn’t a car. This is a statement. She has a presence. She has an aura.”
As if in response, the engine released a low, deep-throated purr that vibrated through the pavement and up into my boots.
Penny blinked, pointing at the grill.
“Did it just flirt with me?”
Heaton’s attention flicked back to me, a private amusement darkening his eyes.
“She responds well to compliments.”
“Honestly? Same.” Penny grinned, completely undeterred.
“Penny stayed over,” I said, finding my voice. “So, you’re getting the two-for-one special today, Dashwood. Try to contain your joy.”
Penny didn’t wait for an invitation. She tossed her bags into the backseat and climbed in, the scent of vintage leather spilling out to meet her.
“I like a woman with power,” she called, running a hand over the interior. “And I like a man who knows how to handle it.”
Heaton’s eyes slowly drifted back to me. He didn’t look annoyed. He looked as if he were cataloging the fact that he now had two living women to keep track of.
“Get in, Madeline,” he said, the rough edge of his earlier promise still scraping against my nerves. “Before I decide we’re done pretending this is where you belong.”