XLVI
The Nova came to life without a key.
Without a touch.
It answered him.
One moment, it sat silent in the drive, a black-plated omen in the dusk. The next, its headlights bloomed, catching dust motes in the blue evening air.
Heaton was already there, leaning against the driver’s side as if he had grown out of the machine itself.
Arms crossed. Jacket open. Dark hair whipped into a mess by the wind.
He looked less like a student and more like a force of nature.
One that had spent the night before promising me a rain check in a voice that still haunted my dreams.
I stopped a few feet away, hyper-aware of my corduroys and a sweater that felt entirely too ordinary.
“I should have worn something else,” I said, my voice smaller than I meant it to be. “Is this okay? For your family?”
His eyes traveled over me with slow, crushing focus.
A small, dark smile touched his mouth.
“It doesn’t matter what you wear, October.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” I stepped closer into his chill. “You look like you walked off a film set. I look like I’m about to study at a coffee shop.”
“Oh, I’m aware.” His smirk deepened. “It’s quaint.”
“Quaint?”
He pushed off the car, closing the distance between us in one fluid motion.
“Trust me. Where we’re going, the wardrobe is handled. You’ll be lucky if you’re still wearing your own shoes by midnight.”
I frowned. “Are you saying they’re going to hate my clothes?”
“I’m saying you won’t be wearing them long.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you’re stalling.”
He tapped the roof of the Nova, and the engine purred against my hip.
“Get in.”
The passenger door unlatched with a soft click.
I slid into the leather interior, the cold seat a sharp contrast to the heat blooming across my cheeks. A moment later, he was beside me, and the car eased forward before I had clicked my seatbelt into place.
The Nova devoured the miles in silence. In the side mirror, the modern world thinned by degrees: the blue flash of highway signs, the last lonely glow of a gas station, the clean geometry of a life that still made sense.
Then the mountains took the road back.
Pines crowded beneath an early frost, and the last of the sun bled against the canyon walls until everything around us darkened to violet.
Through the bond, I felt him change—a territorial spike of something ancient and possessive. He wasn’t just taking me to dinner. He was bringing his only source of light into a den of starving wolves, and some primal part of him was already snarling at the pack.
The pavement ended.
The tires crunched over gravel, brittle and dry, like bones breaking underfoot. Then the canyon walls fell away, and the world opened into a wound.
Winter Quarters unfurled below us.
A valley of bones.
It looked as if time itself had laid a hand over the town’s mouth and told it not to scream.
Charred beams jutted from the snow-dusted earth like broken ribs.
Rusted mining carts lay half-devoured by brush, their metal skeletons bleeding orange into the white.
Stone foundations gaped open like empty eye sockets.
“It’s unreal,” I whispered, arms folding tight across my chest.
Heaton’s gaze moved over the ruins, distant and precise, as if he were reconstructing the town in his mind. Brick by charred brick.
“No,” he said. “It’s what’s left.”
We left the Nova where the service road vanished into brush and walked the rest of the way. The deeper we moved into town, the quieter Heaton became. Not calmer. Just tighter, as if every ruined foundation we passed was taking something out of him.
I picked my way over broken stone and frost-stiff grass. “Do you come here often?”
“As rarely as possible.”
His hands stayed buried in his pockets. His gaze kept skimming the blackened remains, never lingering long.
“This isn’t home, October. It’s a crime scene.” His voice flattened. “I prefer the outskirts. Places where I can pretend the world didn’t end in one screaming morning.”
I glanced at him. “But you still come back?”
“Eventually.”
“Why?”
“You can only live off scraps for so long.”
“Scraps?”
He exhaled through his nose, already regretting the answer.
“Static. Residue. Whatever the living leave behind without noticing.” He stepped over the collapsed edge of an old foundation, boots crunching through frozen weeds. “Heat from a crowded room. The hum of power lines. Leftover emotion hanging in the air after everyone else goes home.”
He looked at me then, silver eyes catching what little light remained.
“I’ve been feeding on that.”
The bluntness stopped me.
He looked away first.
“It works,” he said, “right up until it doesn’t.”
We came to the remains of what might once have been a general store. One soot-blackened wall still stood, stubborn against time and weather.
Heaton slowed beside it, one shoulder settling against the brick with deliberate ease. Anyone else might have mistaken it for arrogance—but the bond knew better.
Hunger. Strain.
The hollow scrape of something held together too long by sheer irritation.
“And when it stops working?” I asked quietly.
His mouth twitched.
“Then I remember why I hate this place.”
“Heaton.”
I stepped closer.
The bond was a live wire now, vibrating with the force of his hunger.
“If you’re weak, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to come back here just to survive.”
His eyes cut to mine, sharp and immediate.
“What are you saying, October?”
“I’m saying I’m right here.” I gestured between us, where the tether pulsed like a second heartbeat. “It didn’t take me long to recover the first time. If you just took a little—”
“No.”
The word cracked through the ruins.
I barely had time to breathe before he pushed off the wall and drove me back against the old brick. The rough, frozen surface bit through my sweater. He caged me there with one hand beside my head, the other braced near my shoulder, his body a hard line of cold fury inches from mine.
“A little?” he said, voice low and lethal. “You think this works in little pieces?”
My pulse jumped.
His attention slipped, just for a second, to the shape of my silence. Then lower, tracking the warmth he could already feel pulsing through the bond.
“You’re not a battery,” he said. “You’re not a well I lean over every time the dark gets loud.”
“But I’m offering.”
I slid my hand up his chest before I could think better of it, fingers catching at the back of his neck, threading into the dark silk of his hair. I tugged, just enough to make him look at me.
His eyes ignited.
“God, October.” The words came roughened down to the bone. “Do not do that unless you mean it.”
“I do mean it.”
He shut his eyes for one brutal second, forehead dropping to mine.
The coldness of him should have shocked me.
Instead, it felt like relief.
“The first time,” he said, voice quieter now, more dangerous for it, “I was trying to save your life.”
“I know.”
His hand flexed against the wall.
“But liking it,” he said, “was the unforgivable part.”
“It wasn’t unforgivable if it kept us both here.”
A humorless sound left him.
“You still don’t understand.”
His mouth brushed the shell of my ear, not quite a kiss, not quite restraint.
“The first pull was survival. The next one would be want.”
I should have backed down.
Instead, I let my hand slide from his neck to the center of his chest, palm open over the dead-still place where a heartbeat should have been.
“Then control yourself.”
Heaton’s entire body went rigid.
The bond answered first—a violent flare of hunger that seared through every nerve and wiped all other thought from my mind. Frost raced in thin white veins over the brick at my back. His eyes slammed shut, jaw locking so hard I could see the strain in it.
“Our choice,” I said, the words feeling less like a decision and more like an inevitability. “It could be our choice.”
His eyes opened. The silver in them had gone bright enough to hurt.
“No,” he said, and this time the word sounded torn out of him. “There is no our choice in this.”
His hand caught my wrist before I could reach for him again.
“There is only my hunger,” he said. “And then there’s you, standing too close to it.”
I bit down on my lower lip to keep it from trembling.
“And I will not,” he said, each word precise now, carved clean with effort, “turn you into the thing that keeps me here.”
His fingers tangled in my hair, not gently, but with a proprietary grip that tilted my head back, exposing my throat to the biting wind.
“This,” he whispered, his lips brushing the sensitive skin beneath my ear, “is why I should have scared you properly the first time.”
His hold tightened by a fraction, only enough to keep me still beneath the weight of his warning.
“Fear would have been a kindness. Maybe then you’d have some sense.” His voice scraped lower. “Maybe then you’d stop offering yourself up like you have any idea what that does to me.”
My pulse went wild beneath his thumb.
“I just wanted to help you.”
“Help me?”
His thumb found the frantic beat in my neck, pressing just enough to narrow the world to that single point of contact.
“No.” His eyes held mine. “We go inside. We let them stare. We let them talk. And you keep this—”
His gaze dropped once to the pulse beneath his hand, to all the bright, living things about me.
“—to yourself.”
I could only nod.
The bond answered for me anyway, a low, warm flare low in my body.
His grip loosened.
“Good.”
He reached up, not with tenderness, but with strange, careful precision, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear as if correcting a flaw in his own creation.
“They’re just curious to meet the girl I can’t stop breaking all my rules for.”
Then he stepped away before I could argue, turning back toward the path, his shadow stretching out like a warning.
We crested the last rise, and the ruins gave way to the only thing in Winter Quarters that still looked like it remembered how to stand.
The Covington Hotel.