LIV
We hit the road in silence.
The mountain still clung to him. I could feel it in the Nova like a second weather system—power packed too tightly beneath his skin, the charge riding the air between us until even the heater felt thin beside it.
He drove one-handed.
His other hand stayed loose near the gearshift, close enough that every now and then his knuckles brushed my knee. My wrist. The inside of my elbow.
Small, almost absent contacts that felt less like affection than inventory.
I let him do it twice.
On the third pass, I caught his hand.
“Do I get a report when you’re done?”
“Poor judgment,” he said. “Chronic.”
I turned in my seat to look at him. His profile was all hard lines and controlled breathing, eyes still too dark from the pull.
“Are you always this mean after a full charge?”
His mouth tipped up at one corner.
“I don’t usually come back to find two other ghosts in bed with the other half of my soul.”
“You literally told them to pin me down.”
“Yes.”
His thumb moved once against my palm.
“And I hated every goddamn second of it.”
It should have annoyed me.
Or embarrassed me. Or reminded me he had been the one under a mine collapse while I was the one getting folded into a haunted ghost sandwich.
Instead, my pulse pounded.
Not because Ruby and Theo had touched me. I had needed them to. We both knew that.
But underneath all that clipped irritation in his voice, there was something worse.
Something he would rather choke on than say plainly.
Fear.
Fear and relief and whatever twisted version of tenderness Heaton was capable of when he thought I wasn’t looking too closely.
For one dangerous second, I felt everything he wasn’t saying—the guilt, the relief, the ugly little pulse of possession that had nothing to do with reason. Maybe the most unsettling part wasn’t the feeling itself, but how easily I understood it.
He looked away first, jaw tightening as though he had already let me see too much.
Then his fingers slid from mine to the curve of my waist.
“Come here.”
He pulled me across the bench seat in one firm tug. Not into his lap. Not quite. But hard enough against his side that the space between us disappeared.
My shoulder hit his chest.
One arm locked around my waist while the other stayed on the wheel, steady as ever.
“Better?” I asked softly.
“No.”
I tipped my face up.
His eyes stayed on the road.
“Closer.”
The bond pulsed, warm and satisfied.
So, I settled into him, one hand fisting in his jacket as the Nova carried us deeper into the canyon through frost and pine.
He didn’t loosen his hold after that. If anything, his arm tightened by a fraction, as if he still didn’t trust the fact that I was here and breathing and no longer half-buried in his death.
I should have left it alone. Let the dark stay dark. Let him keep his walls and his silence and that charged, terrible calm he wore like armor.
Instead, because I had no self-preservation where Heaton was concerned, I wanted the most dangerous thing of all.
The human pieces.
The small ones. The stupid ones. The parts no one had been asking him to give up for a hundred years.
“Can I ask you something?” I whispered.
His thumb traced a slow line against my hip.
“That has never stopped you before.”
“Something human,” I said. “Something small.”
That got his attention. I felt it in the way his thumb settled more deliberately against my side.
And in the quiet after.
“Proceed at your own risk, October.”
“Do you have a favorite movie?”
He was quiet long enough that I thought he might leave the question there between us, unanswered on purpose.
Then, at last—
“Donnie Darko.”
I blinked up at him. “Seriously?”
He gave me a brief look.
“I’m sorry, did you want me to say The Notebook?”
I smiled despite myself. “No. I just didn’t expect that.”
He looked back at the road, and when he answered, the humor had thinned.
“It’s about a guy who sees the end coming,” he said. “He thinks he can outsmart destiny. Save the people he loves.”
The road curved, and his hand tightened fractionally on the wheel.
“But in the end, the only useful thing he does is step out of the way.”
The answer landed like a bruise.
I hadn’t asked him for a confession. I asked for a favorite movie.
And he had given me a worldview.
I looked down at the hand spread over my waist, at the charge still sitting under his skin like a second pulse.
“You really think that’s what you are?” I asked quietly. “Something that has to step out of the way?”
He didn’t answer immediately, but that was answer enough.
I slipped my hand into the opening of his jacket and flattened it against his chest, my fingers curling slightly in the fabric of his shirt.
He glanced down at me.
“You’re bad at this.”
“At what?”
“Interrogation.” His thumb brushed once at the edge of my ribs. “You ask one question and then get distracted by the answer.”
“I’m not distracted.”
“No?”
He shifted one hand from the wheel just long enough to touch the underside of my jaw, fingers cool and firm. He turned my face toward him, forcing my eyes to meet his. His thumb stroked my skin, a slow, possessive touch that made my breath catch.
“Then ask your last question, October. Make it count.”
I held his gaze, refusing to blink.
Refusing to let the silver drown me.
“Favorite color.”
That caught him off guard.
I felt it in the sudden stillness of his hand, through my palm still pressed to his chest—some small, old fault line opening beneath the surface.
When he finally spoke, his voice had roughened.
“The miners kept canaries.”
I nodded against him. “To warn them when the air went bad.”
His fingers slid from my jaw to my wrist, thumb settling over my pulse.
“The smallest thing in the dark,” he said, “was usually the bravest.”
The Nova banked through a long curve, and gravity pressed me harder into his side.
“Yellow,” he said at last. “Canary yellow.”
I watched his face carefully. “Because it meant survival?”
His eyes stayed on the road, but his thumb pressed once against my pulse.
“No.”
His voice roughened on the word.
“Because it meant hope. The last bright thing before the dark closed in.”
The heater hummed as the road kept unfolding.
My pulse kicked against his thumb as if it wanted to answer for me.
“And then I found you,” he said.
Everything in me went still.
His mouth tipped—not quite a smile, not anything safe enough to trust.
“And suddenly, that color had the nerve to mean more than one thing.”
I looked up at him. “Because I’d warn you?”
His head turned just enough for me to see the black at the center of his eyes, the silver ringed around it like a target.
“No,” he said simply.
His arm tightened around my waist.
“Because even in the smoke, even with the mountain, even with all this death hanging off me—you would still sing.”
He leaned down, his forehead brushing mine for one second.
“My brave canary,” he whispered. “The last light I’ve got down here.”
I should have said something.
Instead, I stayed there with my heart splitting quietly open, because whatever song had started between us was already rising.
And whether or not I was brave enough to finish it, he had already heard the first note.