"I don't—I don't think so. The bathroom door is closed, but I can't—" My breath hitched. "I can't make myself check."
"Don't. Don't check. Don't touch anything." I heard movement on his end—the rustle of fabric, the jingle of keys. He was already moving. "I'm coming. Stay near the door. If anything feels wrong, get out and wait in the hallway. Can you do that for me?"
"Yeah." I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor, my knees drawn up, my free hand gripping rug. "Yeah, I can do that."
"Good. I'm fifteen minutes away. Stay on the phone with me."
"You don't have to—"
"Cinder." His voice was gentle but absolute. "Stay on the phone."
I stayed on the phone.
He talked to me the whole drive. Not about anything important—not about the break-in, not about Gavin, not about any of the things screaming through my head. He told me about the book I knew he was reading, about Shackleton's crew building a camp on the ice after the Endurance was crushed, about how they'd survived months in conditions that should have killed every single one of them.
"They didn't give up," he said, his voice a steady current beneath my panic. "Even when everything fell apart. They just kept going."
I knew what he was doing. Knew he was grounding me the way I'd grounded him—with presence, with proximity, with the sound of someone who wasn't going to leave.
It worked.
By the time he appeared—my breathing had slowed enough that I could stand. I stood, and he was there, filling the doorframe, his eyes scanning me head to toe in a single sweep before landing on my face.
"You're okay," he said. Not a question. A declaration, like he could make it true by saying it.
"I'm okay."
He stepped inside my apartment, and I watched the way his gaze moved through the space—systematic, thorough, missing nothing. He checked the bathroom first, pushing the door open with his shoulder, and I heard his breath release when hefound it empty. Then the closet. The kitchen. The narrow space between the fridge and the wall where someone slim could conceivably hide.
"Clear," he said, coming back to where I stood frozen by the door. "No one's here."
"But someone was." I pointed to the window, to the nightstand. Explained each detail in a voice that sounded clinical and detached, the nurse in me taking over because the rest of me was too rattled to function. " And the book—"
"I believe you." He said it without hesitation, without a flicker of doubt, and something inside me hurt at the simplicity of it. "Pack a bag."
I blinked. "What?"
"Pack a bag. You're not staying here tonight until we change the locks." His jaw was set, his hands curled at his sides in a way that told me the cold was building, held in check by sheer willpower. "I know you want to be independent. I know you don't want to need anyone. But someone was in your space, Cinder, and I can't—" He stopped. Swallowed. Started again, quieter. "I won't be able to sleep knowing you're here alone. So please. Come home with me."
Home.He said it like his apartment was already ours. Like there was a space waiting for me in it that had always been mine.
"I should call the police," I said weakly.
"We'll call them from my place. I'll sit with you through every question. But right now, I need you somewhere safe."
I looked at him—this man with his impossible cold and his steady hands and his eyes that saw me, really saw me, in a way no one had since I was seventeen and my world decided I wasn't worth keeping.
"Okay," I whispered.
I packed in under five minutes because I hadn't really unpacked. Taz stood by the door the entire time, a sentinelbetween me and whatever had invaded my space. When I came out with my bag, he took it from me without asking and slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing.
We didn't talk in the car. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on the center console, palm up, an invitation I accepted without thinking. His fingers were cold when they closed around mine, but I didn't flinch. I held on and let the silence be enough.
His apartment was warm. Not just heated—warm in the way a place became when someone actually lived in it. Worn leather couch, a bookshelf crammed with paperbacks, a kitchen that smelled faintly of coffee and something herbal. It was large but not empty. Careful but not sterile. The opposite of my place in every way that mattered.
He set my bag down by the couch and disappeared into the kitchen without a word. I heard the kettle click on, the quiet rattle of mugs being pulled from a cabinet. I stood in the middle of his living room, arms wrapped around myself, trying to stop the trembling that had nothing to do with temperature.
When he came back with tea—chamomile, I could smell it—I took the mug and held it between both hands, letting the heat seep into my fingers.