Talon steps fully into the room and pushes it closed with a quiet click.
The sound seems louder than it should be.
Final.
The silence settles over us again, heavier now, thicker. There’s no interruption coming to save us this time.
Someone has to start this.
“So—”
“Actually, now there’s hot water, I think you should take a shower first, Sierra,” Luke says, cutting across me before I can get any words out. “We really don’t want you to get a cold.”
“Uh… yeah, that seems like a good idea.” She crouches down, rummaging through her bag for something to wear, then stands and moves between us toward the bathroom.
As she passes by, her scent hits me—clean soap beneath damp fabric, something warm and unmistakably her—and every muscle in my body tightens in response.
The door closes behind her a second later.
The room shifts again.
It sinks in, all at once, that we’re all in this room together. That we’re going to be sharing it. With us… and her.
I hadn’t thought about that.
The whole drive out, all I could think about was getting to her in time. About not missing her. About not arriving to an empty stretch of road and nothing else, or worse, an overturned vehicle, or a car swept into a culvert by a flash flood.
I was terrified I’d never see her again.
Maybe that sounds dramatic. It probably is. But it didn’t feel like it out there in the storm. It felt real. Immediate. Like something was being ripped out of me while I drove.
But I couldn’t let myself spiral. I had to focus on the road. On staying between the lines. On keeping the truck steady while the rain hammered down hard enough to blur everything beyond a few feet.
The harder it rained, the worse my head got. That quiet voice starting up, telling me something would happen to her. That visibility was shot. That her car wouldn’t hold up.
And to think her car actually gave out on her out there…
Fuck.
A cold wave runs down my spine.
If anything had happened to her… I don’t even know where I would begin with that.
“We need to get our story straight before we talk to her,” Luke says in a deliberately low voice, so what he says won’t carry through to Sierra in the bathroom.
The walls aren’t exactly thick, but the sound of the shower starting up a moment later might just be enough to cover us.
“Our story straight on what?” I ask, shifting a step closer to him and keeping my own voice low despite the sound of the shower.
“On what we’re going to do moving forward.” His expression is serious now, no trace of humor left. “You’re the one who said in the car you’re not letting her go.”
Yeah… fuck.
I did say that.
“What did you mean by that?” Luke asks.
I wish he hadn’t.