Safe.
But sometime between the aquarium, the boat, and the blood-soaked dock, something changed.
I looked down at Sloane.
Her dark hair spilled across my chest and shoulder, still damp from the shower earlier. Her face was already relaxed in sleep, the tension she carried during the day absent. She looked smaller like this, softer.
But I knew better.
This woman had fought zombies with a damn fish hook, almost gotten herself killed guarding me while I pumped fuel, swam through a flooded tank system while the dead clawed after her.
Tiny, sure.
But tougher—genuinely tougher—in ways that mattered more now.
A smile tugged at my mouth.
A month ago I would’ve laughed at the idea of this fierce, argumentative woman holding the power to shatter everything I am.
But I understood what this meant, I’d carried it once before, and that’s what made it terrifying.
Because love isn’t peace.
Love is fear, the real kind, anyway.
It’s the moment someone else holds the power to destroy you and you hand it over willingly. It’s choosing their life over your own without thinking. It’s knowing their loss would destroy you in ways you’d never come back from.
Love meant you were no longer the most important person in your own story.
And somehow—quietly, stubbornly, against every wall I’d built—I’d ended up here again.
The odd part?
I didn’t mind, not one bit.
I tightened my arm around her. She shifted against me, her breath warm on my chest.
Because if this really turned out to be the end of everything we knew—if this cabin on a quiet postage stamp of an island marked the farthest any of us got—I’d go out happy.
Wrapped around a tiny woman who fought like hell, argued with me constantly, and fucked like a demon when the world gave us five minutes of peace.
Yeah, I could die with that.
But Sloane didn’t realize any of this yet.
To her, this still lived in the category of survival.Adrenaline. The strange closeness that comes from being thrown into chaos with someone and clinging to whatever warmth you can find.
She hadn’t reached the place I had.
Not yet.
And that sat fine with me.
I could wait.
I’d wait her out—patient, quiet, stubborn in the way only someone who’s already made up their mind can be. Wait until she recognized what this truly meant, until she understood that whatever started between us in the ruins of that aquarium didn’t have an expiration date.
It wasn’t going anywhere, and neither would I.