The weight of that choice presses heavier than the bruises. I don’t know how to carry it without fracturing. I don’t know how to believe in it without cracking open completely.
And I have no idea how to hold that kind of weight in my chest without it splintering everything I’ve built to survive.
Eventually, Malachi shifts. Gets up and leaves the room without a word. His footsteps are quiet, almost careful, as if he doesn’t want to wake something fragile. I don’t breathe until the door clicks shut behind him.
Then I roll to my back with a hiss of pain, muscles protesting. My spine scrapes against the tension that’s rooted itself beneath my skin. My ribs creak the way old floorboards do.
The mattress dips where he’d been, warmth fading. An absence too loud for the early morning hush. I press my palm into the sheets. They’re still warm. Still him.
The air is thick with him—clean soap, cracked leather, and something darker. Cedarwood. Gasoline. A thread of something masculine and dangerous that should feel suffocating, but instead feels... grounding. A scent that clings to my skin the way a secret does, one I don’t want to wash off.
I scan the room as if I’m seeing it for the first time. It’s neat, surprising considering the man. No clutter. Just order. Discipline hidden behind chaos.
The place is more suite than bedroom. Organized, functional, stripped down. He’s lived here forever, long before he was president. All I know of his past are whispers. Cornelius took him in young. Gave him something to belong to when no one else did.
My gaze flicks toward the dresser. Empty space where my guitar should be. My throat tightens. I don’t dare ask if it’s gone.Not yet. I’m not ready to find out which part of me didn’t survive the night.
Cornelius didn’t just die. He was taken. And it happened not long before the old sheriff disappeared. The new one’s decent. People say he’s trying, but this town still has shadows that run deep. With Donovan’s name being whispered again as a bad omen, it’s hard not to connect the dots. Maybe I’m being paranoid. But this town doesn’t do coincidence. Not really.
There’s a knock at the door.
“Candace?” Sloane’s voice is gentle, but it cuts through the fog in my brain. It’s soft, careful, as if she already knows I’m fraying at the edges. As if she knows the shape of broken and isn’t afraid of it.
I sit up slowly, body aching in places I didn’t know could hurt. My legs swing off the bed, bare feet meeting cool floor, and I crack the door open. She’s standing there alone, a canvas bag slung in one hand, her face open and steady. She doesn’t smile, but she doesn’t look away either. Just waits.
I let her in without a word.
She walks in as if she belongs, as if this is normal. She’s dressed down—dark jeans, a hoodie, her hair pulled back—but something about her feels composed. Balanced. She carries herself as someone who’s used to holding people together. As someone who’s probably held herself together more times than she can count. As someone who’s learned how to be the net instead of the one falling.
“Malachi asked me to check on you,” she says. “I’m a nurse. Clinic in town.”
She says it as if it’s no big deal, but I feel the weight behind it. Not just in her tone, but in the fact that she’s here. That she came. That she saw someone wrecked and didn’t flinch.
I sit on the front of the bed, heart thudding a little too loud in my chest. My walls go up out of habit, brick and mortar laid sofast I almost don’t notice it. But something cracks when she sets the bag down beside me. Not loud. Just a quiet fault line beneath my ribs.
Toiletries. Clean clothes. Nash must’ve brought them from my house. My throat tightens at the thought of him in my room, maybe stepping over the pieces I left behind. The shattered frame. The emptiness under the floorboard. My grief, my failure, spread out like laundry I never meant to air.
The image flashes sharp. Nash’s heavy boots on the rug, maybe noticing the scattered notebooks, the picks from my guitar. My music. My mess. A private world laid bare.
I want to ask if my guitar was there. If the notebooks survived. But the words wedge behind my ribs, a splinter I can’t dig out.
Sloane doesn’t press. She doesn’t hover, doesn’t ask about things I’m not ready to give. She just moves around me, a tide. Steady, quiet, sure. As if she’s always been here. As if she will be.
When her hands skim my forehead and her fingers brush the bruises along my ribs, I brace out of instinct. Muscles twitch. My jaw locks.
But she’s gentle. Practiced. Her touch is clinical without being cold. As if she knows how to patch people up without making them feel broken. When she sees the raw scrapes on my arms and the swelling along my wrist, she doesn’t flinch.
“What’s this from?” she asks.
I swallow. “I took a bat to my dad’s dresser,” I mutter. “Then a lamp.”
Her mouth twitches, almost a smile, but she reins it in. Just nods, a quiet agreement. A knowing. The kind that understands survival sometimes wears the face of destruction.
She finishes checking me over in silence, and I let her. I don’t know why. Maybe because she’s not pretending I’m fragile. Maybe because she didn’t bring pity through the door with her. Just presence. Steady and unfazed.
It hits me then, how rare this is.
No one’s ever come to check on me before. Not like this. Not without asking for something in return.
