The words rip from my throat, jagged and too loud in the empty night. They echo off the asphalt and stone, bleeding into the roar of the river.
Isaac stops mid-step. He spins back around and takes several steps toward me, his expression a mix of disbelief and fury. This time, I hold my ground as the shadows cut hard across his face, making him look half sculpted, half haunted.
“You’re the one who followed me!”
“And you nearly threw me off a fucking bridge!”
His jaw tightens. “Language.”
He’s out of leverage, but the audacity of it still manages to snap something in me.
I take a step, nearly closing the distance between us until I can see the uneven rhythm of his breath blooming in the cold.
“Fuck. You.”
The silence that follows is heavy and dangerous, hanging between us like the drop beneath our feet. His shoulders tense, his eyes flashing with something I can’t read. Rage or regret, maybe both.
For a moment, I think he might walk away again, turn his back and disappear into the mist rolling low across the bridge until he’s nothing but a shadow swallowed by the night, gone forever.
For some reason, that scares me even more than the fall.
Instead, all it takes is one more step for him to reach out and wrap his hand around my throat. He uses his grip to haul me forward so quickly that I stumble, crashing into his chest.
And then he kisses me.
It’s not gentle or sweet.
It’s a collision. Desperate and consuming. Like all the fear and anger and want between us snapped in the same instant.
My hands fist in the front of his coat, dragging him impossibly closer. His grip on my throat eases but doesn’t disappear, guiding me, grounding me. The kiss burns through every sliver of panic still clinging to my ribs, stealing my breath and replacing it with something hot and dizzying.
His other hand curls around the back of my neck, keeping me in place. Holding me together. Holding me up.
As his lips move against mine, commanding them to open so his tongue can dive between them, I realize with humiliating clarity why the thought of him walking away terrified me.
Because after the fear of thinking he might throw me over that wall—or worse, leave me alone in the dark—I needed him to do the opposite.
I needed him tostay.
To touch me, to anchor me.
To take the fear he caused and smother it with something stronger.
He kisses me harder, and I melt into it, into him. Into the coarse sweep of his beard, the warmth of his body, and the claiming of his mouth. The world goes quiet except for us. Reckless and alive.
Even if I don’t understand what we are, or what the hell just happened on this bridge…
Right now, in his hands, in his kiss, I feelwanted.
And God help me, I want him to never let go.
The first time I heardJackson speak my name, it was laced with fear, broken by a sob. I think the sound of it just might haunt me for the rest of my life.
But I only have myself to blame.
I finally snapped. The weight of it all—the accusations, the rumors, the distrust— finally crushed me past my breaking point. The final straw was seeing all of that in Jackson’s eyes, in his whispered question.
Did you?
