If she stayed, they’d smother her fire.
Piece by piece.
Men like Gideon always did.
Blind men, men who mistook a wildfire for something they couldhold.
He melted into the night.
The darkness folded around him.
Arden Rivers was already his.
He’d spent weeks learning her. Mapping every flicker of hesitation, every glance over her shoulder as if she could feel him there.
Could she?
The thought sent a shiver through him, electric and unsteady. A volatile mix of certainty and need.
Gideon Blackwell couldn’t save her.
The club’s gleaming walls couldn’t contain her.
His footsteps fell silent into the pavement, merging with the city’s pulse and the tight rhythm of his thoughts.
All it would take wastime.
Time for her to see.
Time for her to understand.
And when that moment came—when her defenses crumbled, when her eyes finally opened to the truth, his Little Fire would understand.
They weren’t just drawn together.
They were fated.
?
The cold slipped beneath her jacket like a blade, clean and unapologetic.
Around her, the city lived and lingered: horns echoing down the block, laughter spilling from a window, an engine snarling at a stalled light.
But something had shifted.
Subtle. Wrong.
A disturbance too quiet to name.
She didn’t see it at first; she felt it.
A prickle at the base of her neck. That whisper of eyes in the dark.
Then she saw it.
A single rose.
Blood red and flawless, resting against the deep midnight paint of her car.
