The idea of leaving Estella with the man who had just reached for her makes my stomach drop into an acid pit. My limbs braid with tension, imagining the hand again, the entitlement in that motion.
But when I look at her, she is far from rattled. She offers me a nearly invisible nod, like a flint strike of permission. I take it for the cue it is and pivot on my heel, falling into step behind Owen without rushing.
The back of his head fills my vision, a map of posture and intent. My fingers close around the rifle, feeling the cold metal, hard reassurance against the skin of my palms. I imagine, with a clarity that makes my mouth dry, lifting it and putting a single, clean bullet where it matters.
“So you’re her new fuckboy, huh?” he asks, and the image collapses like glass.
The question snaps the fantasy away as confusion knots my brow. He glances over his shoulder, half chiding, half demanding an answer.
“What?”
He stops, forcing me to do the same. The world narrows to the scrape of gravel under our boots, the faint chirp of an insect, the rustle of dead leaves. Slowly, he turns so we face each other, his features lit by a hard, small sun of self-satisfaction.
“Come on, man. It’s so fucking obvious.” He spreads his arms like a carnival barker displaying a prize. “I’m not judging here. I mean, she’s such a piece of ass, I can’t blame you.”
The words strike like a live wire. Fury surges through me so fast it feels like an animal breaking loose, a bright, hot current that tightens every muscle. My grip on the rifle goes white, and my jaw clenches until my teeth ache.
If we weren’t on the mission, I would take him apart limb from limb for the way he talks about her.
“I’m just trying to warn you,” he says, as if his nastiness were charity, before falling back into step, moving with the jaunty rhythm of a man who thinks himself untouchable.
I match his pace, my anger entwined with a coarse, jealous ache. There’s a thread of something older between them, one I had suspected but never named. In a quiet, ungentle corner of my mind, I had known; in another, I had refused to believe it. Now the possibility blooms between my ribs like a festering wound.
“Warn me about what, exactly?” I ask, and the question is softer than the anger that fuels it, edged with something I don’t want to admit.
“Whatever she told you, she’s playing you,” he states. “Don’t trust her. She’ll use you and toss you aside the moment you stop being her shiny toy.”
“You had a thing, huh?” I ask, each syllable dragged out like a stone grinding over gravel. I used to have the patience of a saint. Now I can feel it cracking, thin fractures spreading through it. “Something serious?”
“I tried to put some sense into her head,” he explains, with a bitter chuckle that curdles into self-pity. “Tried to fix her. Change her for the better. But she just wouldn’t fucking listen. She’s a psycho, man. Completely gone. Lost fucking case.”
I bite my tongue so hard that iron floods my mouth. The taste of blood grounds me, a reminder that I can still feel, still restrain myself, albeit barely. Each word he throws out pushes me closer to the edge. The desire to break him claws up my spine like fire under skin.
And the funniest part is that he believes every word he’s saying. In his mind, he’s the savior. The fucking hero of a story he wrote for himself.
Pressure builds in my chest, heavy and relentless. The past presses against the edges of my vision—flashes, voices, the dull ache of something I thought I’d buried, and just like that, I hear her again.
I just want to help you. You could be better. You need to change.
My ex, the one who thought love meant repair. I gave her everything I had, stripped myself bare until there was nothing left to give. Still, it wasn’t enough. I became a project. A thing to be mended, improved, reassembled into something more palatable.
She wanted tofixme, too.
And when I failed to become the version she wanted, she looked at me with that same hollow disappointment, the kindthat makes you wish you could carve yourself open and start again.
I drag in a breath, grounding myself in the weight of the rifle in my hands. “How did you meet?” I ask, forcing my tone soft, though bitterness still leaks through like water through cracked stone. I hate every word, but he’s the only lead I have—the only window into Estella’s past that she refuses to open herself.
He shrugs, eyes flicking toward the trees. “On one of the missions, similar to this one. Both she and I had a similar past.”
I don’t believe that for a second. Estella and he don’t belong in the same sentence, much less the same story. “Like what?” I pry.
He snorts, spitting a laugh into the dirt. “Like both of us living in shitholes. FuckingGravemoor. Mine had a shitty name too?—”
He keeps rambling, and I let it slide off like rain on leather, tuning him out. Amid those sounds, I try to focus on the name Gravemoor. It rings unfamiliar, and I’ve been in enough holes to know the map of human misery by heart. Something alive stirs at the edges of me, a tightening hunger, a pulse akin to excitement. Every scrap I learn about her peels back another layer, brings me closer to the shape of who Estella really is.
I want more.
Ineedmore.
