“Okay,” Austin said again, fast and focused. “I’m not far, Blair. I’m just down the road. I’ll be there in a minute, okay?”
“Okay,” I breathed, his words grounding me.
“I’ll be there in a—”
The sentence never finished. Or maybe it did, and I just didn’t hear it. Because the sound that ripped through the phone was unmistakable. The shriek of tires against pavement. Metal colliding with metal. Close enough that it came through the line like it was happening right beside me.
The fear that had only just left my body came back. This fear was different. It wasn’t slow or creeping. It was lightning. It struck instantly, ripping through me from my head, through my chest, down into my organs, all the way to my toes. I stared at my phone, frozen in a numbness so deep it felt unreal, like my body was waiting for Austin’s voice to come back through the line. Like if I just held still enough, time would reverse itself.
One second.
Five seconds.
Ten.
Thirty.
There was nothing. No sound. No breath. No voice. Just silence. Then the call disconnected. The sound of it felt final, sharp and unforgiving, like a door slamming shut somewhere I couldn’t reach. That was what broke me free. My head snapped up, my eyes flying toward the dark road stretching out in front of me. The alcohol was still in my blood, still buzzing through my veins, but something in my mind pushed through the fog, cutting clean and clear.
He said he was close. One minute away. Right down the road. The thought latched onto me, urgent and desperate, and it was enough. My feet moved before I fully realized what I was doing.I took off running, sprinting as fast as I ever had, my lungs burning, my legs screaming, my body moving on pure instinct as I ran back toward the house. Toward the road. Toward him. It felt like I didn’t take a single breath as I ran. My chest was too tight with fear to allow something as basic as air. My brain was stunned, shocked into a state where thinking felt dangerous, like if I let myself fully process what I’d just heard, I’d collapse.
He was wearing his seatbelt. He would have fastened his seatbelt. I told him he needed to wear his seatbelt, so he would have. Right? The breath trapped deep in my stomach finally tore free as I ran into the intersection. A four-way stop. I didn’t have to guess anymore where the accident had happened. It was right there. Two cars sat mangled in the middle of the road, twisted and broken. Shards of metal littered the dark pavement, scattered violently like they’d been ripped from their frames and thrown outward by force. Glass glinted faintly under the streetlights.
My feet slowed, then stopped completely as I took in the scene. My pulse thundered in my ears, so loud it nearly drowned out everything else. It looked like one car had blown through the intersection at full speed, slamming into the other hard enough to spin them both, locking them together in a brutal, wrecked dance. But the breath that escaped my chest this time wasn’t fear. It was relief. Because neither of those cars was Austin’s. Austin hadn’t crashed. Something else had—something close enough that I’d heard it through the call.
“Blair!”
I heard his voice at the exact same moment the realization hit me. He wasn’t dead. My head snapped up, panic giving way to frantic searching as I tried to locate where the sound had come from. Then I saw him. Austin stood just beyond the wreckage, afew yards back from the intersection, his expensive car parked neatly behind the third stop sign. Untouched. Perfectly intact. Like it didn’t belong anywhere near the chaos in front of it. He was holding a phone in his hand. Not his phone. It was a flip phone. Old. Out of place. Not his usual phone. Something for things you didn’t want traced. I let out a breath. Then another. Then another. I was trying to make my brain catch up with my eyes, trying to convince myself that what I was seeing was real. That the worst thing I’d imagined hadn’t just happened.
Austin was fine. He was fine. As the truth settled in, something else drained out of me too. The adrenaline. The panic. The sharp edge that had been holding me upright. Between my encounter with Killian and the sound of metal colliding through my phone, my body had been running on borrowed energy. Now it gave up. The world swayed again, the alcohol reminding me just how much control it still had over me. Austin started running toward me, but he stopped a few feet away. The hesitation on his face was immediate and unmistakable. We both knew why. We didn’t know what we were anymore.
“Blair, I…” he started, breathless. “I’m sorry.” Then his expression shifted. The concern drained away, replaced by confusion as his eyes took me in properly. “Are you drunk?”
“What?” I asked, my thoughts lagging behind the moment. “I heard the crash. I thought you died.”
He took another step closer, swearing under his breath. “Blair… fuck. You’re drunk. Fuck.”
“I thought you were dead,” I repeated, because he still wasn’t hearing the part that mattered. He wasn’t understanding how terrified I’d been. How close I’d come to breaking.
Something finally clicked. Austin’s face fell as the meaning reached him, real pain flickering across his features as he looked at me, at the way I was standing, at the way I was swaying. But it only lasted a second. He shook his head, dragging a hand through his hair in frustration. His gaze darted from me, to the wreckage, then back to me again. Then back to the wreckage. He looked like someone trying to solve an impossible equation. Like he didn’t know which disaster to address first.
“Go wait by my car, Blair, okay?” he said quickly. When I didn’t move, his voice rose. “Blair. We can figure everything out after, but right now I need you to wait by my car. Okay?”
I flinched at the urgency in his tone, nodding even though I didn’t understand what the problem was. My body obeyed before my mind caught up. I walked toward his car, glancing over my shoulder as he ran back toward the wreck. Austin went to the red car first, leaning into the driver’s side window. Words spilled out of him too fast for me to hear before he pulled back and rushed to the silver one. He spoke to that driver too, voice sharp and urgent, then turned and ran back toward me again. I opened my mouth to say something. Nothing came out.
It felt like I was operating on autopilot, like my body had slipped into a mode I didn’t know existed. I tried to sort through what I was feeling, but every emotion overlapped until none of them made sense on their own. The relief I’d felt when I saw Austin alive was overwhelming. Unmatched. It was like being told a life-saving treatment had worked after being certain you only had a week left. I’d run toward him because I needed him. Because I did need him. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to walk away from him. And at the same time, I wanted nothing less. I needed to walk away. And I needed him.
“Blair,” Austin said again, closer now. “Get in the car. Please. Get in the car.” I frowned, my feet rooted to the pavement. I couldn’t get in the car. Could I? Getting in the car meant staying. And I wasn’t sure I was allowed to do that anymore. I started to shake my head, but Austin let out an urgent sigh of frustration. He stepped toward me and placed both of his hands on my shoulders. I tried to shrug him off, but he didn’t let me. “Blair, get in the car, okay?” he said quickly. “We can talk after. I can’t be here when the cops come. I need you to understand that. I can’t be here—and neither can you, because you’re really drunk.” Because of what he was. Because of what he’d been. He looked straight into my eyes, searching my face like he needed me to grasp how serious this was. How non-negotiable.
“Okay,” I finally mumbled, pushing his hands away from me.
He stepped back immediately and opened the passenger door. I climbed inside, my movements slow and uncoordinated. The moment he shut the door and got into the driver’s seat, he threw the car into reverse, pulling away fast and heading in the opposite direction from the crash. I watched him reach into his pocket and pull out the flip phone. I wondered who he was about to call, until he slammed it against the window. I flinched. He hit it again. And again. Each impact was sharp and deliberate. After the fifth strike, the phone was barely recognizable. Austin rolled down the window and tossed it into the night, watching it disappear into the darkness like it had never existed at all. I still didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything at all.
Austin kept driving, his eyes flicking to the rearview mirror every few seconds like he expected headlights to appear behind us at any moment. Eventually, I turned away from him, pressing my forehead against the window instead. I focused on my body—on the way everything inside me felt wrong. Really wrong.I closed my eyes as the road stretched on. I wasn’t sure how long he drove, only that it was long enough for the party to feel impossibly far away. Long enough that I didn’t recognize anything around us anymore.
My stomach clenched hard. “Pull over,” I muttered, my eyes still shut.
“What?”
