His mouth twitched, part pain, part defiance. “I was thinking Blake shouldn’t get to talk about you like that.”
My throat tightened.
He looked awful. Reckless. Stupid. Brave. Mine.
And suddenly I wasn’t mad—I was furious. At Blake. At the cameras. At a world where a woman could be dragged through the mud on-air and the only one who stood up for her ended up in handcuffs.
I reached out and took his hand—bruised, bloodied, trembling.
And I didn’t let go.
The silence was deafening.
After I signed the paperwork, handed over the bail, and watched Kieren walk out of that station—still bruised, still bleeding, still looking like every part of him ached—I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t. My throat was tight. My heart felt like it had been put through a meat grinder.
He followed me out without asking where we were going. No cocky quip. No deflection. Just quiet footsteps behind mine, like even he didn’t know what came next.
The car ride was more of the same.
Rain slicked the windshield as we pulled out of the parking lot. The radio was off. My hands stayed at ten and two, white-knuckled on the wheel. Kieren sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window like the world had shrunk to a point he couldn’t see beyond. The city moved past us in a blur of wet pavement and yellow lights, but in the car, time felt slow—stretched thin by everything we weren’t saying.
I could feel his heat. His presence. The gravity of him. Even battered and bruised, Kieren Walker radiated intensity like it was stitched into his bones. But right now? He looked a little lost.
I glanced at him once at a red light.
His lip was swollen, cracked. There was blood at the collar of his hoodie. His knuckles were torn up bad—split skin, already bruising, fingers twitching now and then like he still wasn’t done fighting.
“You should’ve let someone else handle it,” I said softly, eyes back on the road.
He didn’t answer right away.
Then: “No.”
Just that. No apology. No justification. No regret.
I swallowed hard. My chest burned.
“What you did—” I started, but my voice cracked. “It was reckless.”
He exhaled. Not a sigh. Just air, forced from lungs that didn’t seem to know how to relax.
“He said you slept your way up,” he muttered finally. “On air. Live. Like you were nothing. Like what we’ve done was a joke.”
“It was a joke,” I said, too sharp, too fast.
Kieren flinched like I’d slapped him.
I immediately hated myself for it.
We didn’t speak again until I pulled into the underground garage of his apartment building. The security gate clanged closed behind us, sealing the silence in.
When I killed the engine, I just sat there. The keys hung from the ignition. Rain ticked softly on the roof.
Kieren shifted beside me. “You didn’t have to come.”
“I know,” I said.
The silence in the car wasn’t comfortable—it pressed against my chest like a weight, like if I breathed too loud it might all collapse. The streetlights made everything outside the windshield glow in soft gold, but nothing about this moment felt soft. Kieren sat next to me, still—bruised, blood on his knuckles, a cut on his lip that looked worse under the glow of the dash.
