Something is weighing on her. I can feel it. I just wish I had the energy to ask.
The city keeps moving. Sirens wail somewhere in the distance. Wind rattles the windows. And once again, that same low motorcycle engine sound rolls past beneath us.
Locke doesn’t react this time. Or maybe he does and I’m just too tired to notice. His phone vibrates on the coffee table as I’m still contemplating.
I feel him still before he says anything. I watch as he scans the screen silently. Then another message comes in, the phone vibrating in his hand. He doesn’t show me. He just sets the phone face down on the coffee table again, not even sending a response.
“What was that?” I ask softly.
“Nate. He was checking in,” he says after a pause. “Said he can’t talk now, though.”
That alone is enough to send a ripple of unease through me. I resist the urge to push for more details. I don’t think he has any, and whatever’s happening there isn’t mine to untangle… not yet.
I shift closer to Locke, my fingers sliding under his shirt so I can wrap my arm tighter around him. He tightens his arm around me, too, grounding us both. For the first time since I hit send, I let myself acknowledge what I’ve been avoiding.
This isn’t over.
It might never blow back on us the way I fear. Tiernan did his job. We were careful. This could be the end of it: noise, outrage, speculation, and only the footage to speak for itself.
Or it could spiral into something bigger and darker.
I don’t know.
All I know is that I made a choice. I set something in motion. Now I have to live with the aftermath, whatever it might be.
Right now, though, I’m here with the only people I love in this world. Awake enough to know that whatever comes next, I won’t face it alone.
That has to be enough, at least for tonight.
Chapter 40
LOCKE
Silence doesn’t always mean nothing is happening. Sometimes, it just means you’ve gotten better at blocking out the noise. Making it wait.
The loft is dark except for the city bleeding in through the windows. Neon reflections crawl across the ceiling in slow, distorted patterns. Arden is asleep against my chest, her breathing shallow at first, then gradually evening out. The kind of sleep that comes from exhaustion, not peace.
I don’t move. I learned a long time ago that stillness keeps you sharper. It lets you notice what doesn’t belong.
My phone sits face down on the coffee table. Not because it’s quiet, but because every vibration feels like a fuse is being lit. The fallout is already in motion; I can feel it. You don’t spend years navigating this industry without learning the rhythm of a scandal.
The first wave is chaos.
The second is control.
That’s where we are now: studios are scrambling, comment sections are frozen, publicists are rewriting history in real time. Luke will be condemned loudly and cautiously, in that order. Everyone will pretend they didn’t know until the moment knowing became unavoidable.
No one wants answers. They want deniability.
Arden doesn’t see any of that, and I won’t be the one to put it on her shoulders. She already made the hard choice. Everything after that is just the machine doing what it was built to do.
Outside, traffic hums below us, steady and indifferent. The sound of cars passing, horns honking, sirens wailing, they all blend into a sort of white noise that I’ve grown used to.
That’s when I hear it again. The motorcycle.
That’s the third time in the past hour.
The engine is a low rumble. It doesn’t roar, doesn’t speed past. It slows beneath the building, idles just long enough to be noticed, then moves on.
