Something flickers in her eyes—gratitude, raw and unguarded.
“Trouble seems to find you no matter where you go,” I say, because I need the distance the words give me.
Her breath stutters. Just once. She hates that I’m right. She swallows, throat tight, but she doesn’t look away. I know exactly where her mind goes—to the original fracture, the moment everything went wrong. Trouble found her when she was twelve. It sank its teeth into her then, and it never let go.
She steps closer. Just enough that the air between us thins to nothing. Her fingertips brush mine, barely there, but it’s enough.
God help me.
“I’m not afraid of you,” she whispers.
“You should be.”
“Maybe. But for some reason, I’m not.”
Her warmth hits me like impact. She doesn’t want danger. What she leans toward—what she trusts without saying it—isthe safety she feels when I’m here. The protection she refuses to name but doesn’t deny.
“Rowan,” I warn, my voice scraping out of me.
Heat coils where her skin grazes mine. I breathe out hard, fighting the instinct to pull her closer instead of pushing her back.
“You’re tempting me,” I warn. “Be careful, or I’ll stop pretending I’m the good guy in this story.”
Her smile is small. Knowing. Beautiful in a way that should scare me.
“Since when were you the good guy?”
Fuck.
27
ROWAN
There’s a problem with society. It teaches us that trauma strips you of want.
They talk about girls like me in the past tense, like we stopped existing the moment something was taken. Like once you’ve been hurt badly enough, you lose the right to hunger for anything more than survival. Safety. Quiet. A small life with rounded edges.
They’re wrong.
Desire doesn’t die because someone tried to break you. It just goes underground for a while. It learns how to wait. It becomes specific in its choices.
I have lived with grief long enough to know the shape of it. It’s always there—some days loud, some days dormant—but it doesn’t erase the rest of me. It doesn’t cancel desire. If anything, it makes it more deliberate. More honest.
I know what it costs to want something. I know what it means to reach for it anyway.
And I want Justin Collins.
He moves around me like he’s aware of invisible fractures, adjusting his steps without ever pointing them out. He noticeseverything—what makes me still, what makes my shoulders tighten, what makes my breathing change—then makes space and quietly guards it.
I know the violence he keeps leashed, the discipline it takes to hold himself still. That restraint is part of why I trust him. He doesn’t use his strength to claim me. He uses it to protect the space where I get to choose.
That’s the part people don’t understand.
Traumatised girls don’t stop wanting. We just learn to value consent more than fantasy. We learn the difference between being taken and being chosen.
And standing here now, I realise something simple and terrifying. I don’t just feel safe with him. I feel brave enough to want him.
That realisation settles in my chest and doesn’t move.
