Not fear.
Something sharper.
Something that refused to face it alone.
“You’re okay,” Ethan says, his voice low and controlled, but closer than before, closer in a way that settles into me instead of pushing me back.
“I saw him,” I whisper, because I need him to understand that this is real now, that this is not just a feeling or a suspicion anymore. “I saw his face.”
His jaw tightens, something darker moving through his expression. “I know.”
“No, you don’t get it.” My grip tightens without thinking, pulling him a fraction closer. “He wasn’t just watching. He…” I shake my head, my breath catching. “He looked like he knew me.”
Silence fills the space between us, heavy and charged, but not empty. It is full of everything we are not saying, everything he has been trying to draw out of me since the moment I arrived.
“You said that before,” he says quietly. “Now you’re sure.”
I nod once.
My breathing is still uneven, my pulse still too loud in my ears, but something else is threading through it now, something warmer, something that has nothing to do with the man outside and everything to do with the one standing in front of me.
Ethan doesn’t step back.
He doesn’t give me space.
He holds it, holds me there with nothing but his presence and the weight of his gaze.
“Then he made a mistake,” he says.
I swallow. “How?”
His eyes drop to my mouth, slow and deliberate, before lifting back to mine. “Because now I know how close he’s willing to get.”
My breath catches.
It shouldn’t matter that he’s looking at me like that.
It does.
More than it should.
“You’re not even worried,” I murmur, reaching for something steady, something logical to hold onto.
“I’m always worried,” he says. “I just don’t show it.”
“Why not?”
His gaze sharpens as it meets mine. “Because then you’d panic.”
“I’m already panicking.”
“No,” he says quietly. “You’re holding it together.”
The words land deeper than they should.
Because he’s right.
Because I’ve been holding it together since the second I realized I wasn’t alone out here.
