All the tension that fractured beneath grief and truth and guilt comes roaring back stronger than before.
The porch creaks softly as he shifts closer. Now I can feel the heat of him fully. The sharp clean scent of pine and leather.
Every instinct inside me says this is dangerous. Once this line breaks, nothing between us stays simple again.
Not that it ever was.
“What happened over there—you don’t know what it did to me,” he says roughly.
“I understand enough.”
Tension flickers across his face. “That’s the problem.”
Maybe.
But I’m tired of pretending complicated things become simpler if we refuse to look at them.
Phoenix made a choice. Rhys made one, too. And somehow both of them have been trapped inside that moment ever since.
I look up at him steadily. “I came here because I thought you abandoned him.” The words leave visible pain across his face. I continue anyway, “But you didn’t.”
His eyes close, face fracturing.
“No.”
One syllable changes everything but fixes nothing. The mission still failed, and people died. Phoenix is still gone, and Rhys carries it all like punishment branded into his skin.
But now the truth exists between us instead of the lie. And that feels more intimate than touching him ever did.
His hand lifts again, slowly. This time it reaches me. Rough fingertips brushing carefully along my jaw. Tentative. Like he’s touching something fragile. Or maybe he’s the fragile thing here.
My breath catches, and my eyes close. Neither of us moves or pulls away.
The mountains loom behind him, glimmering with rain and cloud and morning light. And standing here now, close enough to feel the war still living inside him, I realize something terrifying.
I’m no longer staying because of the investigation. Or even concern for Rhys.
Now I’m staying because somewhere along the way, this broken, haunted man stopped feeling like the enemy.
And started feeling like home.
Chapter
Twenty
RHYS
“What do you need from me?”
The words come out too raw.
But I mean them to the depths of my soul. Whatever she asks, I’ll give. I have nothing left to hold back.
Her hands curl into my flannel, and she tugs me back inside. The breath leaves my chest.
Those eyes. Earth and moss with flecks of gold. Once I saw Phoenix in them. Now all I see isher.
The woman who came up a mountain stubborn as hell. The woman who changed a man, even if she doesn’t know it.
