I came to Miami because I wanted to feel something. I remember thinking that in a cheap sublet at two in the morning, like it was a gift I was asking for, like feeling was a thing you could simply request and receive. The numbness was a wall, and I spent five years on one side of it, dry and unreachable and safe, pressing my palm against it and calling it loss.
The wall is gone.
Now everything gets in: the copper smell and the crunch of glass and the way Marisol's face went blank for those two seconds at the covered body. Juliet's eyes staring at nothing. The grief from inside the safety of Logan's arms, still raw and open under my ribs, no time to close around it before the windows blew.
I wanted this. I wanted to feel.
Now I wish I couldn’t.
I know the room is clear. I know I'm standing twenty feet from Nico Rosetti who could coordinate a military operation in his sleep. But still, my hands shake. My breath stays shallow. I flinch at every sound.
I don't hear him approach.
One moment I'm alone against the bar, and then Logan is there. His jacket is gone. His shirt is untucked on one side. His hair is disordered. He crosses to me without hesitating and takes my arms in both hands. The floodlights are directly above us and somewhere behind me the glass crunches once under a boot and I flinch again.
His eyes move over my face. Fast, methodical.
"Are you okay?"
My throat closes.
The same question. He asked it in the strip club booth while I was crumbling over my mother and it split me open. He checked on me briefly in the back office before he had to go handle things. But I don’t know the answer any more. I'm alive. My arms work. The cut on my forearm has stopped bleeding. But none of that is the same as being okay.
"I know it's over." My voice comes out wrong — too thin, not quite mine. "I know the building is clear. My body just—" I stop. My hands are still shaking and I look down at them like they belong to someone else. "I can't make it stop."
He looks at my hands. Then at my face.
"Wren." Lower, closer. "Look at me."
I look at him. That's the one thing I can do right now.
Something changes in his eyes.
His pupils dilate. His grip on my arms tightens — just slightly, just enough that I feel it. His breath shifts, deepens.
I know that look.
I have seen it in his eyes in the forest with leaves in my hair and the dark all around me. I have seen it in his office when he locked the door. I have seen it in the motel hallway when he saidgoodnightlike a threat and walked away.
His arousal is responding to my fear. The fear written on my hands, my face, the set of my shoulders — he sees it and his body is answering it.
I watch him register it. A flicker crosses his expression — conflict, recognition, shame — and for one second he's very still.
Then he leans in anyway. His hands pull me slightly closer. His mouth moves toward mine.
And I freeze.
Not from fear of him. Not from wanting him to stop. My nervous system has been running at capacity for an hour — the blast, the gunfire, the survival calculations, the grief before all of that — and now the input spikes again and something juststops. My body goes rigid. My breath stops. My hands press flat against his chest, locked there, not pushing, not pulling. Just stopped.
One second. Two.
He's so close I can feel the warmth of him. I want him. I'm frozen and I want him, but I cannot make my body do anything at all.
He pulls back.
His hands drop from my arms. He steps away — one step, the space opening between us like something cut it.
I look at his face.
