Horror.
Not at me — inward, all of it turned inward, and I watch him read the sequence: her fear, my arousal, the freeze. I see him reach the conclusion as clearly as if he'd said it aloud.
"No." The word finally arrives. It comes out cracked, barely there. "Logan, that wasn't — it wasn't you—"
His eyes find mine for one second.
I see him weigh it.
I see him decide he doesn't believe it.
The mask comes down.
The man who held my face in his hands in this building two hours ago. The man who saidI'll come backlike a fact. That man vanishes and what's left is Logan Cruz with his expression locked and his eyes showing nothing, his body already turning away.
"Logan—"
He doesn't stop.
He crosses the room swiftly, the internal retreat faster than the physical one. He passes Gunner without speaking. Passes Nico, who looks up from his phone and clocks something in Logan's face that makes him go still for half a second.
The door at the far end of the room. Logan pushes through it. The door swings closed.
He doesn't look back.
I unfreeze completely about three seconds too late. My hands come up from my sides. My breath unlocks, ragged and overdue. I take one step toward the door and stop.
He's already gone.
I don't go after him.
I don't know where he went. I don't know what I would say anyway. My emotions are already too much for me, and this is just one more layer I cannot handle. I'm standing in the middle of the destroyed Gilded Lily with glass under my feet and the copper smell still thick in the air. Across the room Nico iswatching me with a look that says he saw some of that. Gunner is still methodically clearing debris. Marisol is still moving between the wounded and the waiting.
I press my thumb to the inside of my wrist.
My pulse is fast. Real. There.
The survival fear is still in my body — my hands still shake, my breath still catches — but something else moves underneath it now, larger and quieter and worse. He's gone somewhere I can't see, somewhere I don't know the layout of, and he's building the worst version of himself out of three seconds I couldn't control.
I saidit wasn't youand he chose not to believe it.
The freeze had nothing to do with him and everything to do with an hour of gunfire and five years of grief stacked on top of each other until my body just gave out. That's the truth. He doesn't have it.
The fear of the broken thing between us, of the story he's telling himself right now in whatever dark room he's found is the only thing in my chest that isn't shaking.
It's completely, absolutely still.
28 - Logan
Idon’t remember releasing her hand.
I don't remember the exit, the walk through the debris, the moment I stopped being the man holding Wren's hand in the wreckage and became the man in a car. Just: the Gilded Lily, the glass grinding under boots, her pulse under my thumb. Then the car. The rearview mirror showing me a block, then two, then nothing — the building swallowed by Miami at two in the morning.
My hands are on the wheel. Knuckles white against the leather. My foot finds the accelerator. The machinery that runs everything when Logan Cruz isn't functional takes over, keeps the body moving, because stopping is not an option and someone has to do something.
I don't decide to go to the ocean. My hands decide.
The images wait at the edges. Patient. I keep my eyes on the road. Take the turn south. The car moves through sparse late-night traffic and I don't think about what's at the edges because thinking requires a mind and mine has gone somewhere very quiet and very dark.
