A thin, taut beat stretched between us.
His voice broke on the next word—just one—then he steadied himself and continued.
“I need to know that you’re going to be safe, Libby. That’s all. That’s the only thing I’m asking you to give me.”
This wasn’t a man pushing me away because my proximity was inconvenient, or because I was too much, or because he’d decided I wasn’t worth the complexity of whatever this had become.
This was a man pushing me away because I mattered. Because whatever this was had already found the gaps in his armor, and that was the thing that undid him—not bullets, not ambush, not the particular violence of a world ending. Those he had survived before and expected to survive again. For this, he had no training. No calluses built to protect him from the raw nerve of it.
My eyes burned. I blinked back the tears, holding his gaze even as everything in me wanted to look away—to argue, to tell him, “Hell no.”
But I saw the way he was looking at me.
He needed this. Needed the single, solid certainty of it—something to hold against whatever was coming so he could walk into it without half his mind on me. Needed me to give him that.
“I promise,” I said quietly, working hard to keep every tremor out of my voice, to give him something that sounded like solid ground even though it was being said from the middle of what felt like free fall.
The tension left his hands. He exhaled completely, as if something heavy had been set down.
“Okay,” he whispered.
We sat in the dark. Slowly, his forehead lowered toward mine until we were almost touching—a distance I could have closed without meaning to, without even deciding to. Close enough to count his eyelashes, to trace the small scar above his left eyebrow. Close enough to smell him—sweat, dust, and gun oil.
Everything between us was tangled, unresolved, and complicated in ways that defied clean edges.
You’re not my cup of tea.
You’re the closest I’ve ever been to feeling something real.
Both true. Both mine to carry now, to hold alongside each other and figure out what to do with in whatever time we had before tomorrow arrived and possibly made the question irrelevant.
Neither of us moved away. Neither of us reached for the space that would have been so easy to create and so much harder to admit we didn’t want.
* * *
“Libby… baby… hey—hey, we need to wake up.”
His voice dragged me up through something thick and dark, pulling me back into a world I didn’t want to rejoin.
“It’s almost daylight,” Finn said, kissing me quickly. “We need to get moving. Secure everything. Go over the plan with the girls.”
My eyes blinked open.
For a second—nothing. No recognition.
Then it crashed through me.
The house.
The plan.
Today.
I shoved myself upright, muscles screaming from too few hours of sleep and too many hours of dread. Fiona had taken watch sometime in the small hours, giving Finn some much-needed rest.
“I’m up,” I murmured, swinging my legs off the bed.
We dressed fast.
