Too quiet.
Then, without warning, the night came back—not as memory, but as sensation: the smell of it, the cold of it, the specific weight of what I’d done pressing down all at once.
The dock. The horde pouring across the lot. The screaming tangling together into a single, ragged sound that still echoed inside my skull.
Finn standing on the shore.
Finn turning back.
Finn going under. Gray hands, snapping teeth, the weight of them—and then nothing. Just the place where he’d been.
Gone.
Something collapsed in my chest. A broken, animal sound tore from me, one I didn’t recognize as my own voice until it was already over.
I squeezed my eyes shut so hard that colors burst behind my eyelids. It didn’t help. The memory played anyway: his eyes finding mine through the chaos, one hand raised—not waving, not reaching, just held up, like he was asking me to wait. The boat pulling away. The water opening up between us. My voice tearing itself apart on his name until there was nothing left of it—and still the water closed over him, indifferent, complete.
My throat tightened, and the words were a strangled whisper in my own head: I never told him I loved him.
The truth of that settled over me and pressed in.
I groaned and shifted against the mattress, pressing my face deeper into the pillow—
And froze.
There. Around my waist.
An arm.
Heavy. Warm. The weight of a living thing.
My heart lurched—one hard, violent thud.
Panic surged, instant and electric, flooding my limbs with adrenaline that burned away the grief and the fog, and the headache in one blinding flash. My body reacted before my brain caught up.
I twisted hard, breath catching in my throat, my hands already coming up—
And came face to face with him.
Silver eyes.
Those silver eyes. Pale and storm-colored, mapped in stolen glances, cataloged in a part of my brain I hadn’t known existed before him—like the exact shade the ocean turns just beforeeverything goes wrong. Eyes I had grieved. Eyes I had said goodbye to.
They looked back at me now.
Clear and real and right there, inches from my face, framed by dark lashes and the bruised, exhausted skin of a man who had been through something terrible and come out the other side of it breathing.
He smiled.
“Hey…” he said, and his voice came out rough with sleep and something deeper.
My brain refused to process it.
“No—” I whispered.
I blinked. Hard. Squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, bracing for the cruelty of waking up twice.
Still there. Still looking at me.
