Nothing. Then another scream before a gunshot cut it short—a single, hard crack that the buildings threw back and forth until it had nowhere left to go.
I didn’t need to see it to understand. Someone had made a run for it, gotten caught, or decided to fight back. The ending was always the same.
“It needs to fucking rain,” I muttered through my teeth.
Without it, we had nothing.
We didn’t have time for frustration; we had a backup plan.
Rain or no rain, we were moving soon. The supplies should have lasted longer. They hadn’t—not because anyone had taken more than their share, none of us were eating enough for that—but four people were still four people, and the numbers didn’t care.
Libby and I had sat with it all the previous night, in the dark while the house creaked around us, and worked through the numbers in whispers.
“When we’re down to the last of it, we move,” I’d told her. “Storm or no storm.”
She nodded without hesitating. “We don’t have another choice.”
Listening to the last of those distant sounds fade, the weight of that decision settled harder against my chest. Moving without cover meant exposure—not a plan so much as a calculated gamble, and gambles had a way of collecting when you could least afford to pay them.
I understood death. I’d made my peace with it long ago, sitting with the idea until it no longer had the power to slow me. The men I’d seen freeze were the ones who never returned. This acceptance had served me well, keeping me sharp and functional through situations that broke others. I didn’t regret cultivating it.
But Fiona was different.
Our parents were gone. Our other siblings were scattered, their fates unknown and likely to remain so. She had only me, and that was a responsibility I could never set down.
Libby and Lily were becoming a liability to my focus. I hadn’t allowed myself to confront it directly, but the feeling had taken root, nonetheless. It wasn’t just the shared watches, but the way Libby had wordlessly handed me her canteen first yesterday. A small gesture of trust, settling in my gut like a stone, a weight unrelated to survival.
All of it was dangerous.
Caring made things harder. More people to protect meant more variables, more ways to fail, more outcomes beyond my control, no matter how well I planned or how sharp I remained. And if something happened to any of them—
I cut the thought short before it had fully formed.
I couldn’t go there. When the moment came to act, I needed to be the version of myself that had brought people home before: cold, calculated, operating on training rather than feeling.
I opened my eyes and looked back at the Suburban.
One way or another, we weren’t staying here long enough to discover what truly running out of options looked like.
* * *
I woke from broken sleep to the wet heat of lips wrapped tight around my cock.
A low groan tore from my throat before I’d fully surfaced. Faint light filled the room—pale stripes cutting through the boards, somewhere between night and day.
It was Libby’s mouth. Hot, slick, and hungry, working me with a steady, deliberate rhythm that made my hips jerk before conscious thought caught up.
She’d started this a few mornings ago. Sweet, careful Libby had transformed into someone else entirely in this room, waking me with her mouth, her hands, the tight grip of her body before our watch began. It was as if she needed to remind both of us that we still existed beyond mere survival, as if she needed proof that something worth having still remained.
I wasn’t complaining. Not even slightly.
My hand slid into her hair, fingers curling through the soft strands—not pushing, but holding her there, enjoying the way her throat contracted around me each time she sank deeper. The heat of her mouth bordered on the obscene. Her tongue slid along the underside of my shaft, tracing the vein that pulsed with every heartbeat as she took more of me, her throat constricting around the head in waves that pressed my toes hard into the mattress.
Her tongue traced the ridge beneath my cock, a slow, deliberate movement, as if memorizing its shape. Then her lips sealed around me, the suction pulling just enough to make my thighs tense. A wet click as she released, followed by the slick drag of her mouth sliding back down—deeper this time, her throat fluttering around the head. The sound, thick and obscene, filled the room. When she pulled back, a glistening thread of spit stretched from her bottom lip to my skin, catching the dim light before snapping. The air hit the wet trail she’d left, cold against the heat of me, and my hips jerked without permission.
She hummed, the vibration traveling straight up my spine. My hips drove forward, pushing another inch past her lips, and I hissed through my teeth.
“Fuck… just like that, baby.”
