Her hand loosened on my shirt and flattened against my chest instead—right over my heartbeat.
The silence was packed with everything neither of us had language for, with the reality waiting beyond those boarded windows, and with the knowledge that in a few hours, I’d walk out the front door into a street that had been actively trying to eat us for three weeks.
My arms tightened around her.
“I’m going to get us out,” I said, low, directed more at myself than at her.
She heard it anyway.
“I know you are.”
My jaw tightened. The plan ran its loop—the car, the roof, the four minutes, the variables I could account for and the ones I couldn’t. I wanted to believe what I’d just said. Part of me did. That was the part that had kept people alive before, the part that didn’t flinch at bad odds. But I knew the difference between confidence and certainty, and I wasn’t going to lie to her, even now, even like this—except that I already had, and she’d taken it without question, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
But she said it as if she believed it completely, as if the possibility of any other outcome genuinely hadn’t occurred to her, and that trust—absolute and entirely unearned—broke me.
I pressed my lips to the top of her head.
Her body softened against mine, every last trace of tension leaving her, as if she’d finally located the single place in this broken world where she could stop bracing for what came next.
I tightened my grip and sat with that.
Fear coursed through my veins, the plan replaying in my mind, every variable scrutinized, every gap exposed.
But something else had taken root alongside it all.
I wasn’t just fighting for survival anymore.
I had something I refused to lose.
And in every way that mattered—in every way my training had ever warned me about—I now had something I could lose.
That changed everything.
Tomorrow loomed between us, unspoken.
The relentless loop had kicked in, the one that never shut off, keeping me alive and exhausted in equal measure.
So I did something I hadn’t done in a long time.
I shut it down.
Just for a minute.
I glanced down at Libby, still tucked against me, her head resting lightly on my chest. I let the silence wrap around us before changing the subject.
“So,” I said, a faint levity of humor in my voice, “I definitely know what you like in bed.”
She stiffened immediately.
There it was.
The blush crept up her neck and colored her cheeks, visible even in the dim light. I watched it spread with more satisfaction than I probably should have.
A quiet chuckle rumbled in my chest.
“Relax,” I murmured.
She huffed—half embarrassed, half amused—and pressed her face harder against my shirt as if she could hide there.
