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Emotion clotted my chest and throbbed at my throat.

“Why don’t you go back to the house?” Silas coaxed. “I’ll head over there to give an update as soon as we’re finished. It’s safe now.”

There was a message hidden in his words. Confirmation that Shayne had been taken out. That the threat had been extinguished.

I sniffled and inhaled a fortified breath. “I’m not going anywhere.”

I wound around the other side of the table, getting close up to Trevan’s head.

So I could see the life in his eyes.

The fierceness and the apology as he wheezed into the oxygen mask.

“I choose to stay,” I proclaimed.

I just prayed he would be brave enough to choose me, too.

My arms were crossed over my chest, hugging myself as I climbed the exterior steps that led to my apartment.

The night was late.

The hum of bugs droning in the trees touched my ears, and the soft stirring of wind whipped up a few wayward locks of my hair.

All while my heart felt like Play-Doh inside my chest.

Like it’d been mashed but had no shape.

A blob that didn’t know what it wanted to be.

“Lena.” Trevan pretty much begged it as he started to slowly ascend the stairs behind me.

The rest of the night had been wrought with tension. Trevan trying to act like it was no big deal and getting up from the pool table the second the doctor had finished suturing him.

Storming down the hall and into Church where all the Crows had gathered to debrief the events of the night. The enormous door clattered shut behind him and shut me out.

Afterward, Silas had all but insisted we spend the night, but I’d needed to get out of there. To breathe. To think beyond the weight and oppression of the club.

A club I respected, but I was having a hard time reconciling all of it after seeing Trevan that way.

Averting his gaze and refusing to look at me.

I’d said I was going home by myself. It was safe, after all. Any reason for Trevan to be staying with me muted.

But apparently, that was what it took to get him to pay attention. He said there was no way in hell I was going home alone.

He thought his only job was to protect me.

And it’d…hurt.

A lot.

And I knew after what had been happening between us and then tonight, I couldn’t bear it any longer. Couldn’t keep pretending.

Silas had lent Trevan his truck to get us back here, and we hadn’t said anything on the ride home. A vast cavern of uncertainty whittled between us. So much tension that I’d barely been able to breathe, let alone speak.

Caught in a void of pain and longing that neither of us knew how to cross.

“Would you slow down?” The guttural voice hit me from behind, heavy with an apology.