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And she was looking at me. Actually looking, seeing, noticing.

“You followed me,” she said.

Not a question. A statement, warm and knowing, like she’d expected it, like she’d wanted it, like she’d felt that same impossible tug and had been waiting to see if I’d be brave enough, or stupid enough, to act on it.

“I didn’t mean to.” The words came out rough, scraped raw from a throat that had forgotten how to speak honestly. “I was going home. Then I saw you come back. And then I was... following.”

The admission felt dangerous. Like handing her a weapon and hoping she wouldn’t use it.

She smiled, and my undead heart skipped a beat.

Actually skipped. A full, physical stutter-stop that I felt in my chest like a fist closing around nothing, like the organ had suddenly decided to participate in my life again.

I pressed my hand to my sternum, frowning. That wasn’t supposed to happen. Vampires didn’t have heart palpitations. We didn’t have heartbeats at all. We didn’t have anything: no pulse, no breath, no warm blood moving through cold veins. Just the memory of being alive, and the hunger that never quite went away, and the endless, empty nights stretching out forever.

But right now, my chest felt like a drum someone had started beating. Like something had woken up inside me that I hadn’t known was sleeping.

“You’re not very good at this,” Carolina said, crossing the distance between us with a grace that made my clumsiness ache. She moved like water, like smoke, like something that had never stumbled or tripped or knocked over a glass in her entire life.

I thought about all the ways I could answer that. All the defenses I’d built over a year of being everyone’s favorite joke: the sarcasm, the self-deprecation, the careful emotional distance that kept me from caring too much when people laughed.

“At what?” I asked instead, because I genuinely didn’t know what she meant.

“Being mysterious.” She stopped an arm’s length away, close enough that I could smell her properly, jasmine and ozone with something wild and electric that made my fangs ache with a hunger that had nothing to do with blood and everything to do with wanting. “You’re about as subtle as a brick through a window, Logan Richards.”

I blinked. “You know my name?”

“I know everyone’s name.” She tilted her head, studying me like I was a specimen under glass, something interesting and strange and possibly dangerous. “You’re the vampire who trips over cracks. Who walks into walls. Who spilled an entire tray of shots last Tuesday and somehow managed to soak three werewolves and a dryad.”

My face burned. I could feel the heat in my cheeks, the rush of blood memory that my body still insisted on producing even though it made no sense, even though I was dead, technically, legally, medically dead.

“Yeah, well.” I kicked at a loose stone, watched it skitter into the dark. “I’m going through a phase.”

“A phase?”

“Coordination issues.” The words tasted like ash on my tongue. “I’m working on it.”

Carolina laughed, and the sound wrapped around me like a physical thing, warm and alive and so beautiful it hurt. “You’re terrible at lying, too.”

“I’m not lying.” The protest came out sharper than I intended, defensive and raw and too honest. “I just... I wasn’t always like this. When I first got here, I was fine. Then something happened. I don’t know what. But now I can’t walk across a room without finding something to trip over.”

I stopped, surprised by my own honesty.

I didn’t talk about it. Dean knew when to leave a man alone, and Mack had offered to help more than once, but accepting meant admitting how badly I needed it. So I buried everything under sarcasm and acted like none of it mattered. After a year as Arrhythmia’s favorite punchline, pretending not to care felt like the last scrap of dignity I had left.

But Carolina was looking at me like she actually saw me, like she was seeing past the clumsiness and the humiliation to something underneath, something I wasn’t sure still existed, and the words kept tumbling out before I could stop them.

“Everyone in this town hates me,” I said, quieter now. The truth of it settled in my chest like a stone, heavy and familiar. “I don’t know why. I don’t know what I did. I just know that I wake up every day waiting for the next humiliation, and they keep coming, and I can’t. I can’t figure out how to make it stop.”

I hadn’t meant to say that. Hadn’t meant to admit how much it hurt, how tired I was, or how close I was to giving up on the idea that Arrhythmia could ever be anything but a cage.

But Carolina’s expression shifted. Something flickered in her blue eyes: pity, maybe, or recognition, or something else I couldn’t name but desperately wanted to understand. She reached out, her fingers hovering near my cheek, and I went very still.

I didn’t breathe. I didn’t move. I just stood there, frozen, while her hand hung in the air between us like a promise, like a threat, like something I wanted so badly I was afraid to reach for it.

“You really don’t know,” she whispered.

“Know what?”