Kiera's POV —
By ten-thirty, I was trying not to worry.
By ten-forty-five, I was lying to myself about it.
And by the time the clock crept toward eleven, I had given up pretending that the tightness in my chest was anything other than fear.
Not loud fear.
Not panic.
Just that slow, steady kind that sits under your ribs and makes every passing minute feel heavier than the last.
He had said he would be back.
I knew the kind of work he did. I knew enough by now not to ask questions whose answers would only leave bruises in my head. I knew men like Malakai did not move through clean worlds or harmless hours. There would always be blood somewhere near him, even if it wasn't his.
Still.
Knowing that did not make the waiting easier.
I sat on the edge of my bed with my phone in my hand, staring at the screen without really seeing it. I had already unlocked it three times, opened his contact twice, and closed it both times before doing anything stupid.
Should I call him?
No.
That felt clingy. Nervous. Small.
But what if something had happened?
What if the reason he wasn't back was because—
I stopped that thought before it could finish.
I stood up.
Sat back down.
Then stood again.
The room suddenly felt too still, too close, too full of my own mind. So I did the only thing I could think of to keep myself from spiraling any further.
I went to find Bridget.
Her room was brighter than mine, warmer too, full of the kind of lived-in chaos that somehow suited her perfectly. A hoodie had been tossed over the chair. Her bed was half-made in a way that suggested she had attempted neatness and then grown bored halfway through. Music played faintly from her speaker — low enough to ignore, loud enough to soften silence.
She was cross-legged on her bed in one of her oversized T-shirts when I knocked.
The moment she saw me, she pointed dramatically.
"Aha. Distress face."
I rolled my eyes and stepped inside. "I do not have a distress face."
"You do," she said immediately. "You also have an 'I'm trying really hard not to overthink something' face, and right now you're wearing both."
I shut the door behind me. "You're annoying."
"And observant."
I sat on the edge of her bed.
Bridget looked at me for a second longer, then put aside whatever she had been doing and shifted to face me fully.
"What happened?"
"Nothing."
She snorted. "Liar."
I looked away, staring instead at the window across the room where the night pressed dark against the glass.
"Seriously," she said, softer now. "What is it?"
I hesitated.
Because I couldn't tell her the truth.
Not all of it.
Not that I was sitting in her room because her brother had become the kind of thought I couldn't escape and the kind of worry I didn't know how to survive gracefully.
So I gave her part of the truth.
"I'm just... restless."
"About?"
I should have expected it.
I did expect it.
Still, I said, "Nothing in particular."
Bridget narrowed her eyes at me.
Then, like the menace she was, she said casually, "This wouldn't happen to be about my emotionally terrifying brother, would it?"
I looked at her so fast I practically betrayed myself.
She gasped dramatically. "Oh my God."
"It's not like that."
She pointed at me with the full force of her disbelief. "That is exactly the face of someone for whom it is like that."
I groaned and dropped my face into my hands.
From above me, I heard her laugh.
"Oh, this is incredible."
"Stop enjoying this."
"I will stop enjoying it when you stop being suspiciously pretty and mysterious every time his name enters a room."
I looked up at her. "Nothing is going on."
That was technically true.
Depending on how generously one defined nothing.
Bridget's expression shifted into something sweeter but no less dangerous. "Mmhm."
"I'm serious."
"Sure."
"Bridget."
"What?" She grinned. "I'm not saying anything. I'm just saying if there was something to say, I would deserve to hear it first because I am, objectively, the most important person in this situation."
I laughed despite myself.
That seemed to satisfy her.
For a little while after that, she kept me talking. Not about him — not directly, anyway — just about stupid things. School nonsense. A lecturer she hated. A girl in one of her classes who apparently cried because her project partner had ignored her text for six whole hours. Bridget reenacted the entire thing with enough drama to deserve a stage.
I listened.
I laughed when I was supposed to.
I even forgot myself for brief seconds at a time.
But not fully.
My thoughts kept slipping.
Back to the clock.
Back to the gates.
Back to whether his car had come in yet.
Bridget noticed, of course.
She noticed everything.
But for once, she didn't call me out on it.
Eventually, midway through a sentence about some absurd school argument, she yawned.
Then another one followed.
Then another.
I gave her a look. "You're literally falling asleep in the middle of gossip."
"That's because I'm committed to the art, not the energy."
I smiled.
She stretched out across the bed dramatically. "I'm either going to sleep for twenty minutes or take a shower and then sleep for twenty minutes."
"That sounds productive."
"I'm a visionary."
I stood, smoothing my hands down my shorts. "Go shower. Before you pass out and drown in your own conditioner."
She pointed sleepily at me. "If you suddenly decide to confess your feelings about anything while I'm gone, you are legally required to wait until I come back."
"There is nothing to confess."
"Mmm." She waved a hand weakly. "That's what they all say before disaster."
I laughed softly and headed for the door.
"Goodnight, Bri."
"It's not nightnight, it's shower-night," she muttered, already half-folded into herself.
I left before she could say anything worse.
Back in my room, the quiet hit harder.
Maybe because I had used up my distractions.
Maybe because now there was nothing left between me and the waiting.
I sat on the bed again.
Checked my phone.
Still nothing.
The house outside my room felt too silent. Not the comforting kind. The listening kind. The kind that made every second sound louder in your own body.
I don't know how long I sat there before the door opened.
No knock.
No warning.
Just the handle turning and the dark shape of him filling the doorway.
I stood immediately.
"Malakai—"
Then I saw the blood.
My breath caught.
There was blood on his shirt. Across the collar. Down one sleeve. A darker stain near his side. Some of it had dried, some of it still looked wet in places where the light from my room caught it wrong.
For one horrible second, all I could think was he's hurt.
I was already moving toward him before my brain caught up.
"What happened?"
His gaze found mine instantly.
And even in that state — bloodied, tired, dark-eyed in a way that made the whole room feel smaller — he still looked unbearably controlled.
"It's not mine."
That should have calmed me.
It didn't.
Not fully.
Because even the way he said it was wrong — too flat, too cold, too close to the edge of something worse.
I came closer anyway. "Are you sure?"
"Yes."
The answer was immediate.
Absolute.
Still, I looked him over again, searching automatically for signs I couldn't help looking for now. Stiffness. Favoring one side. The way he held himself when pain was trying to hide in him.
He shut the door behind him.
I noticed then that his face looked more dangerous than usual — not angry, not outwardly, but emptied of everything unnecessary. Like whatever had happened tonight had stripped him down to the coldest part of himself and left the rest somewhere else entirely.
"What happened?" I asked again, quieter now.
He looked at me for a second before answering.
"I don't want to talk about all of it."
That alone told me enough.
Still, after a beat, he added, "Two of my men died."
The room went colder around the words.
I stayed still.
His jaw shifted once.
"A third was left alive. Barely."
I swallowed.
Something in his eyes darkened further when he said the next part.
"There's a leech in the group."
The way he said leech made it sound less like insult and more like a death sentence waiting for the right neck.
"Someone is passing information out," he continued. "Plans that were never meant to leave the room."
I looked at the blood on him again and felt something tight and ugly move through my chest.
Not fear of him.
Fear for him.
"That's why this happened?"
"Yes."
The answer came cold.
Simple.
But I could feel what sat under it — rage sharpened down into control so severe it almost looked like calm.
I took one more careful step toward him.
"You should shower."
His eyes flicked down to me.
There was something strange in them now. Exhaustion, maybe. Or the kind of darkness that comes after a night where too much of yourself has been spent on ugly things.
"I know."
He didn't move.
Neither did I.
For one suspended second, we just looked at each other — me in soft sleep clothes and quiet worry, him blood-marked and dangerous and carrying the night on his skin like something that hadn't finished with him yet.
Then he reached for me.
One hand slid to the side of my neck. Warm. Firm. Grounding.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I'd been holding.
He stepped into me then, close enough that I could smell smoke, metal, the sharp scent of outside cold still clinging to him beneath the blood.
His forehead almost touched mine.
"Don't look at me like that."
My voice came out soft. "Like what?"
"Like you're trying not to imagine worse things."
That was exactly what I was doing.
He knew it.
Of course he knew it.
My hand lifted before I could stop it and rested lightly against the cleaner part of his shirt near his chest.
"You came back."
His expression changed.
Only slightly.
But enough.
"I told you I would."
The words slid through me quietly.
Then he kissed me.
Not hard.
Not rushed.
But not as soft as before either.
There was tiredness in it. And heat. And something almost desperate beneath the control, like he needed to feel something alive after whatever death had followed him home tonight.
I kissed him back immediately.
Because there was no universe in which I could do anything else.
His hand moved from my neck to my waist, pulling me closer, and I felt the blood on his clothes against the side of my arm and didn't even care. The kiss deepened only briefly — enough to steal breath, enough to send my pulse into chaos — and then he slowed it himself, ending it with a final small press of his mouth to mine.
When he pulled back, I was breathing harder.
So was he.
His thumb moved once against the side of my waist.
Then, very quietly, almost like the thought had only just reached his mouth, he asked:
"Will you shower with me?"
For one second, I forgot how to think.
The room went still.
The blood.
The worry.
The darkness he had brought back with him.
The heat still trapped between us.
Everything folded into that one impossible question.
And all I could do was stare at him.