If she let herself, she could still smell him—cedar and soap—ghosting the back of her throat. He turned toward the lot, shoulders loose, hands sliding into his pockets like he hadn’t just set her nerves on fire.
“Goodnight, Counselor.”
She watched him walk toward the street. Heart pounding. Lips still tingling. Somewhere on the square, a phone camera flashed.
On the balcony, Micah pulled back from the viewfinder, his thumb hovering over the playback. Lila leaned over his shoulder, the glow of the screen illuminating the jagged edge of her smile as she took in the image of Eleanor’s back against the brick and Reid’s hand buried in her hair. It looked like a movie poster. It looked like an indictment.
“There it is,” Lila murmured. “The money shot.”
Later
Eleanor lay awake long after midnight.
The house was quiet around her, the only sound the rustle of dogwood branches shifting outside her bedroom window. Her phone lay face down on the nightstand, but the images were already burned into her mind.
She ran a slow hand over her face, her skin still humming with the phantom heat of his hands. Her fingers trailed down, tracing the edge of her lower lip—a physical record of the way he’d claimed her mouth.
It had been as hot as she’d feared.
That was the problem. She’d spent two years building a wall ten feet thick, only to find out that the most honest thing about Reid Calloway was the way he’d destroyed her defenses in a single breath.
Suddenly, the nightstand shivered. A sharp, rhythmic buzzing.
Eleanor froze. She didn't want to look, but the blue light of the screen was already bleeding into the dark, casting skeletal shadows of the dogwood across her white ceiling.
She flipped the phone over.
It was a notification from a local "Sylva Sightings" account. A grainy, high-contrast photo of the stairwell. Her back against the brick. Reid’s hand was buried in her hair.
@MountainMysteries:spied at Sky Bar: The DA and the Defense taking "sidebar" to a whole new level. Is this how "justice" works in Sylva? Looks like the Ice Queen finally found someone to melt for.
@LilaGrantOfficial:This is exactly why I came to this valley. The people in power are too busy playing games with each other to care about the truth. If the DA is this close to the woman who let a monster walk free in Charleston, who is actually looking out for the victims?
@WNC_HottieHunter:omg I knew Calloway was fine but I wouldn’t mind being pinned against a brick wall by the DA. Is she taking applications for co-counsel?
@JacksonCoLocal:How is he allowed to prosecute cases if he's dating the defense? This whole town is rigged.
Eleanor dropped the phone like it had burned her.
The warmth was gone, replaced by a cold, familiar dread. She had wanted to be invisible. She had wanted to be safe. But as the notifications began to chime one after another—a relentless, digital heartbeat—she realized she was already trending.
She stared at the screen's glow, her pulse thundering in her ears. Charleston. God help her, if this was starting up again...
She’d spent three years running from that name, building a fortress of "no comment" and clinical distance. She had finally started to think the ghosts were buried. But there it was again, typed out in black and white for forty thousand listeners to dissect.
Not random.
Never random.
She turned over and squeezed her eyes shut, willing the room to go dark again, willing the panic back down where she'd kept it for years.
But underneath the fear, underneath the dread, there was still the memory of his mouth on hers.
God.
What a kiss.
Her lips still felt swollen. Her pulse still kicked every time she remembered the way his hand had tangled in her hair, the way he'd studied her like he already knew there was no going back.
