We separate. Not far, the space of a breath, his forehead almost against mine, his hand still at my jaw.
“Lola,” he says. Just my name. Breathless.
“Don’t make it a moment,” I reply.
He pulls back. Looks at me. And then—because he is Jack, because this is exactly who he is—he nods. Once. And lets it be what it is rather than what it could become.
“Okay,” he says.
I keep my mouth shut.
Ryan is waiting when we come down. He’s there, standing at the base of the wheel with his hands in his pockets and the stillness he carries everywhere. He looks at me when I step off the platform with the expression that gives me nothing and somehow gives me everything, the one I keep failing to decode.
Jack does the thing where he evaporates. He’s said goodbye and crossed two meters away before I’ve processed that he’s leaving. Then it’s Ryan, and the late-night carnival around us, and the sound of the wheel slowing to a stop.
“You all right?” Ryan asks.
“People keep asking me that.”
“People are noticing things.”
“People should mind their own business.” I say it without heat, which is different from how I’d have said it a few days ago. He notices. I see him notice.
“Archer,” he says. Not an apology on Archer’s behalf, just the word, acknowledging the source.
“He’s not wrong,” I say, for the second time tonight.It’s getting easier to say, which is its own warning.
Ryan looks at me for a moment. “No. He’s not.” He says it evenly, without apology for that either. “He’s also not always right about what the right response is.”
“He grabbed my wrist.”
“I know.”
“Did he tell you?”
“The bond,” he replies simply. “Not details. Just… I felt the moment.”
I file this. Pack bond, physical events, the Alphas all connected in ways I don’t fully understand. More information about the perimeter of my situation.
“I handled it,” I say.
“I know you did.” And the way he says it—notof course you didwith its edge of surprise, notI’m sure you didwith its note of performance, just plain and direct, something he knows to be true and is stating—sits differently than it should.
I look at the Ferris wheel, now fully stopped, its lights doing their slow blink into overnight mode.
“Ryan.” I say his name and then don’t continue, and he waits. He holds space without filling it.
I’ve been framed for a bank robbery. That’s the sentence that wants to come out. Three states are looking for me, my face is in news alerts, and the person who did it was my best friend, and I have no evidence and no allies and no plan except to keep moving until I can think clearly enough to build one.
It’s right there.
I can feel it in the back of my mouth, the truth. The weight of two weeks of carrying it alone pressing outward like something that wants release.
I’m so tired.
The thought arrives so plainly that it almost takes me out at the knees. Not the running, not the logistics, but the aloneness of it. The exhaustion of knowing something enormous and having no one to put it down with, even temporarily. Even just the weight of saying it out loud to someone who is looking at you the way Ryan is looking at me right now.
I close my mouth.
