Page 25 of Hostile

The thought arrived with the quiet certainty of something that had been true for a long time and was only now being named.

I set the arrow on my nightstand where I could see it.

I did not call him that night. I needed to sit with the feeling a little longer before I handed it to someone else, even him. Especially him.

He called me.

Ten in the morning, Savannah time, which meant he’d been up for hours doing whatever Wyatt did during family Christmases in a house that ran on appearances and expectations and the weight of a name. His voice when I answered was the careful version—the one he used when he was in a space where he couldn’t say everything he wanted to say.

“Did you open it?” he asked.

“Yes, I opened it last night.”

“And?”

I looked at the arrow on my nightstand. At the thin silver line of it, simple and certain. “It’s perfect,” I said. “How did you know?”

“Know what?”

“That an arrow was the right thing.”

He was quiet for a moment. Not the processing silence—the deciding one. “Because you never second-guess where you’re going,” he said. “You might not always say it out loud, but you always know. I’ve never met anyone who knew it the way you do.” Silence stretched across the line. “I wanted you to have something that would remind you of that when I couldn’t.”

My throat did something inconvenient.

“It’s your true north,” I said. My voice came out softer than I’d meant. “That’s what it is. The thing that tells you where to go when everything else is interference.” I stopped, looked at the arrow, then said the rest of it because the December quiet, the distance, and the honesty that had always existed between us made it impossible not to. “My heart will always point to you, Wyatt.”

The line was very quiet.

When he spoke, his voice had changed—not the careful version anymore, but something beneath it, the real one, the one he used in the library and in the rain, and in the café when he said things he meant completely. “Mine too,” he said. “It always has.”

I pressed my fingers against my eyes.

Don’t cry, I told myself. You are not the kind of person who cries on the phone.

“Merry Christmas,” I said instead.

“Merry Christmas, Megan.”

I held on to the call for a few more minutes, talking about nothing in particular, both of us running out the clock until he had to go back to whatever the Aldridge Christmas required of him.

After he hung up, I sat in the quiet of my room for a long time with the arrow in my hand and the winter light coming gray through the window and the feeling I’d been carefully managing for three months loose in my chest with nowhere left to put it.

I put the arrow back in the velvet pouch, then placed the pouch in the bottom drawer of my desk.

Not to hide it. Just to keep it safe.

That was the first time I put it there.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

MEGAN: PRESENT

Nothing can break my good mood today.

Not the three-inch heels that have been slowly killing me since I stepped out of the car. Not the November cold that bit through my coat on the walk from the curb. Not even the fact that I can feel my pulse in my throat, which is not something Megan Hale does. Not in public. Not ever.

Tonight, I own twelve percent of Wyatt Spencer Aldridge’s most prized initiative, and he knows it. The disclosure notification went out on Friday, right on schedule. That gave him the weekend to sit with my name attached to the thing he built with his own two hands—the first thing that was entirely his and not inherited—before walking into this room full of donors and board members and old Savannah money, all of them expecting him to be exactly who he’s always been.