Page 129 of Fate, Interrupted

He lets out a quiet breath, his forehead dipping toward mine. “Yeah,” he says. “I am.”

I let out a small, satisfied smile.

“Good,” I say. “Because I’m not changing my mind.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

We stand there a little longer, neither of us rushing the moment back into motion. I think about Larkin three hundred miles south, about Penny who worries about me. I think about how none of this feels like a loss from where I’m standing. It feels like a beginning.

Then reality presses gently back in. He reaches into his pocket for his keys. The truck sits a short distance away, drops of mist clinging to the hood and windshield. He hits the unlock button and the headlights blink once.

We walk toward the vehicle through the lot. The mist is thicker now near the tree line, drifting low across the ground, and the bar noise has faded to nothing in this far corner of the parking lot. His hand is warm in mine, the slight roughness of his palm, the steadiness of his grip welcome sensations, and I think about this lot, this mist, this hand, this ordinary walk across one hundred feet of gravel that feels like the most significant thing I’ve done in years. Because it’s the end of a good evening, and that is everything.

The truck is ten feet away.

Five feet.

He steps ahead of me toward the passenger door, reaching for the handle.

“Hey.”

The voice comes from behind us, and I feel his posture shift in the half-second between the word arriving and when it catches up to me.

He turns slowly.

The man steps out of the low mist, his outline resolving before his expression does. Same build, same face, the same Larkin hat. But his eyes are different from when he left the bar. Whatever the cold air did to him, it finished what the alcohol started. Whatever courage alcohol gave him earlier has been replaced by cold focus. He’s been out here for a while. He’s been thinking.

“You need something?” Silas says. His voice is level.

“We’re not done,” the man says.

I go very still.

Silas moves his weight forward slightly, positioning himself between the man and me, claiming the space. I stay where I am, watching the man decide. His shoulders are tight, and his jaw is set. His right hand is loose at his side with the deliberate looseness of someone ready to move the instant he needs to. He’s already decided. He starts to cover the distance.

“Yes,” Silas says. “We are.”

The man takes another step forward.

Silas reads it. I can see him reading it—the slight correction to the left, the attention sharpening past the point of conversation. He’s calculating. He’s fast. In another second he’ll have it.

He needs one more second.

He doesn’t have one more second.

I see the arm move before Silas does, the shoulder dropping, the intention telegraphed in the angle unmistakable now, no longer ambiguous. My body decides before my brain does.

I shove Silas. Hard. Both hands flat against his back. With everything I have.

The sound that follows is very loud and very close. Everything else fades away.

Chapter thirty-six

Norah

The sound is wrong. Too sharp. Too close. It doesn’t belong in the moment.

A brutal impact slams into my left side, high and hard. There’s a burst of heat under my ribs, sudden and consuming, like it’s trying to burn its way through me. For a second, that’s all there is—pressure and heat, crowding out everything else.