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I don’t just want to watch her. I want to own her. Possess her. The need to trap her in a room where the only thing she has left to look at is me makes it hard to breathe sometimes.

“So, what brings a girl like you to a dead-end town like Blackwood on Halloween?” I ask, breaking the suffocating silence.

Harmony doesn’t look at me, but her fingers tighten; a harsh grip on the steering wheel.

“I could ask you the same thing.”

“I asked first.” I lean slightly into the center console, invading her space just enough to catch the warm scent emanating from her skin. “Most people use tonight as an excuse to party. You look like you’re driving to a funeral.”

She lets out a short, hollow laugh that doesn’t reach those butterscotch eyes. “I’m just passing through. I have family history here.”

“Passing through implies you’re leaving,” I murmur, my gaze tracing the delicate curve of her jawline. “And returning implies you left in the first place.”

That catches her attention. Her head snaps toward me for a split second, her light irises flashing with sharp suspicion. “I never said I lived here. So what makes you think I’m returning?”

A dark, slow smile curves my lips.

I let the silence stretch between us, enjoying the way her breathing hitches, the way her golden skin pales just a fraction beneath the dashboard lights.

“Call it an educated guess. You don’t have the look of someone who stayed in Blackwood. You look like someone who got away. Someone who built a whole life somewhere else... but keeps coming back every October thirty-first like a moth drawn to a flame,” I lie smoothly, keeping my tone dripping with an unsettling, possessive calm.

Her voice drops into a tight, icy register. “You shouldn’t make guesses about strangers. It’s bad for your health.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s advice.”

I tilt my head, studying her full, parted lips.

God, I want to press her back against that driver’s side door and kiss her until she forgets her own name.

“I don’t take advice from beautiful women in isolated cars. Especially ones who pull over for hitchhikers when the sun goes down.”

“I pulled over because I thought you needed help. It was an act of kindness.” Her voice trembles slightly with a mix of anger and fear.

“Kindness?” I let out a soft, dark chuckle that makes her shoulders tense. “No. You didn’t stop out of kindness. You stopped because you couldn’t resist. You saw a man alone on a dark stretch of highway, and something inside you told you to hit the brakes.”

She stares straight at the dark road, her jaw set, calculating every move.

She watches me like I’m a predator. As if I’m a stalker who picked tonight to track her down, corner her on a deserted highway, and make her my victim.

She has no idea about the shadow of Noah hanging between us. She has no idea I’m here because I spent fifteen years trying to figure out how my quiet, awkward best friend ended up dead in a ditch fifteen years ago tonight after getting in the car with her and her friends.

Noah was the only person in this town who ever gave a damn about me, and his death shattered whatever small piece of humanity I had left.

I came back to Blackwood to finally get answers about what happened to him. To figure out what role Harmony and her cruel friends played in his final hours.

My hands ball into tight fists at the mere thought of him.

But sitting this close to her, heat pouring off her body, the anger in my blood twists right back into that sick, relentless obsession.

I don’t just want the truth about Noah.

I want her.

“You’re making a mistake.” Harmony’s gaze flashes to me, sharp and lethal. “You think you know who I am, but you don’t.”

“I know enough. I know you’re afraid right now. I can practically hear your heart hammering against your ribs from across the console,” I whisper, sliding my fingers across the center console until they rest less than an inch from her hip.