Page 75 of Heat Unwritten
"Two hours," I had promised her.
I pressed the gas pedal to the floor. We were going to break that promise. We were going to be late.
And for Tessa Kane, being viewed without her armor wasn't just annoying. It was her apocalypse.
"She thinks we did it," Simon whispered, the realization hitting the car like a bomb. "We leave, and ten minutes later the leak drops? She's going to think we sold her out."
I gripped the wheel, my eyes burning.
"Hold on," I snarled.
I drove back toward the storm.
TWENTY-THREE
Simon
The silence in the black SUV wasn't peaceful; it was a holding cell.
I slumped against the cold leather of the back seat, my hood pulled up over my head like a shroud, staring out the tinted window at the grey slush of the pharmacy parking lot. The engine ticked as it cooled, a metallic metronome counting down the seconds until Anders returned with the gauze and Daniel returned with the eggs.
We were resupplying. We were being logical. We were handling the logistics.
But my hands were vibrating.
I looked down at them resting on my denim-clad knees. My fingers were permanently stained with ink and charcoal, marking me as the artist, the observer. But now, beneath the black smudges of my trade, there was something else. A phantom sensation. A tactile ghost.
I rubbed my thumb over my index finger, remembering the slick, velvet heat of Tessa’s body. I remembered the way she had looked in the mirror, flushed, ruined, and absolutely magnificent, and the way she had commanded us to fill the void.
Years,I thought, a bitter taste rising in my throat.I spent years drawing her from a distance because I was too scared to get close. And now that I’ve touched her, I feel like I’ve contaminated the art.
The air in the car was stale, recycling the heavy, complex scent of our pack. It smelled of Anders’ sharp, ozone-laced bourbon, Daniel’s warm, yeasty spiced chai, and my own underlying note of dark chocolate, currently scorched by the anxiety that smelled like burnt sugar.
But underneath it all was her. Sea salt and blackberries.
It clung to the upholstery and my hoodie. It was stamped into my skin. We had left her alone in that glass box on the cliff, wrapped in our scent, believing she was safe because we had locked the door.
Two hours,Anders had promised.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket. The screen was cracked in the corner, a casualty of me dropping it when we first breached the house yesterday. I hadn't looked at it in twenty-four hours. We had been in a dead zone, a pocket universe where the internet didn't exist.
But here, in the parking lot of a local pharmacy, the signal bars flickered. One bar. Two bars of LTE.
The device buzzed in my hand, a frantic, angry vibration as a day’s worth of notifications tried to push through all at once.
Messages from the studio. Emails from my agent. Direct messages from fans asking why I hadn't streamed.
I swiped them away, my thumb moving on autopilot. I didn't care about the stream. I didn't care about the character renders. I just wanted to check the weather radar, to see if the storm front had truly passed, to reassure myself that the sky wasn't going to fall on her again while we were buying ibuprofen.
My thumb hovered over the weather app.
Then, habit took over. The muscle memory of a man who lived his life online, who curated an audience of millions.
I opened my most recent social media app. The little loading circle spun for a second, a digital ouroboros eating its own tail, as the feed refreshed.
Then, the world ended.
It didn't happen with a bang. It happened with a hashtag.
