Page 109 of Haunt Me

“Didn’t ask for anything.”

She studies me. “Are you always this stubborn?”

“Only when I know I’m right.”

She smiles, small but real, and still doesn’t move. Just sits there with her hand on the handle like she’s waiting for something.

“Go inside,” I tell her, voice lower than I mean it to come out.

“Thanks, Wolf,” she says, soft through the howl of the wind before she turns and gets out of the truck.

I don’t answer, and I don’t wait until she’s fully inside before I pull away, gravel spitting under the tires.

I make it maybe a half mile before I have to pull over, tires sliding on the shoulder as I stop hard enough to jolt the whole truck.

The sound that comes out of me isn’t anything I recognize. Raw, wrecked, torn loose from somewhere I don’t have a name for. Both hands clamp against the wheel hard enough for it to hurt. I don’t try to stop it. I can’t. It just keeps coming. One broken sound after another, until my throat’s raw and my chest is heaving.

Knox let a stranger move into Raven’s cabin. It should’ve stayed empty and untouched, but he handed the keys to a stranger anyway.

My hands find the bottle in my bag. This time I don’t stop myself. The cap comes loose easily. My body remembers the motion faster than my mind can object to it. I bring it to my mouth and drink. Long and hard, throat burning, chest burning worse, until something in me finally, mercifully goes quiet.

God, I’d forgotten this part. Not the shame that comes after, not the shakes or the mornings I can’t remember. Just this. The first few seconds where the pain stops.

I take a second pull before I let myself think about what I’m doing.

“Wolf. Don’t you dare.”

Her voice cracks through the cab like a second thunderclap, right beside me, close enough that I feel breath that isn’t mine stir against my ear.

I drop the bottle.

It hits the floor mat and rolls, whiskey spilling out in a dark stain I don’t look at, because I’m too busy staring at the empty passenger seat, heart slamming hard enough that I can feel it in my throat.

“Raven?”

Nothing answers. No warmth. No scent. Just my own ragged breathing and the rain hammering the roof, and the absolute bone-deep certainty that I just heard my wife tell me not to do this.

I sit there frozen, waiting for it to happen again—half-terrified and half-desperate for it to.

It doesn’t.

But it doesn’t need to. Once was enough. Once was more than enough.

I lower my head against the wheel, hands shaking now for a reason that has nothing to do with grief and everything to do with what I just heard. Weeks. Weeks of sitting through full-body tremors I thought would never end. Each day choosing not to be the man who reaches for the bottle every time something rips him open. Two drinks in, and I was already halfway back to being that man, and she knew it before I did.

She yelled at me. My Raven, who never once raised her voice at me, not even the day I put my bike through a fence showing off, actually yelled my name loud enough to stop my own hand mid-motion.

I’m not doing that again. Not tonight. Not ever again.

I reach down, snatch what’s left of the bottle off the floor, roll the window down, and hurl it out into the dark. Rain slashes sideways into the cab in the second the window’s open.

My hands are still shaking when I pull back onto the road, and it isn’t only from the cold soaking through my sleeve. I point the truck back toward the clubhouse, not trusting myself to face Knox tonight, and not entirely sure I trust myself to be alone with a bottle again either.

I don’t know what I’m going to say to him. But I do know he’s going to have to answer for this.

Raven

Something changes tonight, and this time I don’t just feel it happen the way I’ve felt things before, distant, secondhand, like weather passing through a window I can’t open. I cause it. All of it. The storm, the timing, the exact stretch of road where his headlights would find her stranded and unable to leave.