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Her fingers stayed in mine, but the rest of her—her shoulders, her carefully measured silence, the way she kept her gaze fixed ahead—pulled back like a tide leaving shore.
She was here, but not letting herself be here.
An hour ago she was soft and ruined and clinging to me. Now she was rebuilding walls I’d just used my mouth to demolish.
“Sienna.”
She didn’t look at me. “Hmm?”
I watched her profile, how her lips pressed together like she was trying to hold something inside. “Do you have something on your mind?”
She shook her head emphatically. “Nope.”
It was a lie dressed in bright colors. Her hand tightened around mine for one heartbeat, like she didn’t mean to, then immediately loosened, as if she remembered she was supposed to be pulling away.
We kept walking anyway.
The trail back seemed a million times shorter than it had on the way up, and before I knew it, the gravel lot was gleaming through the trees like a cold bucket of sense waiting to hit her.
Her shoulders tensed the second she saw it, and that tiny shift in her body hit me with a hot punch of no.
Before she could go any farther, I caught her wrist gently and guided her back a single step until her spine brushed the pine behind her.
Her breath stuttered. “Sterling,” she whispered, like my name was a bruise she wasn’t ready to press. “We should keep going.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “But first, you need to wrap your mind around something.”
She blinked hard, already bracing. “What something?”
“This,” I murmured. “What’s happening. Us.”
Her mouth fell open, outrage and panic flaring at the same time. “There is no us,” she insisted. “We…this…was a moment. A lapse. A very situational lapse in judgment that probably had something to do with my proximity to your very large… I’ve already told you this.”
I arched a brow.
“I mean…I’m trying. I really am.” She dragged in a shaky breath. “I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust what men want. I don’t trust my ability to choose someone who won’t hurt me again.”
There it was, the wound underneath the words.
Her voice broke around the confession. “I made a promise to myself, Sterling. I can’t break it for you.”
My hand lifted, brushing her jaw with my thumb, barely a touch at all. A better man would have told her she was right. But I wasn’t a good man.
Good men didn’t have blood under their fingernails and an incinerator in their basement.
Good men didn’t take pleasure in the final gasps of monsters who wandered into their town.
Good men didn’t push hot brands in people’s eyeballs and call it fun.
I wasn’t good. I knew that.
But I also knew I wasn’t ever going to hurt her.
I didn’t know how I knew that…I just did. I’d burn the entire world before I let anything put a bruise on her again.
That certainty settled in my chest with a quiet, deadly clarity.
“Sienna,” I said, my thumb tracing the edge of her cheekbone, “you’re right not to trust most men.”
