Page 41 of Her Unending Horizon

I wiped down the machine, grabbed my bag, and headed for the truck without saying goodbye.

Outside, the daylight hit me square in the face. I squinted against it and climbed into the cab, dropping into the seat with a wince.

“What the hell are you doing?” I asked myself out loud.

No answer, obviously. Just the familiar interior of the truck.

I rested my forehead against the steering wheel and let the silence press in.

In less than twenty-four hours, I’d let Chloe see my cleaning compulsion. Had her tape up my ribs. Promised her I wouldn’t go back in the cage. Shown up at the station unfit for duty. Got myself benched by my captain. Fucking, showed back up at the gym like Pavlov’s dog. Was psychoanalyzed by a gym rat, who should have a doctorate in psychology, and then had some recruiter look at me like I was a piece of meat.

Yep, I sure knew how to fuck-up twenty-four hours.

Chapter Nine

I sat cross-legged on the living room floor, my spine protesting and my right foot already going numb, and wondered—not for the first time—why I was like this.

Why was I drawing with a barely functioning blue ink pen from the junk drawer and an ancient yellow legal pad that had seen better decades?

Oh, right.

Because Michael Rankin had scared the holy hell out of me, and I’d shot out of my apartment in Gatlinburg like a bat out of hell with exactly zero thought put into anything beyond get to Zarek.

Art supplies? Sensible shoes? Emotional preparation?

Who needed those?

I shifted, the legal pad rustling in my lap, and looked down at the sketch I’d just finished.

Kael stared back at me.

My Kael. Tall, sharp-cheekboned, eternally tired. Except this time, he had a black eye and a butterfly bandage over his eyebrow. I’d shaded the bruise with cross-hatching, dark on one side, lighter on the edge—almost exactly the way Zarek’s had looked in the bathroom mirror this morning when I’d pretended not to stare.

I grimaced.

“Nope,” I told the drawing. “We’re not doing that.”

I dragged a line through Kael’s face, then another, until his eyes and the bruise and the bandage were nothing but an ink-scratched mess. The pen snagged on the cheap paper. I flipped to a clean sheet.

My phone buzzed in my purse for what felt like the hundredth time.

I ignored it.

Whoever it was could wait. If it was my editor, she’d already sent two gentle emails and one sharp one. If it was Trenda, she’d keep calling until either I answered or she drove over to Gatlinburg to find an empty apartment.

I put the pen back to paper.

Seris this time.

Her hair came first—wild, dark waves. Then her eyes, big and wary. I added the line of her shoulders, then the suggestion of fabric. My hand moved on autopilot, pulling from muscle memory and design choices I’d made months ago.

I reached her dress… and stopped.

Because I’d drawn this dress.

The soft cotton, dark blue with tiny white flowers. The one I was currently sitting in on Zarek’s living room floor, wrinkling beyond salvation. The hem hit just above Seris’s knees the same way it did on mine. The neckline, the little buttons down the front—even the way the fabric pulled slightly where her knee was bent.

I stared at the page.