I Rejected My Obsessive Werebeast novel Chapter 90

Chapter 90

Outside the window, the city lights were scattered across the dark like a field of small, patient stars. Somewhere out there, the hearing was being prepared. Somewhere out there, Jessica was still typing. Somewhere out there, Connor was recovering in a Bureau medical facility, and Phoebe was lying in a hospital bed with bandages on her head, and Lucien was sitting in a cell with his golden eyes open in the dark.

But in here, none of that existed.

“Just us.” Silas said, his voice low against my hair. “Don’t think about any of it.”

I leaned back into him and closed my eyes.

“Okay,” I said. “Just us.”

We left the city just after sunrise, the sky still holding that pale, washed- out pink that comes before the real light arrives. Silas drove with one hand on the wheel and the window cracked open just enough to let the morning air move through the car, carrying the smell of wet pavement and the first green hints of the countryside. I watched the skyline shrink in the rearview mirror, the towers folding themselves into smaller and smaller shapes until they disappeared entirely behind a bend in the highway.

The radio played something soft and instrumental, the kind of music that doesn’t ask for your attention but fills the silence comfortably. Silas glanced at me every so often, quick looks that lasted just long enough to confirm I was still there and then returned to the road. His shoulders, which had been locked in a kind of permanent tension for weeks, were finally starting to drop. His ears, usually angled forward in that alert, watchful way they had in the city, were relaxed now, tilted back in a

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manner that made him look younger, less burdened.

We didn’t talk about the hearing. We didn’t talk about Connor, or Phoebe, or the tunnel, or any of the things that had filled every conversation for so long that I’d almost forgotten what it felt like to talk about nothing at all. Instead, we talked about the shape of the clouds, about a gas station we’d passed that had the ugliest sign in the world, about whether Silas thought he could learn to cook something other than noodles if we had a kitchen for long enough. He said maybe. I said I’d hold him to it. He laughed, and, the sound of it in that small car, moving through that quiet morning, was one of the most ordinary and most precious things I had heard in a long time.

The guesthouse sat on a shelf of land cut into the mountainside, high enough above the bay that you could see the water stretching out to the horizon from the balcony. It was a simple building. stone and wood, with a sloped roof and a terrace that ran along the upper floor. The owner, an older woman with weathered hands and a direct manner, showed us to our room and pointed out the path down to the shoreline and the path up into the hills behind the building. She told us the hill path was beautiful but added, in a tone that suggested she wasn’t making a suggestion so much as stating a fact, that we should stay on the lower routes and avoid going deep into the forest.

The weather service had been issuing warnings all week. Severe convective activity expected in the mountain regions, possible flash flooding in low–lying areas. We’d seen the alerts on our phones, scrolled past them, and filed them under the category of things that happened to other people on vacation. Our plan was to stay near the water, walk the ‘coastal paths, and not venture anywhere that required serious footwear.

The first few days passed with a kind of dreamlike slowness. We woke when we woke, without alarms, and ate breakfast on the terrace while the morning mist burned off the bay. We walked along the shore in the afternoons, our footsteps leaving prints in the wet sand that the tide erased

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