Page 79 of Without a Trace
“Hey, buddy.”
He pressed his little face into my thigh sensing it—that something had shifted. That I wasn’t okay.
I didn’t cry.
Not yet.
I just sat there, fingers tangled in fur, heartbeat trying to slow. My body was still buzzing. Still reacting to the kiss. To Alden’s whisper. To Zeke’s mouth on mine and the way Trace had exploded.
The room was quiet except for my breath and the faint echo of voices downstairs—muffled, distant. I couldn’t tell if they were fighting. I didn’t care.
I stood slowly and moved toward the mirror, dragging my feet across the floor. My reflection looked unrecognizable. Lips swollen. Shirt rumpled. Hair tangled and wild.
A girl trying to wear power as perfume and self-destruction as armor. A girl trying too hard to pretend she didn’t care who she destroyed.
I stared at myself for a long time.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I whispered.
And I didn’t have an answer.
Not one that made sense anyway.
Nothing that made me feel better. Nothing that dulled the edge cutting through me.
The truth sat low in my stomach, heavy and unspoken: they were hiding something. All of them. And I wasn’t just part of it.
I was the center of it.
Every move I made pulled them tighter. Every breath I took made them unravel.
Why me?
What did they know that I didn’t?
I turned off the light and climbed into bed beside Hemingway, curling around his small, warm body—the only thing still steady in this house of breaking glass.
And for the first time since I spun that stupid bottle, I didn’t feel like a queen.
I felt like a girl who might’ve just shattered the whole goddamn kingdom.
Sloane
Scarlett didn’t come back downstairs.
And honestly, no one expected her to.
No one said a word after Trace and Alden came back in.
I sat on the floor in front of the cold fireplace, legs folded under me, hands gripping the edge of the blanket I’d pulled around myself like armor. The room felt haunted—something sacred had been scorched.
Lena was curled tighter on the couch, her eyes wide and glassy. Rhett hadn’t moved since the bottle stopped spinning. Kane stood in the corner, arms folded, jaw working as he wrestled with silence.
The tension in the room hadn’t broken. It had only changed. Quieter now. Heavier. A hundred questions no one wanted answered.
I turned to Alden. “What the fuck was that?”
He didn’t look at me. “Scarlett.”
