Page 64 of Beneath the Desert Bloom
Nora pictured him in daylight. Not just a silhouette in her dreams. A person. A force. Hers.
Her thighs squeezed involuntarily. She cleared her throat.
“Okay,” she muttered. “That’s not terrifying at all.”
Outside, the sky had gone lavender. The shop felt warmer now, the air dense with things unspoken,
“What if I leave instead?”
Opal’s voice was quiet. “The desert doesn’t chase. But it remembers. And it never lets go completely.”
“What if I don’t want this?”
“You do,” Opal said. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”
Nora opened her mouth to argue. But nothing came out.
Because Opal was right.
They sat for a while longer.
Opal made tea, black and bitter and laced with something floral Nora couldn’t name. The shop glowed amber as the sun slipped toward the ridge. They didn’t speak of fate. Only choice. What you carry. Who you love. Who you become.
When Nora finally stood, her body felt heavier, but steadier. Like something inside her had locked into place.
She clutched the cloth-wrapped blade and stepped toward the door.
Then she turned back.
“What happens next?”
Opal shrugged. “That’s up to you. But I hope you don’t run. Too much is lost when the ones who hear it walk away.”
Nora nodded once.
And when she stepped outside, the wind rose to meet her.
CHAPTER 15
THE SILENCE HAD lasted three days.
It wasn’t regular silence, like the kind you fill with podcasts and cleaning playlists and pretending the dishwasher hum is meditative. It was a deeper, weighted stillness. The kind that settled in her bones and made the floor creak wrong. The kind that turned the wind into something she listened to like a whisper.
She hadn’t seen him anywhere. Not in the dream space. Not in the desert. Not in the corner of her vision like she half-expected every time she walked past a window.
He was gone. And it was driving her fucking insane.
Not because she missed the drama of it all, the cryptic silence or the scorching heat that rose in her belly when he appeared like a summoned god. But because she missedhim. And that felt worse than anything.
She had tried everything to distract herself.
Cleaning. Reading. Rearranging the kitchen drawers until she’d found the weird little knife her grandfather always used to open mail and left it sitting blade-up on the counter like a warning.
She’d even tried writing.
That had gone great. She got one whole page of scribbles in her journal that devolved into:
What do you want from me what do you want from me what do you want—
