Page 114 of Fractured Devotion
Even if it breaks me first.
Chapter 36 – Celeste - A Silence That Follows
The moment the clinic doors slide shut behind me, the tension drains from my shoulders.
Maybe it’s been there all day.
The buzz of low conversation, the soft clatter of shoes against polished floors, the subtle, judgmental glances… they follow me until I cross the threshold into open air. Then, it’s just silence. A deeper kind. The kind that presses into your ribs.
The sidewalk feels too wide, too exposed. I walk fast, purposely. Not because I’m in a hurry, but because I don’t like the sensation crawling up my spine—the feeling of being followed. It’s irrational. Or maybe it isn’t. I don’t turn around.
The weight of the day stretches across my back. Harper’s name still floats in the spaces people won’t touch, but I’m too tired to care how it looks. Grief has a way of gnawing through protocol. Still, I don’t cry. I just walk.
The streets between the clinic and my apartment are mostly empty by this hour. A flickering street lamp casts shadows where none should be, and I pass it without looking up.
My apartment greets me in stillness. There are no signs of intrusion and no clicks of hidden cameras. Just the smell of old books and the faint trace of bergamot from the candle I left half-burned two nights ago. I lock the door behind me. Twice.
I sit on the couch and stare at nothing for a while. Then, my phone buzzes.
Kade:Are you alright?
My fingers hesitate over the keys. I don’t answer right away. I just hold the phone, letting his question sit between us like a pulse. Finally, I type:Still living.
He doesn’t reply. But he doesn’t need to. That single message, the thread of it, pulls the memory out of me like velvet drawn across a blade.
The scent of him, the pressure of his hands, and the fire we built between us without meaning to. My body still remembers. I close my eyes and lean my head back.
His mouth against my neck, the softest growl before he pushed me harder and deeper, and the sound I made when I stopped resisting. When I wanted it.
I shift in my seat, heat pooling deep in my stomach. My fingers curl against the armrest, and I let the memory come. I let it wrap around me, thick and raw and real.
For a moment, I’m there again, under him and around him. Lost in the dark and loving it.
The ache that follows is sharp, but not painful.
It’s longing.
I exhale slowly as my heartbeat slows.
I don’t text him again. I just hold the phone to my chest until sleep finds me.
Morning light presses through the blinds like it doesn’t care how little rest I got. I blink awake slowly, as if my dreams were full of gravel. My body aches, not from pain, but from too many hours curled around a need I still haven’t named out loud.
Coffee comes first. The smell anchors me.
I sit at the kitchen table, mug in hand, ignoring the news feed playing mutedly on my phone. I scan the clinic schedule, make notes on my tablet, and run over the postmortem details from Harper’s report again and again like something might change if I just look at it hard enough.
But nothing changes. And nothing makes more sense.
By midmorning, I’m dressed and heading back to the clinic. I walk slower this time, still alert, and still hyper-aware, but steadier. Kade hasn’t messaged again, and neither has Alec.
The courtyard is nearly empty when I cross through. Two interns laugh at something behind the hedge, their sound too sharp. It cuts through the stillness like broken glass.
Inside, everything is familiar. Everything is sterile.
Except for the tension that coils when I step through the corridor near Diagnostics. Alec’s standing at the end of it, talking to Reyes. I pause. He sees me but doesn’t wave.
Our eyes meet briefly, and there’s something in his face that I can’t quite read. Anger maybe. Or disappointment. But I don’t slow down. I just keep walking.
