Page 114 of Fractured Loyalties

Celeste.

Her voice comes in too warm, too bright for the air around me. “Hey, you alive?”

I blink. “Barely.”

“You haven’t been in the clinic. Hardly anyone’s seen you lately, and honestly? Alec and I are starting to get worried.”

I close my eyes, drag a breath through my teeth. “I’ve had some things.”

“Yeah, I figured. But here’s the thing—you look like hell. Not just tired, Mara. Rattled. You ghost me one more time, and I’m sending someone.”

I press my thumb into the curve of my mug, staring at the way the steam curls against the light. “You’re right.”

Celeste pauses. That rare silence of hers that means she knows she hit something raw.

“I told you once,” I say, quiet now. “Back when I started in Miramount. About the man I ran from.”

“The one with the silence you could feel in your bones.”

“Yeah. Caleb.”

Another beat.

She exhales. “He’s back?”

I nod, even though she can’t see me. “Yes. And it feels pretty intense.”

I don’t elaborate. I don’t have to. She hears what I’m not saying.

Her voice softens. “You’re not alone this time, though.”

“I know.”

“You trust him?” Celeste teases, voice laced with that knowing edge only she can wield. “Your Mr. Drop-Dead-Gorgeous with the jaw that could cut glass and hands that could probably dismantle a man just by looking at him?”

That put a smile on my face, but I try not to let it show in my voice, “I trust him to kill anything that tries to touch me. I just don’t know if I trust that he won’t disappear while he does it.”

“Then stay ahead of the fire. And if you need to burn it down, you call me. Don’t wait until it’s ash.”

“I won’t.”

We hang up.

Chapter 21 – Mara - Things with Teeth

The moment the call ends, I just sit there.

The tea’s gone cold again. That makes twice in a single morning. But I don’t get up to pour another. The kitchen feels too quiet, like it’s holding its breath for something it doesn’t want to name.

I stare at the closed comm panel. The blue indicator light still pulses once every thirty seconds, like a heartbeat that refuses to fade. My reflection on the surface is faint, stretched thin by the angle, but I can still make out the lines in my face. The ones I didn’t used to have. The ones Elias traces sometimes when he thinks I’m asleep.

It’s not just Caleb.

Something else is moving under this. A shadow under the surface of the water. I can’t see it yet, but I feel the current shifting around it.

Enough waiting.

I head to my room—not Elias’s bedroom, not the cold perimeter of the house. Just the space he gave me without asking. I need to breathe. And I can’t do it with these walls closing in.