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Chapter twenty

The most dramatic death scene in Denver’s bowling alley parking lot history

Chase

T he second I step into the apartment, I know something’s off. Not in a bad way, just different. Quiet. No music blasting through the speakers and no reality TV echoing from Zoe’s room. Just the faintest hum of the AC and the vanilla from her shampoo lingering in the air.

It’s been a week since she moved in.

One weird, electric, tension-filled week.

We exist in the same space now. Orbiting.

Passing like ships most days, circling each other in the mornings, eating leftovers in the evenings, throwing jabs across the kitchen, pretending we don’t notice the way tension coils tighter every time our shoulders brush.

But I notice everything . The curve of her lip when she smirks, and the way she hums when she’s focused.

How she falls asleep on the couch in one of my hoodies, always looking soft and too fucking tempting.

I’ve been sitting on the edge of a goddamn cliff every single day, trying not to fall headfirst into her.

And even though we’re fake dating, fake living together, fake not-tearing-each-other-apart, none of it feels fake when she looks at me like I mean something.

Or how close I get to reaching for her every time she walks by in those tiny shorts she likes to pretend she doesn’t know are ruining my life.

But I won’t be the one to cross the line. If she wants something, if she wants me, she’s going to have to make that move. Because if I ever touch her the way I want to again, I won’t stop.

I scrub a hand over my face, feeling the weight of the morning skate still clinging to my limbs. I was on the ice for two hours. I should be exhausted, but the second Zoe’s voice rings out from her bedroom, I snap to attention.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

I make my way down to her door but stop mid-step—because holy shit .

She’s standing in front of her mirror with her back to me, wearing a sheer black bralette and a tiny silver chain skirt that’s not even attempting to qualify as clothing. It glints in the light, just enough to make my spine fuse itself together.

Her legs— fuck, her legs —go on for miles. Smooth, bare, tan. She shifts her weight and my knees damn near give out.

My pulse, which had just started to come down from practice, slams into my throat. Every inch of me goes still. And hard.

I’m standing here in sweat-soaked workout clothes, bag still slung over my shoulder, and Zoe Carlson is dressed as my goddamn music video fantasy at eleven a.m. on a Saturday morning.

I clear my throat. Loudly.

“Zoe.”

She jolts and whips around, leveling me with an expression that could kill a lesser man.

“Jesus! Where did you come from?!”

“I live here,” I grit out, immediately locking my gaze on the ceiling because what the fuck is this outfit?

Zoe groans and flings another top onto the growing disaster pile on her bed. “Great. Amazing. Whatever. You can fuck off now.”

I don’t move. I can’t move. My feet are nailed to the floor and my dignity is bleeding out fast, because this woman is standing two doors down from my bedroom looking like a fucking fever dream, and she has no idea what she’s doing to me.

I drag a hand through my hair, still trying to recalibrate my entire existence. “What are you doing?”

She whirls around, fully exasperated. “Trying to find an outfit!”

“For what?”

Her eyes spark as she meets my gaze. “The Enigma Festival.”

My brow furrows. “What the hell is that?”

“You don’t know Enigma?”

“Should I?”

She stares at me, flabbergasted, then steps forward, already glowing with excitement. “Okay. First of all, you are uncultured. Second of all, it’s an underground music festival thing. One night only. No one knows the lineup until they get there. No one even knows where it is until the day of.”

I blink. “The fuck do you mean, no one knows where it is?”

Zoe’s grin turns feral. “It’s based somewhere on the outskirts of Denver in the woods. Totally secret. You only find out where it is by doing a scavenger hunt to uncover the clues.”

“So let me get this straight…” I pause, squinting at her. “You’re planning on going to some random-ass wilderness location, in the middle of the night, with a bunch of sweaty, drunk, half-dressed festival freaks?”

She beams. “Yes.”

“By yourself.”

“My friend from work bailed, and Charlie’s too knocked up or whatever,” she says with a shrug, like that solves everything.

Absolutely not.

“Yeah. No.”

She rears back. “What do you mean, no ?”

I take a step closer, arms crossed. “I mean, you’re not leaving this apartment in that outfit to chase a mystery rave into the woods by yourself.”

She scowls. “It’s not a rave, Dad .”

“Same fucking thing.”

Her hands fly to her hips. “Why do you even care?”

“Because you’re my girlfriend.”

Her mouth opens and closes. And there it is—the exact moment she realizes I’ve checkmated her with our own bullshit.

“Right,” she huffs, crossing her arms to mirror mine. “I get it, Walton, we’re fake dating. But it’ll be fine.”

I don’t blink. “If you were actually my girl, I wouldn’t let you do it either.”

That seems to land. Because for all her sass and spitfire, Zoe knows . She might joke and chirp and push my buttons on purpose, but she knows she’s been spooked ever since that guy followed her home last week. Even if she won’t admit it.

“It’s been quiet,” she says, voice softer now. “No more weird messages. Nothing since the morning after the… that night.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s over.”

She doesn’t argue. Just looks at me for one long moment, before turning back to her pile of clothing.

I lower my voice, eyes tracking her movements. “You’re not going alone.”

Zoe exhales hard, pacing back toward the mirror. “I wasn’t even gonna go, but there’s a rumor the Vinyl Saints are headlining and—”

“ You’re not going alone .”

She whirls around. “So what, you’re coming with me now?”

“Yeah. I fucking am.”

She laughs loudly. “You won’t survive ten minutes.”

“Try me.”

“You’re a hockey player, Walton.”

I take a step closer. “And you’re the woman every guy in a ten-mile radius is going to be staring at.”

Her brows lift, eyes gleaming with challenge. “So?”

I hold her gaze. “So, I’m not letting you walk into the woods alone while every drunk idiot with a heartbeat gets to orbit you like they’ve got a shot.”

I say it carefully, because I’m not trying to suggest what she’s wearing is an issue. If I did, she’d castrate me on the spot, and rightly so. She could walk in wearing a damn snowsuit and I’d still be out of my mind. It’s not the skirt—though the skirt is fucking phenomenal—it’s her .

It’s the way she moves. The way she laughs. The way she walks into a room, and people lean toward her because they can’t help it.

And yeah, it makes me feral. Not because I think she can’t handle herself, but because I’ve had a taste of being the one she looks at, and I’m not interested in sharing.

Zoe doesn’t move for a second, then she slowly shifts her eyes away, enough to break the charge between us.

“You don’t have to fake it this hard.”

I shake my head once. “I’m not.”

Because it’s not fake—not that part. Not any of the parts that matter. She’s still the one I’d cross every line for, not because she needs protecting, but because I want to claim her. Because I need to be the one standing next to her, in any capacity she’ll have me in.

To make damn sure no one else gets the chance to be her safe place to fall.

We stand there for a moment too long, looking at each other dead-on, challenging each other to make a move before one of us implodes, because we both know I mean every damn word.

The silence stretches taut, neither of us breathing or moving.

But eventually, I force myself to smirk and turn away.

I head into the kitchen like my body isn’t still lit up with the memory of her standing there in that skirt, golden skin, and glitter and everything I’ve ever wanted wrapped up in one impossible woman.

I open the fridge just for something to do. Cold air rushes against my overheated skin, but it doesn’t help. Nothing could.

Because Zoe Carlson is living in my apartment, looking like that, and somehow, I’m supposed to pretend I’m not one breath away from dropping to my knees and begging her to let me touch her.

Behind me, her voice slices through the silence.

“Wait, does this mean you’re doing the scavenger hunt?”

I freeze, then glance over my shoulder to find her watching me like she already knows she’s won. Arms crossed. One brow arched. That same feral little smirk that makes my brain go offline every time.

“Zoe.”

“Walton.”

“You planned this.”

She just winks, then turns and saunters back into her room, that damn skirt swaying like a loaded weapon, no doubt annihilating any chance of me avoiding a painful boner for the next twenty-four hours.

***

I have made a grave mistake.

Because the thing is, I thought this would be a normal scavenger hunt. A few cryptic riddles, maybe some indie kids with glitter on their cheeks, a light jog between weird coffee shops. I even braced for a hipster in suspenders playing a kazoo or whatever.

What I did not prepare for was this level of absolute feral chaos.

Zoe holds up the next clue card like she’s just pulled Excalibur from a stone. “Clue number two says we have to shotgun a beer while holding a lit sparkler.”

I stare at Zoe. She stares back, completely fucking serious.

We are currently standing outside some grimy underground record store in the middle of downtown Denver. There’s a full crowd gathered around us—at least fifty people in various states of glitter, leather, mesh, and general life instability—and somehow, I have become one of them.

A guy in a crop top and fishnets just backflipped while holding a Four Loko. A woman with an actual parrot on her shoulder is DJing from a van.

I rub my temples. “Explain to me again why this is necessary?”