KAIREN
The silence in the car was a physical presence, thick and suffocating, layered over the ghost of everything that wasn't being said.
I stared out the window at the blurring city, seeing nothing. My father's dismissive sneer was burned onto the back of my eyelids. Unbecoming.
Next to me in the front seat, Viktor was a statue carved from ice and bad intentions.
He'd been that way since we'd scrambled apart in my bedroom. In the office, he resumed his post by the door, a monument to professional detachment.
But I noticed things now. Dangerous things.
I noticed the faint, shadowy hint of stubble along his jaw that hadn't been there at dawn. I noticed the specific, minute way the muscle in that jaw feathered when my phone buzzed with a notification, a tension that had nothing to do with external threats.
I noticed he was breathing.
