Locke is standing near the far end of the room with one hand braced against the polished wood and the other wrapped around a coffee he doesn’t appear to have touched. His clothes are the same ones he wore yesterday.
His jaw is shadowed with stubble, there’s a faint smear of dirt near one shoulder, and exhaustion sits in every hard line of his body.
He turns before I say anything. Our eyes meet.
The room doesn’t disappear. No music swells. Nobody stops moving. Glasses still clink behind the bar, and someone laughs in the game room as though the world hasn’t shifted beneath my feet.
Yet the distance between us feels enormous.
His gaze moves over me automatically, checking my face, my arms, my posture, every visible inch of me. The same way he always does, except this time he does it fr
