Chapter 69 Across the Fire

Chapter 69 Across the Fire
POV: Eli

I was out of the car before Marcus even put it in park.

"Dude, wait up," he called, jogging to catch me, but I barely heard him. My phone had been dead for an hour thanks to a charger that picked tonight of all nights to die in my cupholder, and the not-knowing had been eating through me the whole drive over. No word from Zara since this afternoon. No word from Naomi either. Just silence, loud and wrong, the same kind of silence that had nearly broken me a week ago.

The field was already packed, fire roaring tall against the dark, and I scanned the crowd fast, searching for one face out of a hundred.

I found her before I even meant to look in that direction, like my eyes already knew where she'd be.

She was standing near the fire. Alone.

For one full second I forgot how to breathe.

I'd seen Zara in a hundred different states since June. Crying on a roof. Curled up small in a hoodie two sizes too big, like she was trying to take up as little space in the world as possible. Shaking, scared, holding her phone as it might bite her. I'd never once seen her standing like this, spine straight, chin up, the firelight catching off a dress I didn't even know she owned, looking like she'd walked onto that field daring anyone to say something about it.

She'd come. Alone. After a message warning her someone had been inside her own house. After threats and stolen photos and a summer that had tried over and over to convince her to disappear.

She came anyway.

Something in my chest cracked open wide, equal parts pride and fear, watching her stand there in plain sight of everyone who'd spent a week tearing her apart online. I wanted to run straight to her. I wanted to plant myself beside her the way I had at the last bonfire and dare the whole field to say one more cruel word in her direction.

But I made myself watch for one more second first, because something about the way she was standing wasn't relaxed. Her shoulders looked tight under all that calm. Her eyes kept flicking toward the tree line on the east side of the field, quick little glances, like she was tracking something, or someone, without wanting it to show.

"Yo, is that?" Marcus started beside me, following my stare. "She looks different."

"She looks like herself," I said, already moving.

I cut through the crowd fast, weaving past clusters of people I half-recognized from school, ignoring the way a few heads turned to watch me go, the whispers that always followed wherever this particular story walked. I didn't care about any of that tonight. I just needed to get to her.

I was maybe thirty feet away when Jade's group caught my eye, clustered near the cooler table, every single one of them watching Zara like hawks circling something wounded. Jade herself had her phone out, not looking at the screen, just holding it loose in her hand, her eyes locked on Zara across the fire with an expression I couldn't quite place. Not the smug, bored look from her porch. Something tighter. Something almost nervous.

That struck me as wrong before I could even figure out why.

I kept moving, closing the distance, and that's when I saw Zara's hand come up, phone pressed to her ear for half a second before she lowered it again, her whole body going rigid as she'd just been told something that knocked the air clean out of her lungs.

She started walking. Not toward me. Toward the tree line on the east side, slow, deliberate steps, the kind of careful movement someone makes when they're trying very hard to look like nothing is wrong.

"Zara!" I called out, but the music and the crowd swallowed my voice whole, and she didn't turn.

I pushed faster, Marcus falling behind somewhere, my eyes locked on the back of that dress as it moved farther from the fire and closer to the dark line of trees at the edge of the field, where shadows pooled thick enough to hide a dozen people standing just out of the firelight's reach.

I saw Naomi first, a shape near the trees that resolved into my sister as I got closer, relief flooding through me so fast it nearly buckled my knees. She was here. She was safe. She was standing right there, alive, in one piece.

Then I saw who was standing beside her.

I stopped dead in the middle of the field, people shoving past me on both sides, my whole body going cold from the inside out.

It made no sense. Every piece of this summer rearranged itself in half a second, every threat, every photo, every perfectly timed message, lining up into a shape I should have seen weeks ago and somehow never let myself believe.

Zara reached the tree line. I watched her stop a few feet from Naomi, watched her body go rigid as she looked past my sister to the person standing just behind her in the shadows.

I started running.

"ZARA!"

She turned at the sound of my voice, just for a second, just long enough for our eyes to meet across the distance still separating us, and in that one second I saw something on her face that stopped my heart cold.

Not fear of the dark, or the crowd, or the strangeness of the night.

Recognition. The same recognition that was currently tearing through my own chest.

Then a hand closed around her arm from behind, pulling her backward into the shadow of the trees, and the last thing I saw before the dark swallowed her whole was her mouth opening around my name, the sound lost completely under the roar of the bonfire and a hundred voices that had no idea anything was wrong at all.