Page 18 of Dreadful

SEVEN

BELLAMY

Something yanks me from sleep.

My heart is already hammering before my eyes open, before I know where I am, and for one suspended second, I'm nowhere. There's only panic and dark and the certainty that something is not right.

The ceiling fan cuts through the cloud of anxiety in a slow, endless circuit. And beneath it, the low white noise machine hums, filling the dark like water filling a glass. It's just loud enough to feel like it’s swallowing everything I need to hear.

I blink a few times and wait for the room to stop swimming. Curtains flutter around the open window, gray-blue light bleeding around the edges. We’re in limbo—the couple of hours before dawn where the world holds its breath, waiting to see what the day will bring.

Someone exhales, their breath stirring the flyaways on top of my head. It’s then I realize I’m sprawled on top of Cruz. My hand flexes, the pads of my fingers digging into the hard muscle of his chest where my arm is draped over him. My head is nestled into the crook of his neck, like a key settling into a lock it wasn't made for. Heat radiates from everywhere we’re connected—his arm a solid weight around my waist, his palm rough and warm beneath my shirt against the curve of my stomach. My leg thrown over his hip, his thigh a firm ridge beneath mine, pinning me in place without force.

I ease myself free of him one careful inch at a time. My elbow catches the sheet on the way up, and I have to stop, teeth pressed together, while the pain crests and recedes like something with a tide. By the time I'm sitting upright at the edge of the mattress, there's a thin sweat at my hairline. I press two fingers against the bandage without thinking. the gauze has gone hard in the center, crusted into something that pulls at the skin beneath when I breathe too deep. I drop my hand and wait for the throb to find its rhythm.

I glance over my shoulder.

Something catches in my chest at the sight of him. Cruz, who is always so composed, so deliberately unreadable—he looks almost young like this, the gray pre-dawn light pooling in the hollows of his face, the tension he carries in his jaw completely gone. His hair is a mess across his forehead. His arm has drifted across the mattress toward the warm space I left behind, fingers loosely curled, like his body made the decision without him.

I let myself breathe. The inhale pulls in sea salt and bergamot and something beneath both of those—something dry and warm, like timber that's been sitting in the sun for a long time.

I hold it in my lungs for a second longer than I need to.

The warmth of the sheets, the solid heat of him—it would be so easy to sink back into that. To let my head find that hollow between his shoulder and jaw again and drift off to the rhythm of his breathing. But my nerves are stripped raw, humming with a sick, exhausted energy I know too well. My body is leaden with fatigue, but my mind is a frantic animal pacing a cage.

Sleep isn’t an option.

A cold prickle creeps up the nape of my neck. My gaze sweeps the room, lingering in the corners where the shadows pool thickest, half-expecting a shape to detach itself from the dark, the glint of a barrel aimed at the bed. But nothing moves. The only shapes are the familiar ones: the dresser, the chair, a stack of Cruz’s shirts.

I drag a hand down my face, my palm scraping over dry lips and the faint sting of yesterday’s adrenaline.

“Fuck,” I breathe into the stillness, the word barely a sound.

The need to see Lola is a physical pull. Fear is a slow, cold serpent coiling in my throat, tightening with every breath. I ease the sheet back, the cotton whispering against my skin as I slide from the warmth of Cruz’s bed. Cool night air washes over my bare legs, raising goosebumps.

The floorboards beneath my feet are cool and familiar. Cruz shifts in his sleep, one hand sliding across the sheets to where I had been, but he doesn’t wake.

Out in the hallway, the house holds its breath. Shadows cling to the corners like old cobwebs. The silence here is different from the room’s—thicker, heavier, a suspended quiet that feels both sacred and fragile.

The hallway opens into the kitchen, and I move through it slowly, trailing my fingers along the counter's edge. The Calloway house at night is a vault of secrets and stillness, every noise a heartbeat in the hollow dark.

But I know better than to trust the quiet.

I tiptoe into the living room and see my sister sleeping soundly on the couch. I expected some of the anxiety and fear to loosen their hold, but if anything, they tighten their leash.

I bite the inside of my cheek and contemplate not for the fiftieth time in the last day: what the fuck am I going to do now?

I pad toward the kitchen, stopping at the patio door to look into the backyard.

I’m not surprised to find Rafe on a lounger, one gun on his lap, another on the armrest, and a third on the ground next to him.

My feet carry me outside before the thought fully forms. The patio door snicks shut behind me, a soft betrayal of sound in the quiet dark.

“You should be sleeping, baby.” His voice is low, almost a murmur, but it lands like gravel skidding across pavement.

“So should you.” I come to a stop beside his lounger.

“Only one of us got shot tonight.”