Page 37 of Dreadful

“Who’s in my bed isn’t family business. This is my fucking life.”

I meet his hardened stare, my own gone flat and cold. “Yeah. Yours and Rafe’s and Cruz’s too. And whoever else is on her roster. And we’re right back where we started.” My expression doesn’t flicker. Neither does his.

Gage stares at me for a long moment, jaw tight, something unresolved still moving behind his eyes. Then he sits back into the seat. “Just fucking drive, Bishop,” he says flatly. “We’ve got a trunk full of guns and cash, and we’re burning time.”

I pull back onto the road without a word. The silence that settles between us is different from the one before.

FOURTEEN

BELLAMY

It’s been six days since my sister left. Days that have felt like weeks and minutes all at once, stretching and collapsing depending on how hard I’m trying not to think.

The Calloway house has its own rhythm now—weapons checks and camera rotations and the particular sound the back door makes when someone’s coming off watch. I’ve started recognizing footsteps. Gage’s are unhurried. Cruz’s have a weight to them that arrives before he does. Rafe’s I don’t hear at all until he’s already there. And Bishop’s are precise in their cadence.

Tension has settled in the way humidity does—not dramatic, just present, coating everything. Coco keeps telling me I’m welcome here, and I believe she means it. But there’s a difference between being welcome and belonging, and I feel it every time I round a corner and have to recalibrate where I am in someone else’s space.

I’m an interloper.

Bishop won’t let me take watch alone, which means I’m stuck following one of the guys around like some kind of lost puppy.

Beneath all of it, the concern sits on my breastbone like a stone I keep forgetting is there until I breathe wrong. My brother. My sister. The Calloways. Me.

The guilt has started to feel less like an emotion and more like weather. Low pressure. The kind that makes your joints ache before the storm actually hits. I keep waiting for Bishop to find me somewhere private—the side yard, the garage—and lay it all out. Instead, his eyes move past me like I’m part of the wall. I don’t know whether to be relieved or terrified, and the not knowing is its own kind of exhausting.

I make myself breathe. Feel the sun. Smell the chlorine and the gardenias Coco has in pots along the fence.

My siblings are safe. I repeat it until it almost feels like enough.

Yet the lingering feeling of unease won’t leave. and I can’t pinpoint it exactly—or maybe it’s because there are too many things that it’s a collective feeling.

It doesn’t fix the thing underneath—the low, sourceless dread that comes from being someone who has always known when to run, sitting still for the very first time.

But the Calloways are Hollow Beach. They don’t do nomadic. They put down roots so deep even a hurricane couldn’t rip them loose.

I drag in a slow breath, trying to anchor myself here instead of in the spinning reel of ambushes and betrayals my mind keeps trying to play.

“Bell.”

The voice is low, close. My eyes snap open. Gage is leaning over the lounger, his hands braced on the armrests, boxing me in. Sunlight catches the gold in his stubble and the easy curve of his mouth.

“Gage,” I murmur, biting the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning like an idiot.

“Missed you.” His voice is rough at the edges.

I let out a soft huff of air, shaking my head just enough to make a few strands of hair stick to my lip gloss. “I’ve been living with you for days.”

He leans down until his nose brushes mine. “But you haven’t been in my bed.”

I tilt my head back against the chair, baring my throat. “You could’ve joined me on the couch.” The memory of that first night—his weight, his mouth, the way Cruz joined in—hangs between us, unspoken.

I thought it was best if I crashed on the couch, considering what happened the first night I stayed here. Given that we’re all under the same roof for the foreseeable future, it felt too much like tempting fate.

A slow smile spreads across his face as he trails a thumb along my jaw. “It’s a little small for us both.”

I shift just enough to let my lips graze the corner of his. “Are you saying you wouldn’t be able to fit?”

He goes still for a heartbeat, then a rough laugh escapes him, warm against my skin. “I think we both know that I can.”