Chapter 157: What Waits on Eighteen

Chapter 157: Chapter 157: What Waits on Eighteen

The wolf trotted a step ahead of Erik on the stairwell landing, then stopped mid-stride, ears flattening, a low growl building somewhere deep in his chest that hadn’t been there a heartbeat earlier.

Erik felt it before he consciously registered the sound — the strange, cold thread of unease that occasionally passed between them through the bond, sharper now than it had been in weeks. Hrimnir had learned to soften his own shape weeks ago, coat trimmed shorter in the mind’s eye, frame drawn in just enough to pass for a large husky at a glance rather than the alpha wolf he actually was — a small adjustment that spared them both the trouble of explaining his true nature to every frightened tenant they passed. But the growl building in his throat now carried none of the softness his adjusted form usually implied.

What is it, Erik asked silently.

Hrimnir didn’t answer immediately. His nose lifted, testing the stale air of the stairwell, eyes fixed on nothing Erik could see.

Wrong, he finally said, the same single word he’d used once before, weeks ago now, in a hallway on the twentieth floor. Something wrong. Close.

Erik’s hand drifted toward his pistol out of habit, scanning the empty landing. "Wrong how?"

Not zombie. Not human either. Not fully.

That wasn’t a distinction Erik had ever heard Hrimnir make before, and something about the careful, deliberate way he phrased it settled cold and unpleasant low in Erik’s stomach.

"Where."

Hrimnir’s head turned, slow and precise, toward the door marked 18.

Erik studied the door for a long moment, some old, half-buried memory surfacing without warning — a woman standing in a doorway weeks ago, black hair, lost eyes, a name she’d seemed to have to search for before she could offer it. Grace. He hadn’t thought of her since. Hadn’t had reason to, buried under everything else the last several weeks had demanded of him.

He didn’t open the door. Something about Hrimnir’s stillness told him tonight wasn’t the night for that, and he had a sweep to finish, a building full of desperate, dangerous people between here and Edward’s floor still needing his attention.

"We’ll come back to this," he murmured, more to himself than to the wolf beside him, and continued down the stairwell — though Hrimnir’s low growl didn’t fully fade until they’d put two more floors between themselves and the door marked eighteen.

Behind that door, Grace sat very still in the dark, listening to the faint, distant sound of footsteps and something else — a low, animal growl, gone almost as soon as she’d registered it — fading slowly down the stairwell, and smiled.

She’d felt him before she heard him. She always did now — some faint, electric awareness humming under her skin whenever that particular pull hit her, closer to instinct than to any of her five ordinary senses. It had started small, in the first days after she’d woken from whatever the red sun had done to her. A flicker of warmth whenever she thought of the tall, quiet man from the hallway. A pull, faint at first, growing sharper and more insistent with every day that passed without him coming to find her.

He hadn’t come to find her. Not once, in all the weeks since that first, brief meeting in the hallway.

That still stung, somewhere deep and private, though she’d learned to fold the hurt into something more useful. Patience.

She knew his name now, at least — Erik. She’d caught it from the two of them together, that first night, the younger one calling out to him with the easy familiarity of a brother. She hadn’t caught the younger one’s name in return, hadn’t cared enough to try. He was noise, background, someone who existed only in relation to the man who mattered.

Since then, she’d learned other things too — pieced together carefully from the fearful, exhausted talk of the neighbors around her, the particular currency of information that still passed between desperate people even now. There was a woman, apparently. Red hair. The two of them, Erik and his brother, along with a few others, had spent the first days sweeping this very building floor by floor, clearing the lower levels of the dead, leaving behind those strange, ridiculous survival notes people still occasionally mentioned with something between gratitude and disbelief.

Grace had never actually seen the woman. Only heard her described, secondhand, filtered through a dozen frightened voices who didn’t know or care that every mention landed somewhere sharp and possessive in her chest.

She wasn’t even there that first night, Grace reminded herself, the thought settling something back into place. I was. I’m the one he actually met.

She didn’t even know if the redhead mattered to him the way the family clearly did — she couldn’t be certain of anything about her at all beyond a color and a rumor. But the not-knowing itched at her regardless, a small, persistent thorn she kept circling back to in the quiet hours between one careful act and the next.

My previous life. Grace almost laughed, thinking about it now, the way she often did when her thoughts drifted this direction.

She remembered the ward clearly, even now, weeks into a body and a world that wasn’t originally hers. White walls. The particular, sterile quiet of a place designed to keep people like her contained rather than understood. Her parents’ faces, tight with the specific mixture of love and exhaustion that came from raising a daughter whose feelings never fit inside the boxes everyone else seemed to manage so effortlessly. She’d screamed when she was happy. Wept for hours when she was hurt. Loved too hard, too fast, too completely, and been told, over and over, by doctors and family alike, that there was something wrong with the sheer size of what she felt.

Wrong. The word had followed her through years of that world — diagnosis after diagnosis, medication after medication, all of it aimed at making her smaller, quieter, easier to be around. ℯ

And then she’d woken up here.

In a world ending, in a body that wasn’t hers, in a place where people screamed and grieved and killed without anyone calling it a symptom — Grace had felt something she hadn’t experienced in years. Relief. Then something sharper, headier, unmistakably close to joy.

Nobody here would ever tell her she felt too much. The world itself felt exactly the way she’d always felt inside — chaotic, extreme, unbearably intense — and for the first time in her entire life, that made her normal. Made her, if anything, uniquely suited to survive it.

She thought of it, in her quieter moments, as something close to arousal — not in any simple physical sense, but in the deeper, more electric thrill of finally, finally being allowed to be exactly as much as she actually was, without apology, without medication, without a single person left alive who remembered the version of her that used to apologize for existing so loudly.

I could love someone the way I actually love, she thought, settling back into her chair, eyes still fixed on the door. Completely. Without holding back. Without them locking me away for it.

She thought of Erik again — tall, composed, achingly familiar in a way she still couldn’t fully explain. She’d only spoken to him for a handful of minutes, that first night, and yet something in him had felt, instantly, like the answer to a question she’d been asking her entire life.

He’ll understand, she told herself. Once he sees me properly. Once he understands what I can be for him.

She thought of the woman with red hair sometimes, when the patience wore thin enough to let uglier thoughts through — a rumor, a color, nothing more, and yet the shape of her kept surfacing anyway, stubborn and unwelcome. She thought, too, of his brother, of whatever family surrounded him, always so certain of each other, so tightly closed against outsiders.

They took up so much of him. All that space in his life, all that loyalty, poured into people who would never love him the way she already knew she could — completely, extremely, without a single ounce of restraint.

A savior, she thought, the word settling warm and certain behind her ribs, though she couldn’t have said, even to herself, savior from what exactly. Just that he was. That he had to be. That everything in her recognized it the moment she’d first seen him standing in that hallway and felt something inside her settle, finally, into place after a lifetime of never quite fitting anywhere at all.

Outside, the rain continued its endless assault against the windows, the building sinking floor by floor into chaos and desperation around her, and Grace sat in the dark of apartment eighteen, patient, smiling, waiting for the exact right moment to stop being a stranger in a hallway and start being something the man she loved could never walk away from again.

She had time. She reminded herself of that, every single day now, turning the thought over like a small, comforting stone.

She had all the time this drowning world was willing to give her.