Chapter 105 - Chapter One Hundred and Four— The Night the World Isn’t Waiting

The tea had gone lukewarm by the time Willow finished the last sip. It was not because she had taken too long to drink it, but because neither of them wanted to move enough to refresh it. The blanket around her shoulders still held the warmth Zane had tucked there, and his arm rested loosely around her upper body, steadying her in a way she did not want to examine too closely. The night hummed with the quiet of a city settling into itself. A dog barked somewhere in the distance. Someone on the fourth floor closed their door with too much force. The late evening traffic softened until it became nothing more than a steady, distant murmur. All the small noises blended together into a muted backdrop, the kind that made it feel as though the two of them existed inside a fragile bubble the rest of the world could not quite reach.