The drive to Silverridge took four hours, and Rhea spent every one of them staring out the window without seeing anything at all.
Caden sat beside her in the back of the car, close enough that his shoulder brushed hers on the turns, close enough that she could feel the tension radiating off him like heat off summer asphalt. He hadn’t said much since the training room. There hadn’t been much to say. Owen rode up front with the driver, the folder with her father’s name in it sitting on his lap like something radioactive, and every few minutes Rhea caught him glancing back at her in the mirror, checking, the way you’d check on someone standing too close to a ledge.
Somewhere around the first hour, Caden had reached over and taken her hand without a word, and she’d let him, her fingers curli
