The car pulled away from the scene, the low hum of the engine barely audible over the pounding in Aria’s chest. She sat stiffly in the back seat, her fingers twisting the edge of her dress as she stared out the tinted window. The chaos they left behind still felt too close, too raw, as if it could catch up to them at any moment.
Sebastian sat beside her, his expression unreadable, though his hand rested lightly on her knee, a grounding presence in the storm of her thoughts. She wasn’t sure if he even realized he was doing it, but she didn’t pull away.
For a while, the silence between them was thick, broken only by the occasional burst of static from the security team’s radios in the car ahead. She could feel Sebastian’s tension in the way his jaw tightened every time the radio crackled,
