ASHER
I woke up to silence, not the comfortable kind but the kind that sat heavy in a room where too much had been said and nothing had been resolved.
Reed's arm was still around my waist. His chest was still pressed against my back. His breathing was steady and even but I knew he wasn't asleep because his thumb was moving in slow circles against my hip bone, the same restless pattern he'd traced during the spaces between waves when we were both too wrecked to do anything but wait for the next one.
The heat was gone completely and for the first time in what felt like days, my body was mine again. No fever burning under my skin, no desperate ache demanding to be filled, no Omega instincts screaming for my Alpha. It was just me and Reed. And the quiet morning light filtering through his curtains.
