With Hearts to Hear| ✔

|21|

Killian pushed open the door with a cautious smile. He had decided to take Lea's advice to apologise for his harsh words. Though he knew it was not going to make things perfect between them straight away, he wanted to go above and beyond, hence his decision to bring back a bottle of Rachel's favourite gin with a mix of fruits.

As soon as he stepped inside, he could tell that something was amiss. Her scent had faded, little more than a wisp in the air remained; the air was cold, ripe with the bitter sting of loneliness; the space quiet, eerily so— which knowing Rachel, whose very soul sung, was an impossible feat.

The gifts slipped from his fingers, the glass bottle meeting the ground with a dull thud and rolling away. He forced himself to focus, to breathe and to stay calm as he let himself momentarily believe that perhaps she had stepped out for fresh air. Until he reminded himself that, the reason she had agreed to come back to his pack in the first place was to try to outrun her problems.

Killian tore through the rooms of the house, searching for any trace that she remained but found nothing. Any trace of her having ever been there had completely vanished, as if she were a mere mirage for the short few weeks she had been there. All her clothes were stripped bare from his wardrobe; her small pots of moisturiser, makeup and hair oils all missing from the countertop in the bathroom; though most damning, the empty space beside the bed where her guitar usually laid resting.

He reminded himself that she was not a prisoner, that he had every intention to let her leave if she had wanted to. Only he had every intention to make her fall in love with him first.

Just like that, she was gone.

***

"Shit." Rachel cussed quietly under her breath.

The small needle on the fuel gauge taunted her as it fell to the 'E', the jeep sputtered to a halt on the side of the road. She was still an hour away from Willsden Brooke, though with a dead phone and empty fuel tank on one of the least used roads into town she knew there was little luck in her getting someone to help her back.

In her haste to leave before Killian returned, she hadn't thought to charge her that had been sitting precariously on 15% battery life when she decided to haul ass out of there. Nor had she bothered to check her fuel tank, and make sure she had spare oil in the trunk.

There was one consolation she thought, at least with a dead phone she couldn't call Killian to bail her out of her situation. She hated that even when she was trying to leave him, it seemed everything was working against her... She hated that at the thought of her being stranded in the middle of nowhere, that he was the first person she wanted to call; that he was the only person to be there for her just because she needed him to be.

She didn't want to think about him, so instead she forced herself to think about her current predicament instead. Rachel got out of the car, looking up and down the empty road for any sign of life. Any sign there was something other than her in the middle of this barren, nowhere road.

An ugly lump formed in her throat, her eyes burning with tears as reality hit her for the first time. She was alone, standing on the side of the road because she ran away from anything that ever happened to her. Because she was afraid that something good might finally change things. Because everything she touched, she ruined. Because she was a coward.

Her shoulders shook with her silent sob, but she refused to make a sound; it was stupid, but the idea of sniffling and wailing like a banshee made her feel weaker.

She had thought she had been alone before, that she had been lost before. But now, standing in the middle of nowhere with no one to call, and the frightening realisation that nobody knew where she was, made her realise she had been wrong.