All Chapters of Torin-Shattered: Way Down We Go (Part 1): Chapter 101 - Chapter 110

I lay on my back and let the ceiling come into focus. Torin still slept beside me, his arm curved around my waist like he was afraid I might slip away in the night. His breath warmed the space between my shoulder and the pillow, steady and reassuring. I placed my hand lightly over his, and his fingers curled in response, even in sleep.My heart fluttered in my chest. He had held me after the shock of Lucien’s death had hit me yesterday, held me when my breaths shook and my thoughts tangled into knots I could not untie. He never asked for explanations. He never questioned my conflict. He simply stayed.Careful not to wake him, I eased out of bed and moved into the kitchen. The morning light cast everything in soft gold, and the loft felt like a paused moment in a photograph. Rook slept on the couch, an arm thrown over his eyes, one foot hanging off the edge of the cushion. Tannin had draped a blanket over him at some point during the night, even though she would deny it if confronted. I

~Torin~Rook sat on the couch with his wrapped arm resting across his lap, pretending it didn’t hurt even though the look on his face said otherwise. Tannin sat on the arm of the same couch with a bowl of pretzels balanced on her knee, flicking them at him one by one like she was testing her aim.Jess leaned against the counter, nursing a cup of coffee he probably didn’t need, and pretending he wasn’t smiling at the two idiots bickering in front of him. No one had made any noise about returning to their own homes, and I was okay with that.Marlowe moved through the room quietly, like she was trying to figure out what her life looked like on this side of fear. I could feel her in the space even when she was not in my line of sight. Something about her presence pulled the air together, steadied it. She stopped beside the table and touched a folded blanket, then let her fingers slip across the back of a chair as she walked around it. Little things. Soft things. The kind of movements she h

Hours passed and the morning unfolded quietly, the kind of quiet that felt earned. Sunlight stretched across the loft in slow, warm ribbons, lifting dust in the air like tiny soft sparks. I moved through the space with a cloth over my shoulder and my sleeves rolled up, cleaning one shelf at a time because it soothed a part of me that had been knotted for months.Torin continued working beside me, wiping down counters, and checking windows one by one, only out of habit now, not anxiety. Even the way he moved was different: still protective. Still alert. But softer around the edges, like the worst of the storm had finally passed.As I was rearranging jars on the top shelf, Rook limped out of the spare room, hair sticking up like he’d fought the pillow and lost.“Why does everything hurt?” he groaned as he braced one hand against the wall.“You were shot,” Tannin answered before I could. She followed him out, tying her hair back with the elastic between her teeth.Rook glared at her. “Tha

Torin leaned against the opposite counter, watching me dry a cup with a small smile tugging at his mouth. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes followed my every movement. He always looked at me like I was something he had spent years searching for and could finally touch without worrying it would vanish.Jess sat at the table with a notebook in front of him, one left over from his detective days. He had filled half the pages with names, places, and questions as he worked through the last threads of everything involving Lucien. Some pages he had ripped out and burned. Some pages he had tucked away like reminders of things he needed to understand before letting them go.Rook lay stretched across the couch with a pillow under his injured side. He shifted every few minutes, grunting under his breath each time he moved wrong. Tannin hovered near him like a hawk with a medical degree she didn’t actually have.“Stop squirming,” Tannin said as she pointed a finger at him.Rook let out a groan

This was the life I wanted. Work. Home. Peace. Marlowe. And a future that finally looked like something bright.Tomorrow would come. The next day. The month after that, and for the first time, in a shitload of too long, none of it scared me.I grabbed the nail gun again. I was building a house today. Soon, I would begin building a home, and I suspected it was going to need enough rooms we all could live in it.Later that afternoon I was in the middle of reviewing the shipment log when the front door chimed. That damn cheerful little bell never matched the roughness of the place. Most of the time it meant a delivery driver or a guy looking for day labor. This time it meant something else entirely. Because the kid filling the doorway looked like a ghost grown out of concrete and grit; Reifer.He stood there with that same cocky tilt to his mouth he’d had the day his mother dumped him at the Ravens clubhouse like he was trash she didn’t know what to do with. Sixteen, almost seventeen, hal