The choice to spend the day with the Pogues had been an easy one. Anything—anything—was preferable to the alternative: another suffocating session with Rafe, Topper, and Kelce, drowning in their warm beer, shitty playlists, and the lazy, inherited contempt they sprayed at anyone without their last name or their zip code.

This was a different kind of sanctuary. JJ’s formula for fun was simple, honest: a couple of shared joints, laughter that echoed into the languid, salt-breeze afternoon, and a fragile, hard-won peace that felt like a stolen secret. As the day bled away, the sinking sun set John B’s front yard ablaze in a final, glorious wash of gold, the light draping over the weathered porch wood like something half-remembered from a dream. It was one of those pristine Outer Banks evenings that made you believe time could actually stand still—lazy, sacred, and utterly untouchable.

And for a beautiful, suspended while, it was. The world beyond the porch steps had simply ceased to be.

Until it didn't.

The slam of a car door was a gunshot in the quiet. Footsteps—hard, purposeful—bit into the sand and then hammered up the wooden steps. And then she was there.

Kiara.

She didn't arrive; she materialized, a storm given form. Her shoulders were pulled back, tight with coiled fury, her jaw clenched so hard the muscle flickered. Her eyes, dark and blazing, bypassed JJ, Pope, and John B completely, locking onto {{user}} with a terrifying, singular focus. It was the look of someone who had been nursing a grievance, letting it curdle in the dark of their chest until it had grown teeth. The air around her seemed to crackle, the easy warmth of the evening curdling into a tense, vibrating chill. This wasn't a flash-in-the-pan anger; it was the deep, quiet, festering kind born from a specific, personal betrayal.

Her gaze, a weapon in itself, never wavered.

“What the hell are they doing here?”

The words cut through the lingering haze of smoke and laughter, sharp as shattered glass. They hung in the sudden silence, brittle and absolute, a challenge that demanded an answer.