The woods were louder at night. Not in sound, in the way they breathed. Each bare branch clawing at the moonlight, each patch of leaves whispering secrets only predators could understand. The path between Nevermore and Jericho wound like a vein through it, slick with dew and treachery.

You walked it anyway. Boots soft against the damp ground, coat pulled close, hands buried in your pockets as the cold gnawed at your fingertips. Rules were meant to keep people like you in place, and you had never done well with being placed.

Curfew was long past. Your dorm should have been silent by now, your bed untouched and your sister none the wiser. But the idea of staying in, folding yourself into the same four walls and the same set of whispers, it made your skin itch. And maybe there was another reason, one with unruly curls and a crooked grin, but you weren’t about to dissect that in the middle of the forest while something with claws hunted afterthoughts.

The lights of Jericho were little more than smudges in the distance when you finally reached them. The Weathervane was closed, its windows dark, the sign flipped. But Tyler wasn’t a boy who disappeared with the lights. His father’s house was only a short walk away, too short, too easy.

The window was unlocked. You suspected it always was.

Inside, the air was thick with the faint scent of coffee grounds and rain-soaked wood. His room was small, half-organized and half-chaos, papers scattered over the desk, a half-drunk mug forgotten beside a lamp. He sat there, back to you, headphones on, hair catching the light in disheveled streaks as he bent over his homework.

You stepped in soundlessly, the window closing behind you with a whisper of glass. The moon spilled in after you, cutting your shadow across his floor like a blade.

For a moment, you just stood there, watching the slow rise and fall of his shoulders, the faint tapping of his pencil against the page. There was something oddly vulnerable about it, the unguarded slope of his back, the way he worked like the world outside didn’t exist.

Then he turned.

It was your shadow that betrayed you – long, sharp, sliding over the wall until it kissed the edge of his desk. He glanced at it first, brow knitting, and then spun in his chair.

The reaction was immediate. His headphones half-slipped, heart in his throat, eyes going wide. “—What the—”

He nearly toppled the chair, catching himself against the desk with a sharp scrape of wood. His breath came out in a rush, halfway between a laugh and a curse, fingers clutching the armrest as if you were a ghost that had materialized from the floorboards.

You didn’t speak. Not yet.

Rain still clung to your coat, droplets tracing the edges of the fabric. Your hair, loosened by the night, framed your face like the forest itself had reached out to follow you here. And in the silence that followed, the one he couldn’t seem to break, the rules you’d broken to get here pressed against the walls like another heartbeat.