Chapter 7
“It’s eighty feet of open-grate ironwork, Talia,” he said, his voice low, scraping against the quiet. “The air up there is freezing, and the safety rail was installed in nineteen-forty. Stay on the deck.”
“This is my theatre, Parker,” she countered, her chin coming up. “I know every rusted bolt between here and the roof. You don’t climb it alone.”
He stared down at her for two long seconds. A muscle ticked along the edge of his stubbled jaw. Then, with an exasperated exhale that was almost a sigh, he unclipped a spare nylon safety lanyard from his harness.
“Tie in behind me,” he said gruffly. “And keep your eyes on my boots.”
The ascent was brutal. The air grew progressively thinner, colder, and dense with decades of dried theatrical dust, coal soot, and resin. The Starlight’s fly loft was a cathedral of suspended shadows: endless hemp ropes hanging like weeping willow branches, canvas backdrops rolled into sleeping mummies, and the massive, spider-webbed iron framework of the gridiron suspended directly beneath the roof timbers.
By the time Talia hauled herself onto the highest catwalk—a narrow steel mesh walkway suspended eighty feet above the darkened orchestra seats—her thighs were burning, and her knuckles were white against the iron rail.
She looked down once. The five hundred crimson velvet seats below looked tiny, like a field of crushed berries scattered across the black floor. A wave of vertigo tilted the world sideways.
Instantly, Parker’s arm wrapped around her waist.
He pulled her firmly against his side, his body a solid, immovable wall of heat against the freezing cross-draft whistling through the roof vents. The nylon of his harness dug into her hip, but she didn't care; she buried her face against the flannel of his chest, clutching the lapels of his heavy jacket until the spinning stopped.
“I told you not to look down,” he murmured, his breath warm against her temple, his deep baritone rumbling through his ribs directly into hers.
“I wasn’t looking down,” she lied, her voice muffled against his collar. “I was inspecting the sightlines.”
A quiet vibration went through his chest—a real, genuine laugh, soft and private. He didn’t let go of her waist. If anything, his arm tightened, holding her anchored against him as the wind rattled the tin flashing overhead.
“You don’t ever give an inch, do you?” he said softly.
“If I gave an inch, this building would have been demolished ten years ago.”
“Maybe some things aren’t meant to stand forever, Talia.”
She lifted her head, looking up into his face. They were so high up that the town of Briar Glen ceased to exist. There were no city council members, no building inspectors, no ghosts buried in the dark soil eighty feet below. There was only the vast, echoing cavern of the theatre and the man holding her suspended between the rafters and the earth.
“Do you really believe that?” she whispered, studying the hard, beautiful symmetry of his features—the slight crook in the bridge of his nose where it had once been broken, the exhaustion tracing the corners of his mouth. “You spend your life studying how structures hold together. You must believe that saving something is worth the fight.”
Parker looked away, out toward the high arched clerestory window at the peak of the proscenium wall. Through the rain-slicked glass, the faint orange sodium glow of the river bridge shimmered in the blackness.
“I believe in honest loads, Talia,” he said, his voice dropping into a quiet, painful cadence she hadn’t heard from him before. “I believe that if a beam is rotten, you don’t paint over it. You don’t prop it up with prayers and nostalgia. You take it out into the light, you face the rot, and you rebuild it from the bedrock up. Otherwise, you’re just waiting for the day it collapses and crushes everyone standing beneath it.”
Talia looked at his profile, sensing the deep, jagged fracture beneath his cool engineering logic. “Who didn’t face the rot, Parker? Who did that to you?”
Parker’s jaw tightened. For a moment, she thought he would retreat back behind his clipboards and code books. But he didn’t move. His hand shifted against her lower back, his fingers curling into the heavy wool of her coat.
“My family lived in a house built on top of an abandoned gypsum shaft in Pennsylvania,” he said quietly, each word measured and heavy. “My father was a foreman. He knew the ground was settling. He knew the water table was eating the foundation out from under the basement. But he spent twenty years pretending it was fine because he was too proud to admit he bought bad land. He spent every weekend patching the drywall cracks, lying to my mother, lying to the bank, lying to me.”
Talia held her breath. “What happened?”
“The kitchen collapsed into the drift when I was fourteen,” Parker said, his eyes flat and clear. “My mother broke both her legs. We lost everything in six minutes. That’s when I learned that loyalty to a lie isn’t nobility. It’s just cowardice dressed up as love.”
The words struck Talia right in the center of her chest, knocking the air from her lungs with the force of an iron beam.
*Loyalty to a lie.*
She looked at him, her eyes burning with unshed tears that she couldn’t explain without betraying the monstrous burden she had carried since her father’s death. Parker didn’t know the truth, but his words had dissected her with surgical precision.
“You think I’m a coward,” she whispered, her voice cracking.
Parker turned his head, looking down at her. His gaze was searching, fierce, and unexpectedly raw.
“No,” he murmured, his thumb coming up to trace the curve of her cheek, brushing away a stray drop of sweat or melted sleet. “That’s the maddening thing about you, Talia. You’re the bravest woman I’ve ever met. You’ve been holding this entire damn cathedral on your shoulders all by yourself, and you’re breaking under the weight of it. I can see it in your eyes every time I touch a floorboard.”
Talia’s heart hammered a frantic, suffocating beat against her ribs. “Parker...”
“You don’t have to carry it alone,” he whispered, his face dipping closer, his breath hot against her freezing lips. “Whatever it is. You don’t have to bury yourself with it.”
The vulnerability in his voice tore away the last shred of Talia’s defenses. She didn’t care about the drop below. She didn’t care about the sixty-foot fall or the seventy-ton block of concrete in the earth. She only knew the desperate, agonizing need to feel real, to feel held, to be loved for something other than her father’s daughter.
She reached up, her cold fingers sliding into the thick, dark hair at the nape of his neck, and pulled him down to her.
Parker didn’t hesitate. A ragged sound tore from his throat as his mouth came down on hers, fierce and consuming.
The kiss wasn’t gentle. It was a collision of everything they had been holding back for three days—the suspicion, the friction, the dangerous, intoxicating heat that had simmered in every shared look across drafting tables and dusty floorboards. Parker’s arm locked around her waist like an iron band, lifting her up onto her tiptoes, pressing her flush against his chest as if he could shield her from the entire world.
