Steel Horizon

Chapter Twenty-Six

The rain started to fall shortly after they left. We watched in silence as their ships rose into the sky and disappeared through the low blanketing clouds. And just like that, they were gone. Someone took the initiative and told everyone to meet up in the library down the street. The human race needed to regroup and decide how to fix our broken world. It felt hopeless. Everything did.

When the Scrappers were here, we did everything to survive. The future was nothing until we knew there was going to be a future. Now we needed to think of one.

I slipped away the first chance I got. There was only one person I wanted to be around, and he wasn't here.

With the Scrappers gone and the world ours again, I should've been relieved or even happy. But all I was feeling was lost. I didn't have a home to go back to. Kaileb was gone and he was the only family I had left. And I had no idea if Jude was still alive.

I walked a few blocks when the rain started to fall, right where the Hunters had hunted us down and killed until there was no one left. I stopped and stared at the blood around my feet, wondering if the rain would wash it away. It was everywhere. Red was painted onto the asphalt by the clumsy strokes of death. Staining the earth. Every bit of it causing my stomach to rise to my throat.

My hair clung to my face, my drenched clothes feeling heavier than a soaked towel in the heat of summer.

It wasn't washing the blood away. The rain fell harder onto my shoulders and it was then when a small stream of it started to drain away. The ground was a melted painting.

When I tore my gaze from the ground, there was a lone figure standing in the road, less than a block away.

Jude.

Something within me stirred and things made sense. Everything made sense. I walked from the dead and towards someone living who made my heart race as if I were sprinting. I started running towards him and he did the same.

We stopped a foot away from each other.

My gaze took in all of him eagerly, wanting more. His white T-shirt was soaked through, showing the curved muscles of his chest and biceps, something that caused my cheeks to warm, and his dark hair was wet and dripping, looking as though he had just ran his hand through it. I was breathing too fast.

"Hi," he said.

I smiled. "Hi."

Every fiber itched to close the distance between us, but I was too nervous to make the first move. I shouldn't have been nervous around him—we had been through everything together and then more. But this was something new. Something we never got a shot at. And it was something I never wanted to let go of.

Jude showed a smile and it was the most adorable thing he'd done. My heart rate picked up—it throbbed in my chest, almost painfully, and I wanted to let it out.

I couldn't stand to be apart from him any longer.

"You promised me something," I said.

Jude shook his head impatiently, still smiling. "Hell yes, I did." And with saying it, he closed the distance between us like there was nothing more he wanted.

His lips were the first thing I felt and adrenaline shot through my veins, sharing every piece of his longing. Jude's hands wrapped around my back and drew me closer so our bodies didn't have an inch of space between us. I wanted to be closer. I wanted to feel his heart beating along with mine, in the same moment, the same breath. I curled my hand around the back of his neck, loving the feeling of his warm skin under my fingers. I couldn't get enough of him. The feel of his lips. His warm breath.

There was a passion behind his kiss I'd never felt before. My head spun with the intensity of it and I didn't know which way was the sun or the red soaked earth. It was just me and Jude.

No rain, no buildings. And the broken world that was left to us didn't matter.

I was no longer lost.