The Walls Between Us

by Noelle Voss

Heat 5 / 5 · 21+Novella · 12 chapters28,228 words2h 3m read~3h 10m listen

Three a.m. in Red Hollow, and Juniper Vale is already counting the ways this night could kill someone. She runs the After Dark’s shadow witness floor with surgical precision—because the last time she trusted a handler over her own gut, a man died behind a jammed door and the alarms stayed silent. She will not make that mistake again. Then federal courier Ezra Torres crashes through her lobby in a leather jacket and a bad attitude, dragging a terrified witness and a sealed directive that rewrites her entire night.

A leak has burned their sunrise exit. Now Juniper and Ezra are crouched on a rusting mill catwalk above a swollen creek, playing engaged couple for any patrol car that swings its lights through the broken windows—staged kisses, staged smiles, and a real, dangerous heat neither of them asked for. Ezra is everything she despises: reckless, rule-allergic, infuriatingly competent. She is everything he resents: controlled, protocol-obsessed, and somehow the only person on this catwalk he actually trusts.

When a crumpled transfer order turns up half-frozen in the grating—his signature already inked, one blank line waiting for hers—Juniper understands the clock has been running since the moment she said yes. Six hours to sunrise. One witness to keep alive. And a handler whose orders are starting to smell like a death sentence.

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