Chapter 103: Nice until it wasn’t
The air in the car was a thick, unspoken thing coated in unshed words and old glances left hanging in limbo. The engine hummed beneath them like a low growl, just loud enough to fill the silence, but not nearly enough to drown it.
Stefan gripped the steering wheel like it was the last solid thing in his world, his knuckles pale under the strain. Beside him, the doctor cool, contained, professionally poised sat with her hands folded neatly in her lap. Her gaze was fixed out the window, but Mara could feel the tension in the way her shoulders held themselves a little too still.
In the back seat, Mara exhaled slowly. The silence was killing her—too heavy, too loud. Like sitting inside a vacuum that might burst if someone so much as breathed too hard. She smirked to herself. Time to poke the bear.
"So... hey, Doctor," she said, casually, as if slicing through tension with a butter knife.
The woman blinked and shifted slightly in her seat. "I’m Eva," she said, her voice soft, laced with a warning that Mara, of course, ignored. "Call me Eva."
Mara raised an eyebrow. Interesting. The formal veneer cracked just a little.
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on the edge of the front seats. "You know, Eva," she said, dragging the name with a kind of playful menace, "I don’t buy it. This tension between you and my brother? Doesn’t feel like work drama to me."
Stefan’s fingers clenched around the wheel. "Sis," he muttered, low, dangerous. "Drop it."
Mara grinned. "Hey, Eva—" she sings-songy her name. "Is my brother gay?"
Eva choked. Full-body kind of cough. Stefan’s foot jerked off the gas, and the car lurched forward for a breathless second before he caught it again.
"Stefania Morissette Shepherd, I’m not gay!" he snapped, his voice somewhere between exasperated and defensive, slamming the accelerator just a little too hard. The car surged forward, but the silence was broken now, and it was glorious.