The sound was sickening, pure and brutal. It echoed through the clearing, swallowed the fire, the rain, the very breath in my lungs. I jerked back instinctively, my hand flying to my mouth, my heart pounding so hard it made the world around me blur.

Rhett stumbled a step—not far, not enough to give Colt the satisfaction of it—but when he straightened, the blood trailing from his lip looked dark and vivid against the silver downpour. For a moment, he just stood there, unmoving, the rain pouring over him, dripping from the sharp line of his jaw like molten steel cooling into something lethal.

And then, slowly, he wiped the blood from his mouth with the back of his hand, golden eyes never once leaving Colt's face. There was a stillness in Rhett that terrified me more than Colt's rage ever had. A cold, cutting calm that said he didn't need to meet violence with violence to win.

"Guess you do think this is all about you, Langmore," Rhett said, voice low, each word measured, deliberate. It wasn't a taunt—it was an indictment. A slow, brutal laying bare of a truth Colt wasn't ready to face.

"That's your problem," Rhett said, stopping just close enough that the tension between them tightened like a noose. "You think you're the center of everything."

The rain battered down harder, turning the world around us into a haze of smoke and stormlight. Colt didn't flinch. Didn't break. But I could see the cracks spidering through him—the places where pride and hurt and desperation were eating him alive from the inside out.

His fists clenched and unclenched at his sides, the cords of muscle in his arms straining with the effort of holding himself back.

For a split second, his gaze cut to me—shattered, accusing—and it was worse than the punch, worse than anything he could have said.

Because it was real.

Because it was mine.

Because it was the cost of the choices I had made without even realizing I was making them.

"Stay away from her," Colt said, voice raw, ragged, a threat and a plea tangled together so tightly they were indistinguishable. His chest heaved with the force of it, his whole body coiled like a man who had nothing left to lose.

"You don't know a damn thing about her."

Rhett's lips curved into a slow, dangerous smile—one that didn't warm, didn't soften, didn't even try. It was the kind of smile that warned you the storm had already found its teeth. His head tipped a fraction, as if he was considering Colt's words like a card drawn from a deck he already knew the outcome of.

And then, in a voice that barely disturbed the rain, Rhett let out a low, almost amused chuckle.

"Oh, I think I know more than you'd like," he said, every syllable a quiet, sharpened thing. No shouting. No taunting. Just the lethal calm of a man who understood he didn't have to raise his voice to win. Because he already had.

And it was enough.

Something inside Colt broke.

He moved faster than thought, faster than breath—the kind of movement that had no thought behind it, only instinct, only rage. His fist cut through the downpour in a savage arc, colliding with Rhett's face with a force that seemed to crack the entire night open, the sickening thud of it louder than the thunder rolling above.

Rhett's head snapped back, the blow slamming him sideways into the dented side of the truck. The whole vehicle shuddered under the impact, metal groaning, tires skidding half an inch in the mud.

My gasp broke from me raw, sharp, but my legs wouldn't obey the command to move. I stood frozen, rooted to the mud-slick ground, every muscle locked with a terror that had no name, only a shape: Colt's rage—unleashed and blind and far, far too familiar.

The blood came quick and merciless, a dark red river mingling with the rain, sliding down Rhett's face, over the hard cut of his jaw, soaking into the collar of his shirt until the fabric clung black and heavy to his skin. For a moment, he swayed, the edges of him blurring under the relentless onslaught of water and violence. I saw it—the moment his knees threatened to buckle—the moment he might've fallen.

But Rhett didn't fall.

He caught himself, shoulders rolling back slow, like the violence hadn't broken him, only reminded him what he was made of. His eyes—golden, searing, alive with a terrible, coiled patience—never left Colt.

And Colt... Colt wasn't done.

The look on his face wasn't the aftermath of a victory. It was the devastation of a man who didn't know how to lose something without setting the whole world on fire just to feel like he'd fought for it.

I opened my mouth to call to him—to plead, to scream, to do something—but nothing came. Only silence. Only the terrible, pounding rhythm of my heart trying to tear its way out of my chest.

Because I knew this rage.

I knew the way it carved him hollow.

The way it took and took until there was nothing left but ruin.

I had seen it once before—the day the bull threw him like a rag doll into the dirt, the day he refused to stay down even when his ribs were cracked and his legs were shaking and his face had gone deathly pale from the pain.

I had seen him fight like this.

Against the earth. Against the odds. Against his own breaking body.

Because Colt Langmore didn't know how to surrender.

Not even when he was bleeding for it.

And watching him now—wild-eyed and heaving, rain slicking the hair to his forehead, fists clenching like if he didn't hold onto the rage he would fall apart—it wasn't just fear that lanced through me.

It was heartbreak.

My scream tore from my throat raw, but it broke apart against the storm, lost in the roar of rain and the hollow sound of fists meeting flesh. I stumbled forward, half-blind, heart slamming against my ribs like a creature desperate to outrun the inevitable, but it was already too late. The violence had a gravity all its own now—heavier, meaner than anything I could pull them back from.

Colt's hand fisted the front of Rhett's shirt, dragging him up like a man possessed. The muscles in his arms strained, his whole body locked in a fury so deep it didn't belong to this world. Rhett's back hit the side of the truck with a sound that made my stomach lurch, the metal shrieking under the force of it, folding inward as though even the machine understood it wasn't built to withstand this kind of violence.

I flinched as if it had hit me instead.

The rain poured down in relentless sheets, turning the clearing into a battlefield slick with mud and blood. Rhett's head snapped back against the dented truck with a sickening crack, and for a terrible moment, he sagged in Colt's grip, his body limp, his eyes half-shuttered. Blood streamed from a gash at his temple, mixing with the rain, running down the hard line of his jaw, soaking the torn fabric of his shirt until it clung to his skin like another wound.

But Colt wasn't finished. No, he wasn't even close.

Colt's fists didn't just land; they shattered. Every blow a brutal punctuation, every movement a piece of him breaking loose. His rage was past language now, past reason—something feral that stripped him down to blood and bone and breathless desperation.

Rhett took it all.

He didn't dodge.

He didn't fight back.

He just absorbed it, like a river swallowing stones, steady and unmovable beneath the force trying to tear it apart. Blood mixed with rain, streaking his face, running in thick rivulets down the column of his throat, staining the torn fabric of his shirt until it clung to him like a second skin. Every inch of him should've screamed surrender—but it didn't. He stayed standing.

Blood.

That was what caught me.

Not the fists. Not the violence.

The blood.

It slid from the split in Rhett's temple like a thread pulled loose, a sharp, glistening red that found the curve of his jaw, the hollow of his throat, before it sank into the battered cotton stretched across his chest.

And once it started it didn't stop.

The white of his shirt surrendered in slow, agonizing patches, darkening from ivory to crimson to something blackened and slick. The fabric clung to him, soaked heavy with it, until it wasn't a shirt at all but a wound he wore on the outside. A brand.

And I couldn't look away

I couldn't breathe past it.

The red blurred in the rain, water streaking it sideways across his skin, diluting it and then not—like the blood was too stubborn, too real to be washed away. It bloomed and bled and ran, and my mind, frantic and gasping, latched onto it with the desperate, animal instinct of someone who can't face the bigger thing—the awful, roaring truth of the violence—but can fixate on this one detail instead.

This one terrible, vivid thing.

The blood on his shirt.

Something deep in my chest curled in on itself—something small, something feral. The part of me that knew that you didn't come back from blood like that. Not whole. Not unchanged.

I stood there, swaying, trapped in the sucking mud at my feet, my hands curled into fists so tight my nails dug crescent moons into my palms. I was soaked clean through, the rain cold enough to burn, but I couldn't feel any of it.
I could only feel that.

The blood. The red. The slow, awful claiming of him.

And I thought—if I could just keep staring, if I could just memorize the pattern of it, the way it slid over the rise of his ribs, the way it caught and shuddered in the hollow at the base of his throat—maybe I could undo this. Maybe I could rewind the moment, find some loophole in the universe that would let me step in before it went so wrong.

"Colt, please—"

The words tore from my mouth, raw and broken and utterly useless against the roar of the storm.

But Colt didn't hear.

Or maybe he did, and he didn't care.

His rage was a living thing now, clawing out of him with every swing, every brutal connection of knuckles to flesh. Rhett's head snapped sideways again under the blow, more blood spraying across the crushed metal of the truck, raining down in thick, wet drops that mixed with the mud at their feet.

Caleb was a blur at first—just a shadow breaking through the chaos—but when his hands locked around Colt's shoulders and yanked him back, I could have dropped to my knees in relief.

Thank God. Thank God, thank God.

The words pulsed in my skull like a heartbeat, sharp and stinging, drowning out the sound of the storm, the ragged gasps tearing from Colt's chest, the terrible, sucking silence that followed every brutal swing of his fists.

Caleb's grip didn't waver, even when Colt thrashed against him like a cornered thing, wild-eyed and half-mad. His boots slid through the mud, shoulders braced, muscles trembling with the effort of holding him back. Caleb wasn't just trying to stop him—he was trying to save what was left of him. Trying to pull him back from the edge before he shattered completely.

"Enough!" Caleb barked, and the word cracked through the air, louder than the thunder rolling overhead, louder than the awful, frantic pounding of my own heart.

For a moment, the clearing froze.

The rain battered down, relentless and deafening, but the violence stilled—held at bay by the desperate force of Caleb's hands digging into Colt's shoulders, by the threadbare shreds of loyalty that hadn't been fully severed yet.

Colt fought him anyway. Fought like it hurt to stop. Like it cost him more to stand still than it ever did to bleed.

His fists swung once, twice, wild and graceless, missing Rhett by inches as Caleb hauled him backward, forcing his body into submission even as his soul tore itself ragged trying to break free. Every inch of him shook—not just with anger, but with something worse. A fury that had curdled into grief and didn't know where else to go.

"You're gonna kill him, Colt!" Caleb roared, voice straining, raw with something close to panic. His boots skidded again in the mud, his arms locking tighter like he was trying to hold onto a man already halfway gone

Behind them, Sean materialized like smoke from the trees, his hands seizing Rhett by the arm, dragging him away from the caved-in side of the truck.

Rhett stumbled, blood sluicing down his face in sick, glistening rivers, but somehow he stayed upright, teeth bared in something that wasn't a smile, not really. Something darker. Something that said he wasn't beaten—not by Colt, not by the storm, not even by the ruin painting his body in violent reds and blacks.

Sean gripped Rhett hard, steadying him with rough hands and sharper words muttered under his breath, but Rhett didn't look at him. Didn't even blink.

His eyes were locked on me.

Through the blood, through the rain, through the wreckage of everything that had just been torn open between us—he looked at me.

And it gutted me.

Because in that look, I saw everything he wasn't saying. The dare. The question. The goddamn invitation to step closer when I knew I should run. To choose the fire when every sane part of me was already screaming in retreat.

The rain sluiced down, soaking us all, flattening everything into mud and blood and broken things, but the storm inside me was louder, tearing through my chest, my throat, my lungs.

Caleb's voice cut through it all, sharp as a whip, anchoring what little was left.

"This isn't the time or place, Colt," he said, low and urgent, every word pulled from some deep, desperate place. "You need to get a hold of yourself. Now."