My heart hammered against my ribs, wild and frantic, a trapped thing looking for a way out. The air between us had thickened to something almost visible, shimmering with everything we weren't saying, everything we couldn't. I could feel it pressing against my skin, filling my lungs with something sharp and stinging, harder to breathe by the second.

He wouldn't look at me. Wouldn't so much as flinch.

And God help me, I couldn't take it—the waiting, the burning weight of his silence, the way he stood there like he was made of stone and shame and things I'd never be able to name.

The words tore free before I could stop them, raw and broken at the edges.

"Damn it, Colt, say something," I snapped, my voice breaking apart on the last word, a sharp, splintered thing I couldn't call back.

It echoed through the room, bounced off the old wood and the low ceilings and came back to me sounding smaller, hollower. A ghost of itself.

The fire crackled, spitting a shower of sparks up the stone hearth. Outside, the storm grumbled low and restless, rattling the windowpanes like an impatient hand. And inside—inside it was only us. Only the terrible, endless ache of two people who didn't know how to reach for each other anymore.

"You think it didn't gut me?" I whispered fiercely, the words trembling in the space between us. "You think it didn't feel like drowning, standing there watching you look at her like that? Like she was the only thing in the goddamn world?"

I could hear my own breathing now, too fast, too shallow, matching the hard, stuttering pace of my heart. It felt like I was unraveling thread by thread, and he was just standing there—watching it happen.

At last, he moved.

Slowly, like every inch of him was carrying a war he hadn't chosen. His boots scraped against the old floorboards. His fists twitched once at his sides before he finally, finally turned.

And when he did, it knocked the breath clean out of me.

His face was a map of the night's wreckage—split lip, swelling cheekbone, a smear of blood still drying along his jaw. But it wasn't the bruises that broke me.

It was his eyes.

They weren't angry. They weren't cold.

They were wrecked.

Wrecked in a way I hadn't seen since the night he was thrown by the bull, broken and bleeding. Wrecked in a way that made me want to cross the room and gather him into my arms even as my own heart lay in pieces at my feet.

I hated the way I knew him so well.
How I knew every quiet crack he tried to hide, every splinter he thought no one could see.
The slight hitch in his breathing—too sharp, too shallow—the way his chest stuttered like even air was a battle he wasn't sure he could win tonight.
The bruises hadn't even finished blooming across his skin, and still he stood there like he could bear it all if he just locked his jaw tight enough, willed the world to forget he was made of flesh and blood like the rest of us.

It was killing me.
Watching him.

The house felt too small for it—his grief, my anger, the storm rattling the windows, clawing at the walls. I could feel the weight of it pressing down, heavy and thick, until it hurt just to stand there and breathe.

"Say it," I whispered, my voice sharp and shaking, but louder than the silence swallowing us whole. "Whatever's sitting on your chest, Colt Langmore—just say it. I'm right here. Don't stand there acting like you're the only one who's been hurt tonight."

Colt's eyes flickered—dark, bottomless—but still I was met with silence.

He just stood there, rigid as a fencepost sunk deep into frozen ground, the kind of stillness that spoke louder than any outburst ever could. His silence was not empty; it was charged, alive with everything he didn't know how to say, everything he was trying so hard to chain down inside himself.

For a breath, a heartbeat, I thought he might finally speak—that the dam would crack and something real would bleed out between us, something we could gather up and hold onto. But the moment passed, thin and brittle as glass, and he stayed silent. Only the clenching and flexing of his fists betrayed him, the restless, helpless anger barely leashed behind the stillness of his body.

It gutted me, the way he fought himself harder than he fought me.

"Fine," I spat, the word tasting like rust, like something old and ruined and too heavy to swallow back down.

My fists curled tighter at my sides, nails carving crescents into my palms, the sting of it sharper, somehow cleaner, than the wreck of feelings clawing at my chest. The words slipped out before I could catch them, low and bitter, cracking against the silence like a brittle branch snapping underfoot. "You're impossible."

The taste of it was sour on my tongue, a taste of defeat, of walls I didn't know how to climb anymore. I didn't wait for him to answer. I already knew the shape of his silence.

I turned sharply, boots scuffing against the floorboards, the sound too loud in a house that seemed to be holding its breath around us. Every step away from him felt deliberate, a choice made in the shadow of a thousand other choices that had led us here. I felt the burn of his stare against my back, a weight that trailed me down the hall, but I didn't turn around. I couldn't. If I looked back, if I saw the wreckage in his face again, I might forget how to keep walking.

The bathroom light was jarring, harsh against the dimness I'd left behind, casting everything in a raw, unforgiving glow. It painted my reflection in cruel strokes — hair plastered to my temples, skin pale and tight, eyes too wide and hollow to feel like they belonged to me.

I wrenched open the cabinet hard enough that the mirror rattled, the clang of metal against wood sharp enough to cut through the numbness spreading under my skin. The first aid kit was buried beneath a tangle of old prescriptions and dust. My fingers closed around it, knuckles scraping against cold plastic, the simple, solid weight of it grounding me in a way nothing else could.

For a moment, I stayed there.

Listening to the rain claw at the windows.

Listening to my own heartbeat thundering against the silence.

I closed the cabinet harder than I meant to, the slam of it ricocheting down the hall like a shot. The weight of the night, of the things unsaid and the things unforgivable, pressed down until my knees threatened to buckle beneath it. But I forced myself to move.

Colt hadn't moved.

He stood planted in the same spot, a fixed point in a world I no longer recognized. The fire had burned down to a sullen, flickering glow, casting long, broken shadows across the floor, and the room was heavy with him—his silence, his anger, his impossible, unbearable grief.

I set the first aid kit down on the table between us.

The soft thunk of it landing felt too loud.

I popped the latch with fingers that shook despite my best efforts, the tiny click shattering the fragile space between us. It wasn't just a kit opening. It was everything we had tried to keep locked up splitting wide open.

"Sit," I said, and though I tried for steady, the word came out rough, dragged raw across the edge of my heart. There was no gentleness in me tonight. No safe place left to offer.

For a moment he only stared at me, the weight of his gaze like a hand closing around my throat. I could see the war in him — pride and pain, anger and longing, all tangled up so tightly he could barely breathe around it. And then, like a man stepping into a fire he knew he couldn't outrun, he moved. He dropped onto the edge of the couch with a grunt low in his chest, the sound of it scraping across my ribs, making me ache in ways I didn't know how to mend.

I sank down onto my knees in front of him, pulling antiseptic and gauze from the kit with hands that shook no matter how tightly I clenched them. The scent of him hit me all at once — rain and sweat and blood, sharp and salt-heavy, the smell of a man who had fought too hard and bled too much. He sat rigid, elbows braced on his knees, head bowed, body thrumming with a tension so thick it was almost tangible.

When I reached for his arm, he flinched — not much, just the barest tremor under my fingertips, but enough. Enough to break something loose inside me. His skin was burning hot, fevered with anger or pain or both, and the steady thrum of his pulse under my touch was too fast, too uneven.

But he didn't pull away.

"You're hurt," I muttered, more to myself than to him, the words spilling out into the small space between us like a secret I hadn't meant to say aloud. My fingers brushed lightly over his swollen lip, the pad of my thumb catching on the raw split in the skin. He flinched—barely—but he didn't pull away. He never did. That was the thing about Colt Langmore: he would rather bleed for you than flinch from you.

"I'm not gonna stand here and pretend everything's fine," I whispered, my voice quieter now, swallowed up by the crackle of the dying fire and the steady, aching beat of the rain against the windows. The cloth in my hand found his skin, warm and battered and real, wiping away the blood dried stiff at the corner of his mouth. His eyes—dark and storm-heavy—never left mine. They were searching, pulling, like he could find something in me to anchor himself to if he just looked hard enough. Like he didn't trust himself not to come apart.

And still, I didn't look away.

Even when it hurt.

Because somehow, the hurt felt closer to the truth than anything else we had left.

"You don't have to do this," Colt rasped finally, his voice rough and low, cracked at the edges like something barely holding its shape. It wasn't stubborn, not the way it usually was when he got like this. It was raw. Vulnerable in a way that made my throat tighten and my hands falter where they hovered near his bruised skin.

"I'm fine," he said again, softer this time, like if he whispered it low enough it might be true.

A sound broke loose from me, half a laugh, half a sob, brittle and wild and entirely too close to the edge. "You're not fine, Colt." My hand stilled on his cheek, fingers trembling against the bruise blooming there. "You haven't been fine for a long time. Neither of us have."

He didn't answer.

He didn't have to.

I leaned in, my fingers ghosting over the cut on his lip, the cloth catching against the broken skin. His breath hitched—a soft, involuntary sound that stirred something deep and aching inside my chest—but he didn't move. Not an inch. He sat there, stubborn and silent as ever, carrying the weight of the night like it was stitched into his very bones. The heat of him seeped into me, soaked through my skin, made my own blood race faster than I could quiet it.

"Hold still," I whispered, though the command was more for myself than him. My voice barely cleared my throat, thick with the storm still churning in my ribs. My hands, steady only by some fragile grace, moved across the map of bruises he wore, touching each one like it might tell me a story I hadn't been brave enough to ask for.

The smell of him wrapped around me—rain, sweat, something wild and half-broken—and it pulled me deeper, into the places I swore I wouldn't go tonight. Places that still remembered how it felt to reach for him and believe he'd reach back.

The bruise on his cheek had darkened, swollen now into something angry and raw, like the night itself had left its mark on him. I traced it with trembling fingertips, feeling the heat radiate from the tender skin, feeling the sharp inhale he tried—and failed—to hide.

He wasn't just angry at Rhett.

And he sure as hell wasn't just angry at me.

He was angry at the night. At himself. At the way life always managed to cut deeper when you weren't looking.