I scowled, shoved his hand away, and got myself up with all the stubbornness I had left. I leaned on Rio. Leaned on the chair. Leaned on anything I could reach. It wasn’t pretty, but step by step, I made it to the bed.
By the time I dropped onto the clean sheets, my heart was thudding, my head light and my muscles trembling as if I’d run a marathon.
I sipped the water he’d left for me, trying to settle my breathing.
“Stay here,” Rio ordered, then turned and vanished from the room.
“Not going anywhere,” I muttered at the empty doorway.
I couldn’t stay at Redcars.
It didn’t matter how kind—or brutal—these people were. Kessler’s system would find me soon enough. And when it did…
Well, for now, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it. Couldn’t even get out of bed, let alone get away.
The second Rio stepped out of the room—even just to grab a drink—I pushed through the dizziness. My vision blurred at the edges, black spots blooming and fading, but I didn’t stop. I couldn’t.
I slid the phone I’d lifted from him out from under the pillow, every movement sending a hot ripple of pain through my side. My fingers shook with effort, not fear, as I navigated to the secure portal I needed. The phone wasn’t flashy, but I downloaded a patch from my cloud storage, watching the percentage climb so fucking slowly; then, I had access to a code screen, and that was all I needed.
My hands were steady enough. My pulse wasn’t.
A message flashed onto the screen.
Just long enough for me to catch a glimpse of it.
K:You’re not as hidden as you think.
K: My baby is already rewriting what you tried to bury.
I froze.My throat went tight.
He couldn’t know I was here. Nothere. Not physically.
My stomach lurched.
A sound on the stairs jolted me into motion. I logged myself out of the code screen, closed everything down, and dropped the phone to the floor—just to the left of the nightstand. Exactly where Rio would think it had slipped from his pocket.
Then, I lay back against the pillow, eyes closed, forcing my breathing into something that didn’t sound like panic. I couldn’t afford to give anything away.
Not yet.
TEN
Rio
Lyric needed to eat.He needed the fuel, and I needed the distance. My temper buzzed beneath the surface, low and hot -- the way it always did when I didn’t know where to put it -- as if my fists were waiting for permission and every step was an excuse not to punch a hole through the nearest wall. I needed action or pills. Impact or floating. Something to feel or not feel.
Hell, anything that wasn’t tangled up in the shitstorm of attraction to Lyric that I didn’t want to name.
But what I felt… fuck.
What I wanted to do to Lyric the moment I saw the soft curve of his stomach under that towel, thepale skin, the quick flash of his cock when he moved, the fear in his eyes—it was wrong. But the feeling lodged in me anyway, guilt fused with heat until it was impossible to tell them apart. He was too raw, too much like Danny, and still I ached for him.
I didn’t do fragile. Fragile got me hurt. Fragile made me hesitate. Fragile crawled into my head and lived there until all the violence I was good at turned into something ugly.
I gritted my teeth and yanked open the fridge, grabbing a couple of things that didn’t require thought. Cheese was protein, right? There was Robbie’s favorite yogurt, still in date, along with a couple of cookies from the tin. Maybe, he could dunk those or something so he could eat without flinching. I focused on the task, kept my hands moving, ignored the heat crawling up the back of my neck and the ache across my shoulders.
Saturday couldn’t come soon enough. That fight—the extra thirty pounds of muscle and rage, going up against someone bigger and stronger than me—I needed it like I needed oxygen. I needed to hit something that wouldn’t break. I needed the release. The noise. The bruises that meant I was still here, still solid, still capable of control.
