For a moment, everything in me went perfectly still.
The wind. The ocean. The cold bite of stone beneath my knees. Cove’s fists tangled in my shirt, and the tremor running through his body as though terror had become something alive beneath his skin.
All of it narrowed around those words.
“I don’t want to die.”
He thought I might kill him.
The searing pain in my chest rendered me speechless for a moment.
“You are not going to die,” I said finally, the words scraping out of me gravelly. “Not by my hand. Not by anyone’s.”
He sobbed harder at that, shaking his head against my chest as if refusal could protect him from the promise.
“Please,” he choked. “Please, Tobias, please just let me go.”
I closed my eyes.
He was still asking for the impossible.
“I can’t.”
He made a sound then—small, wounded, breaking—and drove both palms hard against my chest.
The force did not move me far, but it made space. Enough for him to twist, enough for one elbow to catch beneath my ribs and for one knee to drive clumsily against my thigh as he tried to wrench himself free. He was not strong enough to overpower me, not truly, but he was not weak either.
“Let go of me!” he cried.
“Cove.”
“No!”
He shoved again, harder this time, and managed to tear one arm partially free. His nails raked across my wrist as he tried to pry my hand from his waist, and the sting of it barely registered except as proof that he was still moving, still alive, still close enough to hurt me because I had not lost him over the edge.
I tightened my grip before he could slip away.
He thrashed violently at that.
I shifted my weight, bracing one knee behind him, trying to hold him without crushing him, restrain him without bruising him, protect him from himself, while every movement convinced him further that he needed protection from me.
“Stop fighting,” I said, and hated myself the moment the words left my mouth because they sounded like a command when I meant them as a plea. “You will hurt yourself.”
“You’re hurting me!”
I released pressure at once, just enough to make sure my arm was not locked too tightly around his ribs.
He used the slack to twist again, nearly breaking free.
I caught him by the waist and hauled him back, and he screamed—not in pain, I did not think, but in terror so raw it tore through the night and made something savage in me rise to silence the world that had taught him to fear me.
Except I was the world just then.
I was the thing holding him.
I was the reason he was screaming.
“Tobias!”
