Chapter 37
Dominic
The room is dim, with only a lamp in the corner and the monitor’s soft glow lighting the space.
The steady beep of the heart monitor is the first thing that hits me, a rhythmic reminder that he’s still here.
IV bags hang from a pole beside the bed, clear tubes snaking down to his arm.
There’s a cannula under his nose, tape holding it in place.
His skin is too pale against the white sheets, freckles standing out like marker dots.
I stand there and look at him.
He looks small in the hospital bed. Smaller than he ever does in my head, where he fills entire rooms with his anxiety and his sarcasm and his stubborn faith. The cuff is gone from his wrist for surgery, but I can see the faint line where the leather usually sits.
His chest rises and falls slowly, evenly. Each breath is a quiet miracle.
I cross the room in three strides, drag the chair from against the wall right up to the side of the bed, and sit hard. My hand finds his, cool under my palm, and I wrap my fingers around it like a drowning man grabbing a rope. His hand is limp, but it fits into mine exactly the way it always does.
“Hey,” I say, and my voice comes out wrecked. “You’re late for our session, Little Sin.”
The joke falls flat in the quiet. His eyelids don’t even twitch. The monitor keeps up its steady beep.
The knot that’s been sitting under my ribs for days finally pulls too tight and snaps. Then the tears hit without warning.
One second, I’m sitting there, trying to smirk at an unconscious boy, and the next my eyes are flooding, my vision blurring, a sob ripping up my throat so fast I don’t have time to choke it down.
I slap my free hand over my mouth instinctively, like I can shove the sound back, but it doesn’t work.
It comes out anyway, low and ugly and raw.
I bend over his hand, elbows on the bed, forehead pressing into the back of his fingers, and I fucking break.
I’ve never been big on crying. My mother taught me pretty early that tears don’t fix anything and only make you easier to hit.
By the time I was old enough to really understand what she was turning me into, I’d already figured out that if you’re going to break down, you do it alone—somewhere no one can use it against you.
I don’t cry after kills. I don’t cry after games. I didn’t cry when I watched high school friends vanish one by one, swallowed by “accidents” I knew weren’t accidents at all.
The last time I cried was when my dad died; now it all comes at once.
“Fuck,” I whisper, the word torn out of me. “Fuck.”
I cry for him, obviously. For the way his eyes looked in my living room, when he asked if it was that easy to leave.
For the way his body felt limp and hot in my arms on the couch, with blood slicking my fingers.
For the way his parents dismissed him over the phone, like he was a problem that had gotten solved the moment they decided he wasn’t theirs anymore.
For the fact that if I’d been five minutes slower tonight, he wouldn’t be here at all.
It’s the alleyway victims whose faces I never bothered to remember, and the fact that the first time I really cared if someone lived or died was tonight.
But it doesn’t stop there. Once the dam is cracked, everything I’ve been stacking behind it for years starts to pour through.
I cry for every time my mother put a knife in my hand and a target in front of me and called it “training.” I cry for the nights she stood over me with that cold, proud smile, and wiped other people’s blood off my cheeks like it was finger paint.
I cry for the first time I realized a friend was missing, saw the satisfaction in her eyes, and understood, on some level, that love from her meant death for everyone else around me.
I finally cry for my twin brother, Daniil, who was born four minutes after me, and somehow that four minutes made him the softer one. For Kyra still tangled in the web I just set on fire, for the fear that she’ll pay for the way I just cut us loose.
I cry for the part of me that never got to be a kid.
For the teenage boy who realized being good at football could be a way out, and then discovered that the monster had followed him onto the field.
For the first time my name hit a sports channel, and my mother’s voice on the phone said, “No mistakes now, Domenyk. You belong to the world, but you still answer to me.”
I cry for tonight, for the way I drove my knife into her chest and felt nothing but fucking relief. For the fact that I’m too damaged to even regret killing the woman who gave birth to me, beyond the logistical headache it’s going to cause.
I cry because I’m so fucking tired.
I don’t sob pretty. There’s no controlled tearing up, no delicate wipe of a single tear.
My breath stutters, and then I’m bent over his hand, shoulders shaking hard, ugly sounds ripping out of my chest while I try not to wake him, and fail at keeping quiet anyway.
My nose runs, and my eyes burn. I grip his fingers like they’re the only thing tethering me to this shitty fluorescent-lit reality.
Seth will handle the physical cleanup. He’ll make sure my mother’s body vanishes, that her blood disappears from my floor, that the trackers she hid on my shit get ripped out and smashed.
He’ll walk through my cottage with gloved hands and a professional eye, and he’ll erase tonight like it was a bad dream.
He’s good at that. It’s why I called him.
But there are some stains he can’t touch.
Those are mine.
I’m the one who has to figure out what happens next.
How to tell Kyra our mother is gone and that she’s better off without her.
How to deal with whatever power vacuum my mother leaves behind in whatever fucked network she built.
How to handle the fact that somewhere there are records of everything I’ve done, and I need to find them before someone else does.
How to navigate scouts and contracts if word leaks that the golden boy quarterback’s boyfriend got stabbed in a mugging that doesn’t show up on any camera.
All of that can wait.
Right now, all I can do is hang onto his hand, and let my body shake itself apart until there’s nothing left in the tank.
“I’m sorry,” I choke out eventually, words mangled by tears. “I’m so fucking sorry, Brendon. I never wanted this to touch you. I tried so hard to keep you out of it, and I still dragged you right into the center.”
His fingers twitch, just a tiny shift against mine. It might be a reflex, or the meds. My chest lurches anyway.
“I tried to leave you. I really fucking tried. I thought if I pushed hard enough, you’d walk away.
I’d hate you for it, and it would be easier to go back to being what I’m supposed to be.
I thought I could just be the Beast and you could go back to being a good boy, and we’d both live.
That was the plan. You weren’t supposed to kneel on my floor and ask if it was that easy.
You weren’t supposed to change your next-of-kin.
You weren’t supposed to make me pick between you and her. ”
I draw a ragged breath that hurts. “You weren’t supposed to win.”
The confession hangs in the air between us, quiet and heavy. He doesn’t move. He’s too deep under the drugs, under fatigue, under blood loss. But his hand twitches in mine, a tiny unconscious squeeze, and the tight knot my chest eases a notch.
I swipe at my eyes with the back of my wrist and look at his face. Even pale and wired up, he’s still the prettiest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. Stubborn, soft mouth. Tiny crease between his brows. That ridiculous nose I’ve kissed a hundred times. My throat tightens again.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admit, my voice shaky, “I don’t know if I’m going to jail next semester, or the NFL.
I don’t know how to be anything other than what she made, and I sure as fuck don’t know how to be worthy of you—but you’re stuck with me now.
I told your father I’d take care of you, and I meant it. I don’t care what it costs.”
Another wave of tears hits, softer this time, more like the tail end of a storm than the first downpour. I let it come; no one’s here to see except him, and he already knows the worst parts.
I stay like that for a long time, hunched over the hospital bed, with his hand in mine and my cheeks wet, until the sobs finally drain out and I’m left wrung-out and raw. My head aches, and my eyes feel swollen. I straighten slowly, wiping a forearm across my face, and look at him again.
Beautiful in a way that makes no sense in this clinical light. The corners of his mouth are relaxed now, no tight lines of pain. I lean in and press a careful kiss to his knuckles, tasting salt and antiseptic.
“You scared the shit out of me,” I murmur. “Don’t do that again. Please.”
The monitor ticks on. His chest rises and falls steadily.
I drag the chair closer, refusing to let go of his hand, and settle in for the night. If anyone tries to make me leave, they’ll have a fight on their hands. I’ve lost enough for one lifetime.
I lay my head down next to his arm, curl my fingers around his, and let my eyes close, exhaustion finally dragging at me now that he’s stable and breathing and here.
Whatever comes next—cops, consequences, bodies, Kyra, fallout from killing the woman who made me—I’ll deal with it when I have to.
For now, I sit in a too-bright room, holding the hand of the boy who turned a monster into something else, and I let myself be what I never got to be before.
Just a man, who almost lost the person he loves.