Chapter 39
Knox
Knox stood in front of the full-length bathroom mirror and made himself look. The bruising had turned old. What had been black and purple was now a rot of yellow and green, fading in uneven patches across his ribs and stomach.
The knife wounds had sealed, but hadn’t disappeared. They crossed his body in thin pink lines and raised red seams. Some looked like nothing more than scratches, others were thicker, puckered, ugly with healing. There were so many they stopped looking separate. Just a pattern. A part of him now.
He lifted a hand and touched the brand on his neck. The clover was still there. Three leaves and a stem, preserved in angry ridges of healing flesh. It looked permanent. Less like a wound and more like a mark.
His stomach turned.
The bruises would fade. The cuts would soften. But the clover would never let him forget. He traced one leaf with the tip of his finger and felt the skin pull tight and tender—proof someone had hurt him and left their signature behind.
He barely recognized the person staring back. His body was a map of violence. Three weeks ago he’d been butchered. Now he looked… altered. Not destroyed or broken, just different. Changed in ways that wouldn’t reverse.
The worst part was how ordinary it appeared. As if his body could simply accept what had been done to it, close over cruelty, and move on.
For the past two weeks, ever since he’d returned from the hospital, he’d been living at Dominic’s.
Though living hardly seemed the right word for the strange new shape their days had taken.
He slept in Dominic’s bed every night and woke to warmth at his back or Dominic’s arm heavy across his waist. He wore borrowed T-shirts when his own clothes dragged too rough over healing skin.
And he let Dominic hover in ways neither of them acknowledged out loud.
He only returned to his apartment to grab the occasional clothes, toiletries, and whatever else he might need before retreating again.
Back to Dominic.
Things had changed between them. Not in one dramatic way, but in the accumulation of small things.
Dominic no longer held himself back. He shared things about his life, quiet admissions that felt like gifts being pressed into his hands.
As though nearly losing Knox had made the cost of silence higher than the cost of vulnerability.
He no longer treated tenderness as dangerous. He touched Knox constantly now, often without seeming aware of it—a hand at the small of his back when he passed behind him in the kitchen, fingers brushing Knox’s wrist as he handed him a cup, knuckles dragging lightly over healing skin before sleep.
Sometimes Knox woke in darkness to Dominic’s breathing against his neck, to his solid weight anchoring him after nightmares neither of them named. Half-asleep, Dominic would tighten his hold, refusing even in sleep to let him drift.
Knox had started needing that. Needing him.
It terrified him, because he knew what came with needing someone.
Disappointment.
Pain.
The people meant to protect you were always the first to wound you. The people who swore they’d stay always found a reason not to. Love was just another way to hand someone the means to destroy you. He’d learned that too young for it to ever fully leave.
And somewhere in the middle of all of this, Knox had made a mistake.
A fatal one.
He had fallen in love with Dominic Rivera.
Standing in front of the mirror, scarred and branded and stitched back together, he couldn’t deny it any longer.
Somewhere along the way—without permission and without warning—Dominic had become the person Knox looked for first. The person he trusted beside him when he slept.
Whose touch could settle him and whose voice could pull him back when his mind drifted somewhere dark.
He loved him.
Fucking hell.
The thought didn’t feel tender. It felt catastrophic.
His breath caught. Love wasn’t safety. Love was handing someone the blade and praying they never used it.
Dominic might not mean to hurt him, but that was almost worse. All he had to do was leave. To wake up one morning and decide Knox was too much—too damaged, too needy, too broken to keep choosing.
That was the part no one warned you about. Pain you could survive. Abandonment you learned to carry. But loving someone enough that their absence could unmake you?
That was a different kind of wound entirely.
* * *
Hours passed and the fear didn’t break.
He paced Dominic’s loft in restless lines—from the tall windows to the kitchen island, from the kitchen back across the open floor. Every sound carried: his footsteps, the hum of the refrigerator, old pipes ticking somewhere in the walls. The emptiness magnified all of it.
Dominic had left that morning for Sacramento to work, and under normal circumstances Knox would have gone with him. But since the kidnapping, Dominic hadn’t let him tag along to any of it, insisting he needed more time to heal first.
Every act of care pulled him in deeper.
Every inch deeper terrified him more.
Alone in the loft, with Dominic gone and the fear circling, Knox could feel himself sliding toward a decision he already knew he was going to make. Every time he tried to reason himself down, the same thought surfaced.
I’m too attached.
I need to get out while I still can.
He stopped at the kitchen island and braced both hands against it, breathing hard enough to make his ribs ache. His hands were shaking, fingers trembling against the counter.
Stop. Breathe. You’re fine.
He wasn’t fine.
His chest was doing something—a compression that started behind his sternum and spread outward until his lungs couldn’t fully expand. He tried to breathe through it the way he breathed through everything else. It didn’t work.
His vision blurred. He gripped the counter harder and forced air in through his teeth. His eyes landed on his phone. It sat on the counter where he’d dropped it hours ago.
Jacob.
Since that very first phone call, they’d kept talking regularly.
Not enough to call it closeness, but every couple of weeks, one of them would reach out.
Conversations that started stiff and searching had slowly become less awkward.
The calls were easier when Liam joined. He talked enough for all of them, dragging Jacob into stories, pulling the occasional laugh out of Knox before he could help it.
Los Angeles was far enough away to breathe. Far enough to put distance between himself and whatever was happening here before it rooted too deep to tear out.
He swallowed and picked up the phone, his hand shaking as he hit call.
“Knox?”
He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He almost hung up, said never mind, and kept pacing until Dominic came home and the panic passed or swallowed him whole.
“Hey,” he said instead.
“You okay?”
Knox pressed a hand against his forehead. No. Not even close. “I need—” His voice caught. “I think I need to get out of Stockton for a while. Would it be weird if I came down there?”
“To LA?”
“Yeah.” He hated how uncertain he sounded.
Jacob didn’t leave him hanging for long. “It wouldn’t be weird. You can stay as long as you need.”
Knox shut his eyes. He should have felt relief.
Jacob was talking but Knox barely heard any of it. His gaze had drifted across the loft. If he stayed, he would fall deeper. If he left now, maybe he could still stop this. Maybe he could save himself before the loss became the kind you don’t recover from.
“Yeah,” he heard himself say. “I’ll come.”
The conversation continued. Jacob said something else. Knox responded, probably. He wasn’t sure. Everything had gone distant—muffled, like hearing the world through water—because his body had registered what his mind was still trying to catch up to.
The grief hit so violently he folded over the counter, forehead pressing against his fist, ribs screaming. I love him. I love him. I love him.
Tears came before he could stop them. He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth, as if that could somehow hold the heartbreak in. It felt like severing something living.
He could already feel it bleeding out inside him.