I bury my face in the back of his neck, breathing him in—salt, sweat, tape glue, sex, panic, devotion. His hand twitches on the sheets, then curls back to my forearm, holding me there like he’s afraid I’ll fade out if he stops touching me.
“I’ve got you,” I whisper, voice scraping low against his skin. “Sleep.”
He exhales once, heavy and raw, and the tremor in his shoulders finally eases.
I don’t sleep. Not with him like this. Not after the day he had. Not while the ghosts still try to whisper through the cracks. I stay exactly where I am—inside him, around him, under him, over him—until his breath evens out and the shaking stops.
And the gun? That’s gone before sunrise. Hidden where only I can reach it. Because from now on, if he needs something in his mouth to keep the world quiet, it sure as hell won’t be steel.
27
JULIAN
The cold should help. It usually does. The moment my blades hit the ice, the world is supposed to go quiet, clean, sharp enough to carve all the noise out of my skull. But today the rink feels wrong. Too bright. Too loud. Too full of people who won’t stop looking at me like I’m either a bomb or the crater after it goes off. The scrape of metal on ice is too thin, too hollow. The boards echo too hard. Every breath burns at the back of my throat where it’s still raw. My voice is fucked from screaming—my jaw aches from clenching around a gun barrel—my thighs burn with every push because of what Rafe did to me last night and what I begged for without words.
I should be fine. I should be floating on whatever the hell Rafe did to me in the dark, the way he slid my nightmares back into place with his body and his voice and his hands.
But I’m spiraling. Quietly. Neatly. Like someone pulled the floor out from under me but forgot to warn my lungs.
I skate slow laps at first, head down, breath hissing through clenched teeth. My hands shake around my stick. I can’t stop replaying it—the tape echoing in the walls, Ezio smiling with blood on his teeth, the gun in my mouth, the way Rafe forced air back into me with nothing but his voice and violence. It loops. My brain keeps replaying everything out of order. The moans. The panic. The steel. Rafe’s snarl. My own screams ripping my throat open. And the worst part? The silence after.
The silence last night was worse than the noise.
I drift into the corner of the rink where the shadows swallow the light on purpose. I let my shoulder press into the boards, chest heaving, breath misting out in quick pulses. My fingers tighten around my stick until my knuckles go pale under my gloves. My eyes burn, not with tears—those dried hours ago on Rafe’s neck—but with the kind of rage that comes after humiliation. A cold, clean fury that sits low in the ribs and waits for something to kill.
I look around. Everyone’s giving me space. Finn keeps glancing my way like he’s waiting for me to blow a crater through the ice. Luca is pretending not to stare but he’s tense—jaw tight, shoulders stiff, like he’s expecting me to snap at any second. Misha’s skating slow circles around the far blue line, watching me from the corner of his eye with something that almost looks like pity—if pity came with teeth.
Only one person I don’t avoid. I look to the bench. Rafe is there. He’s not dressed to skate. Black jacket, black shirt, black pants, leaning against the boards like a shadow that learned how to breathe. His arms are crossed, but his eyes are on me like he could choke the whole rink with a look. He doesn’t blink when I meet his gaze. He doesn’t look away. He doesn’t soften.
He just watches.
And something in my chest unclenches a little. Not much. Just enough to breathe without tasting blood.
I push off the boards and skate back toward center ice. My legs burn. My throat throbs. My heart is beating too fast, too shallow, too wrong. I’m not panicking—not exactly. Not like yesterday. Not like my brain is trying to drown me again.
But the edges of it brush me every few minutes. A whisper under my tongue. A shadow behind my ribs.
“Gun.”
The word slips out of me before I even realize it. Quiet. Barely a breath. Just a mouth shape with sound behind it. It’s stupid. It should scare me. It should make me feel worse. But it doesn’t. It grounds me. The idea of steel, the weight of it, the cold curve of a barrel against my tongue—it wipes the panic away like someone dragging a cloth over glass. It’s the only thing that stopped the spiral last night. The only thing that cut the noise. The only thing that forced my body to breathe again.
I whisper it again.
Gun.
My heartbeat steadies a fraction and I skate faster. The ice starts to feel like home again. I cut tight turns, feel the burn in my thighs, the pull on my stitched-up muscles. I ignore the pain. I always do. Pain is easy. Pain makes sense. Pain is clean. Panic isn’t.
Another lap. Another whisper.
Gun.
Rafe’s eyes narrow when he catches the shape of the word on my lips. He knows. Of course he knows. He always knows. His posture shifts—subtle, protective, territorial in that quiet, terrifying way he gets when my head turns wrong. He doesn’t move from the bench. But every line of him sharpens.
My skates carve into the ice too aggressively on my next stop, spraying shards across the boards. The cold air punches into my lungs. I drop my head and inhale through my nose, slow, controlled, trying not to bite through the guard of my mouthpiece.
I want violence. I want blood. I want to break something until the shaking stops.
But mostly? I want Rafe’s hand on my jaw again. I want that voice in my ear telling me what to breathe and when to stop. I want anything that isn’t the memory of that fucking tape.
