Cobra’s eyes snap to me. For one second, all of that fury turns, and I feel the full weight of it.
I flinch. Not because I think he’ll hurt me. I don’t. I know that in my bones. I flinch because the situation is too much. Because there’s blood again. Because I caused this. Because Blaze came to be kind, and now his lip is bleeding because I hugged him in Cobra’s room after a night where Cobra already looked like something inside him was breaking.
Cobra sees the flinch. Everything in him changes. Not softens. Locks down.
Blaze sees it too. He wipes the blood from his mouth with his thumb and exhales. “I’m going.”
“Good,” Cobra says.
Blaze looks at me once. “Glad you’re okay, Liv.”
Cobra’s jaw ticks at the nickname, but he doesn’t move.
I nod, throat tight. “Thank you.”
Blaze steps around him carefully, then pauses in the doorway. “For the record,” he says, because apparently survival instinct only goes so far, “you punch like an emotionally constipated freight train.”
Cobra turns his head slowly.
Blaze lifts both hands. “Leaving.” He leaves. The door closes behind him.
For one second, neither of us moves.
Then Cobra moves to the door and locks it. The click is soft. Final. He turns back to me.
My pulse jumps.
His eyes are still dark, still burning, but the rage is different now. Lower. More contained. More dangerous somehow because it’s not looking for Blaze anymore. It’s looking at me.
I swallow. “You didn’t have to hit him.”
“Yes.”
“No. You didn’t.”
“He touched you.”
“I hugged him.”
His eyes narrow slightly. “Yeah.”
“He was being nice.”
“I know.” That stops me. Because it isn’t denial. It isn’t jealousy dressed as logic. He knows. And he still did it.
My voice softens without meaning to. “Then why?”
He steps closer. Slow. Measured. Controlled. Barely. The room feels smaller with every inch he closes between us. “A part of me died tonight.” The words land like a weight dropped into my chest. No drama. No raised voice. No performance.
Just truth.
I stop breathing for a second. “What?”
His gaze doesn’t leave mine. “I saw you on the ground again.”
My throat tightens painfully. Again. The first night. The street. The van.My body limp in his arms. Tonight, the alley. The pavement. My head hitting hard enough that even Eli heard it.
He looks past me for half a second, like he’s seeing it instead of the room. Then back. “I saw you on the ground,” he repeats, lower now. “And I thought I was too late.”
