Page 152 of Hard Bargain

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.