Then a longer stride, deliberate. The rhythm I've learned over the past three weeks. Cole.
The footsteps stop outside my door. Two knocks, controlled and even.
I'm at the door before I finish the thought, pulling it open.
His silhouette fills the doorway. Broad shoulders, that stillness he wears like armor. Then my eyes adjust and the details hit me.
His hands first. Dried to a dark crust around knuckles that are split and swelling. His shirt is stiff where it's drying against his collar, rust-brown at the edges. A smear along his jaw like he wiped his face and didn't realize what he was leaving behind.
The copper smell hits me a second later. Sharp. Real.
Cole doesn't move. Doesn't step forward, doesn't reach for me. Just stands there in the doorway letting me see exactly what he is. What he did.
I step forward. My hand finds his chest, and the fabric is stiff under my palm, damp in places, and underneath it his heart is pounding, fast and barely controlled. I'm pressing into the evidence, and some part of me already knows what I'm going to ask. What I need him to confirm.
"Inside."
He moves. The door clicks shut behind him.
We stand in the room. The rumpled bed behind me, the sealed door behind him. Nothing but two feet of air between us. His breath comes uneven. Mine matches it.
"Adrian?" One sharp nod, but not enough. "Say it."
His eyes hold mine, dark and intense, and the control he wears like a second skin is gone.
"He is dead."
Three words, and my whole ribcage expands. Not grief. Relief, the first full breath after years of holding it. Adrian is dead. Cole killed him. And I'm reaching for his hands like I want to hold the weapons that did it.
Because I do.
Dio mio.What does that make me?
"Come on." I take his hand and pull him toward the bathroom.
The light is harsh and unforgiving. I turn his hands over, assessing the damage. Split skin over bone, already swelling. His right hand is worse.
My hands aren't shaking as I reach for the first aid kit under the sink.
"Sit."
Cole lowers himself onto the closed toilet lid without argument, and the light catches every new detail. His shirt ridesup when he sits, and the skin underneath is already mottling — dark bruises spreading across his ribs. The exhaustion settling into the lines around his eyes. Heavy lids, loose mouth. The face of a man who finished what he started.
I kneel in front of him with the antiseptic and gauze, and his breath stutters. His eyes go soft for half a second before he catches himself.
"This will sting."
The antiseptic makes him hiss through his teeth when I press the soaked gauze to his knuckles, but he doesn't pull away. I clean each split one by one, watching the rust-brown dissolve into the white cotton. His hands are shaking slightly under mine, fine tremors he's trying to hide.
"What happened?"
His mouth goes hard. "He called you 'cara.'"
The word lands wrong in my chest. Adrian's word for me, back when I thought his intensity was passion, not possession. Back before I learned thatcaracould be a warning and a weapon all at once.
I keep cleaning. Don't stop. Don't let my hands mirror the tremor I can feel in his.
"And then?"