Desmond lay propped against the wall beneath the window, his shirt cut open, his chest wrapped in strips of white cloth already blotched pink where the stitches strained. He’d insisted he didn’t need a hospital, muttering something about how a hospital would only put a target on his back and he wasn’t wrong.
Still, every time his breath caught, my stomach knotted. I didn’t trust him, not really, not after everything but he was also the only reason we weren’t dead tonight. That paradox pressed down on me like the low ceiling of the room, suffocating.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Noah said finally, his voice rough, low.
Desmond lifted his head. His face was pale under the bruise forming along his cheekbone, but his eyes were sharp. “You think I don’t know that? You think I don’t know w
