Page 24 of Hardline Torque
“I’m going to take a stab in the dark,” Drew said then, voice turning serious, “and say that you hurt him.”
Victor winced.“I didn’t mean to.”
“No one ever does,” Drew replied easily.“Intent’s overrated.Impact’s the bastard that sticks.”
Victor stared out into the dark.“You here to tell me to leave?”
Drew let out a quiet breath that might’ve been a laugh.“If that was the goal, Kael would’ve sent Luca.I’m here because I recognize the look on your face.”
“What look?”
“The one where you’re already half-packed,” Drew said.“Mentally.Where you’ve convinced yourself leaving is the only smart move.”
Victor’s jaw tightened.“You don’t know me.”
“I don’t need to,” Drew said calmly.“I know that look because I wore it for years.”
That got Victor’s attention despite himself.
“A few years back, I left Kael,” Drew went on.“Not because I didn’t love him.But because loving him made me whole, but the thought of losing him scared the hell out of me.Because when he mattered, suddenly everything else did too.”
Victor frowned.“You walked away from all of this?”
“From him,” Drew corrected gently.“From the risk.From the possibility that I could lose something that actually meant something.I told myself I was doing him a favor.That I was protecting him.”
“And?”Victor asked.
Drew huffed a humorless laugh.“Turns out distance doesn’t make you noble.It just makes you lonely.And stupid.”
Victor looked away, the words landing too close to bone.
“I thought if I left first,” Drew continued, “I’d stay in control.What I really did was give fear the steering wheel and pretend it was strategy.”
Silence stretched between them, thick but not uncomfortable.
“What if staying destroys me?”Victor asked quietly.“What if it costs more than I can afford?”
Drew didn’t answer right away.He leaned back, eyes on the stars barely visible beyond the compound lights.“Then at least you’ll know you chose it, and no one chose it for you,” he said finally.“Not habit.Not reflex.Not fear.You chose it knowing the cost.”
Victor pictured it then—his future if he left, laid out with brutal clarity.Another city that blurred into the last.Another rented room stripped of personality.Gear packed and unpacked until muscle memory replaced meaning.Aliases memorized, discarded, replaced.Sleeping light, waking lighter.Always cataloguing exits.Always alone.No one knowing him well enough to hurt him.No one knowing him at all.
It felt ...small.
Joyless.
Then he tried to imagine staying and he realized that that was way harder.
Tane’s laugh—low and unguarded, the kind that came from somewhere deep and honest.His temper, sharp and immediate but never cruel, always aimed outward at the things that deserved it.His impossible steadiness in the middle of chaos, the way he planted his feet and made the world adjust around him instead of the other way around.
Victor saw flashes of a life that terrified him in its clarity.
Tane watching his six without being asked.Working beside him at a table strewn with intel and half-cold coffee, arguing tactics, refining plans, trusting Victor’s instincts without needing to control them.Fighting shoulder to shoulder, backs aligned, knowing without looking that the other would be there when it mattered.
He imagined the quieter moments too—Tane checking his injuries with hands that were firm but careful, cooking meals like it was nothing, offering space without withdrawal.Loving him not as something fragile to be managed, but as an equal who chose to stay.
And underneath it all, that same steady truth in Tane’s voice when he’d saidnot me—not a plea, not a threat, but a promise carved into bone that said, I will not abandon you.Not if you don’t abandon me first.
The image scared Victor more than any gunfight ever had.
