Page 125 of Cobra
I keep going before he can decide silence is safer. “And I don’t mean in some vague, pretty way. I mean it. You can belong to something that doesn’t hurt you. You can have a family that loves you. Mine. This one. Me.”
His jaw locks. I see the fight in him immediately. Not against me. Against the idea. Like I’ve handed him something too foreign to hold. “I don’t know how to do that,” he says. His voice is rougher now. Lower. “I don’t know how to sit in rooms like that and be normal. I don’t know what to do with people who ask questions because they care and not because they’re looking for a weak spot.”
My chest tightens.
He looks past me for a second, toward nothing. “I never imagined that life,” he says. “Not once.” I stay quiet. He continues, stripped down and honest in a way that makes my throat ache. “Didn’t see the point. Didn’t think I’d let anyone close enough for it to be possible.” His eyes come back to mine. “Then you walked onto that street.”
A breath catches in my throat.
He says it like that was the moment everything changed. Because for him, it was.
“I didn’t walk into your life very gracefully,” I say softly.
“No.” That pulls a small laugh from me. He doesn’t smile, but his hand shifts, thumb brushing over mine. Then his expression darkens again. “There’s something you need to understand.”
I go still this time. The shift is immediate. He isn’t pulling away. He’s stepping into something.
“What?”
His eyes hold mine. “I’m not always a good man.” The words don’t surprise me. Not exactly. But hearing them from him makes them heavier.
“I know.”
“No,” he says. “You know pieces.” I swallow. He steps back, not far, just enough that the space between us fills with truth. “What I do isn’t pretty. It isn’t clean. When men come for what’s mine, I don’t think about second chances.”
I don’t interrupt. I don’t soften my face. I listen. “That message tonight?” I say. My stomach tightens.
“You saw it?”
“I saw enough.”
His jaw flexes. “They said they’ll get you one way or another.”
The words hit even though I expected them. I inhale slowly. Fear moves through me. Real. Cold. But it doesn’t make me step back.
Cobra watches that too. “They’re wrong,” he says. There’s no anger in it. That makes it worse. “They’re going to learn that, and it’s not going to be gentle.”
My pulse climbs. His violence isn’t random. I know that now. It isn’t chaotic. It isn’t careless. It isn’t thrown around the room because he loses control and doesn’t know what to do with himself.It’s targeted. Controlled. Purposeful. And brutal. I’ve seen enough to know he’s not exaggerating. The question is whether that changes anything.
I look at him. At the man who pulled me out of darkness. The man who sleeps only when I’m in his arms. The man who punched his own brother for touching me. The man who sat at my mother’s table and tried to exist in a world that never made space for him. The man who just warned me that the violence in him has not been tamed by loving me. Maybe that should be where I flinch. Maybe this is the moment someone normal would realize she’s in too deep and start looking for the door.
I don’t. Because loving him while pretending that part of him isn’t real would be a lie. And I don’t want a version of Cobra that only exists because I’ve made him smaller in my head. I want him. Exactly as he is. Dangerous. Controlled. Scarred. Loyal. Terrifying when crossed. Careful with me. I step forward. He watches me do it. I place my hand against his chest, right over his heart. “I’m not asking you to be harmless.”
Something in his eyes shifts.
I keep my hand there. “I’m not excusing everything you’ve done or everything you might do. I’m not pretending I understand all of it.”
His breathing changes. Just slightly.
“But I see you,” I say. “Not who I think you could be if you were different. Not who I’d make you into if I wanted something easier.” My throat tightens, but my voice stays steady. “You.”
His hand comes up, covering mine against his chest. Warm. Firm.
“I love you,” I say softly. “All of you. Even the parts that scare everyone else.”
His eyes darken. Not with anger. With something deeper. Something like pain and relief tangled together so tightly they can’t be separated. “You should be scared,” he says.
“I am sometimes.” His fingers tighten around mine. “But I’m not scared of you.” He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to. I see what that does to him. I see the way it lands, the way it shifts something he has carried too long, something heavy and old and ugly that told him he had to be alone because no one could see the full truth and stay. I stay. I move closer until my body is against his. Until there is no distance left.
