Page 219 of Rogue Riders Duet

“Oh, and her dying isn’t a repercussion?” Dane snaps back, and my head whips toward him.

What?

His dad echoes my thoughts. “What did you just say?”

Dane is shaking now, but this time it’s not with rage, and when I look more closely, I see that it’s with something worse.

Fear.

Piper seems to notice it, too, and tightens her grip on his arm, holding him close while asking him the same question, although much gentler. “What are you saying, Dane?”

“I can’t,” he breathes, voice cracking, and shoulders trembling. “I fucking can’t.”

Something inside me drops. I’ve only known Dane for a few weeks, but he’s always seemed solid as granite, almost unbothered. The calm in the chaos, but right now, he’s unraveling, and everything he’s been holding together is splitting at the seams. I don’t think he knows how to stop it.

Greer showing up and spilling everything didn’t just rip the scab off Alaina, apparently, it cracked something in Dane too.

Ambrose shifts, scoffing like this is all some overreaction. “What the hell are you talking about? It’s a hospital. She’s not going to die just because I want a second opinion on her fing⁠—”

“She will!” Dane cuts in, and his eyes are wide and wet. “She’ll take her own life if you take her with you.”

The words land, and the room just stops. Like all the air got sucked out, and I swear the only thing I can hear is my heartbeat.

And suddenly, I’m not standing in this room anymore. I’m thirteen, and the phone is ringing. Then my mother is sobbing, and I’m staring at the door he walked out of two hours earlier, wondering how the hell we didn’t see it coming.

I dig my nails into my palms, trying to stay here. Now. Not then.

But it’s hard—putain, it’s hard—not to fall into that old, cold space in my chest. The one I’ve spent years pretending isn’t there anymore.

Ambrose’s voice is a whisper now, but it’s enough to pull me back. “Why would she do that?”

Dane turns slowly, looking at all of us. His mouth opens, but the words don’t come.

Maman wraps her arms around Dane like she’s done it a thousand times, then strokes his hair and whispers softly, “Tell us, cherié. It’s okay. Tell us.”

“Alaina doesn’t want to live after this. She’s been holding on by a thread. If you take her now, if you rip this away from her before she’s done, it’ll snap, and I’ll lose her.”

Dane breaks then. Full-on sobs, body curling in on itself, and I help Maman ease him into the living room and onto the couch on autopilot because I’m still processing what he just said.

Piper sits beside him, pulls him in, and cradles him to her, letting him cry. I stand there and look toward the hallway where ma Petite sleeps, not knowing that everything out here is shifting around her.

Ambrose sinks into the armchair across from Dane, legs wide, elbows on his knees. His eyes are hard, but there’s something else there. Real fear.

So he’s not as cold as he pretends to be.

“Explain, Dane,” Ambrose demands.

Piper’s hand curls around his, but Dane doesn’t look up. His voice is quiet, watery around the edges when he finally speaks. “Do you know how hard it’s been being the one keeping her alive all these years?”

Ambrose doesn’t move. Neither do I.

Dane swallows, and it looks painful. “To be the first one she calls when it hurts too much? To sleep like shit every night for seven years because I’m scared, no, terrified, that one day I’ll wake up and she won’t? That the pain finally won? That I missed it? Missed the signs?” His jaw trembles. “You don’t know what it’s like to watch someone you love fake a smile so well, even you start believing it. Only to be reminded that she doesn’t even want to be here anymore. Because she told me, years ago, exactly how this ends.”

I feel the words like a gut punch, and where there was hunger just a few moments ago, my stomach now clamps down on nausea.

“She said once she’s done with what she came here to do, she’d be done. That she didn’t want a life after, and was only coming back to bury him, and then she’d bury herself. She’d rather die than keep living in this much pain.”

Dane keeps going when Ambrose opens his mouth to argue.