Page 48 of Cruel When He Smiles (Sinners of Blackthorne U #3)

Nate

The second Liam and Killian step out of the hospital room, I know Sage is about to rip into me.

That false sense of calm evaporates the moment the door clicks shut behind them. I don’t have to look at Sage to know what’s coming. I can feel the weight of it before he says a word.

He’s vibrating where he sits, hands gripping the arms of the chair like he’s trying to ground himself before he explodes. His jaw is locked so tight I’m surprised his teeth haven’t cracked. One knee bounces steadily, a nervous tell I’ve known since we were thirteen. It only ever means one thing.

He’s about to lose it.

I sigh, sinking back into the bed, wincing at the sharp pull in my ribs and the throb behind my eye. Everything hurts. My head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton and broken glass. But all of that becomes background noise when Sage finally snaps.

“What the fuck was that, Nate?”

I roll my head to the side, cracking open one eye to look at him. “What was what?”

Sage scoffs. “Don’t fucking play dumb with me. You know what. That—” he gestures wildly at the door, at the space Liam just occupied. “That thing with Callahan. The way he talks to you. The way you fucking look at him—”

“Sage—”

“No, shut the fuck up,” he cuts me off, leaning forward, his elbows digging into his knees. “You’re gonna tell me what the hell is going on between you two, and you’re gonna do it now.”

I drag a hand down my face like a dumbass, wincing at the pain. “I’ll tell you later.”

“Later?” Sage echoes, his voice rising an octave. “No, Nate. Now. Right fucking now.”

I shake my head. “Sage, I just—”

“Do you even realize what he’s doing to you? Do you even fucking see it?”

I do. I know exactly what Liam is doing, and I let him. But Sage won’t understand that. He’ll fight me on it, he’ll tell me I need to get away, that Liam is dangerous, that this is a fucking game, and I’m losing. But he’s wrong.

I clench my fists under the blanket until my knuckles ache. “Don’t do this.”

I stare at the ceiling, jaw clenched, trying to breathe through the pounding in my skull.

“You told me what he does to you, Nate,” Sage says, and the quiet way he says it cuts more than yelling ever could. “You told me how he gets in your head, how he fucks with your emotions, how he gaslights you, that he twists shit so you start questioning what’s real. Do you remember that?”

I sigh, shaking my head again. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?” Sage’s eyes narrow. “He looks at you the way Luca looks at me.”

That gets me. I stiffen, my body tensing against the hospital bed, because no, that’s not fucking true.

It can’t be.

Luca looks at Sage like he fucking breathes for him. Like he’d carve the world apart just to keep him standing. Like there is no reality where he doesn’t belong to him.

And Liam—

Liam doesn’t do love.

Liam doesn’t feel things like that.

I scoff, forcing myself to relax, forcing myself to push past it. “You’re reaching.”

Sage shakes his head. “Am I?” His eyes burn into mine. “Because I also heard about what happened today. I heard how Callahan fucking lost his mind when you went down.”

My stomach drops, and he leans in closer, his voice lower now, more intense. “They said he was ready to rip the guy apart, Nate. That he was seconds away from losing his shit completely before someone pulled him back. That’s not normal.”

I swallow hard, turning my head away. “Sage, stop.”

“No, because you’re not fucking listening to me!”

He’s right, I’m not. If I do, if I really let myself think about what he’s saying, then it means Liam isn’t just fucking with me. It means this thing between us isn’t just about control and ownership and pushing me into something I should want to fight.

It means it’s something real, and I don’t know what to do with that.

“You want me to just stand here and watch him break you into pieces while you tell me it’s fine?

” Sage demands. “You want me to act like this is healthy? You told me what he did to you. The way he’d pull away just to make you chase him.

Make you question your own thoughts. And now you’re looking at me like I’m the bad guy for reminding you. ”

“I remember,” I snap and lift my gaze to meet his. “I remember what I said. I remember every fucked-up detail, okay? But he makes it stop—he makes everything stop!”

His mouth opens, but he doesn’t speak. “You think you know what’s happening, but you don’t. You don’t know what it’s like.”

He scoffs. “Oh, sure. Because I haven’t watched this happen before. Because I don’t know what it’s like to see someone fall into something dangerous.”

I laugh, but it’s humorless. “Oh, you mean like how I had to watch you fall for Luca? You mean how I had to stand back and let you make your own choices even when I fucking hated them?”

Sage’s jaw locks, but I push. “Don’t fucking act like this is any different, Sage. I know how you feel. I felt the same way about Luca. I watched you chase after a guy who was bad for you, a guy who was toxic and self-destructive and not good enough for you. And you know what I did?”

He says nothing, so I answer for him.

“I let you go because it wasn’t my fucking choice to make,” I say, voice lower now, steadier. “Because I knew you had to figure it out yourself. Because I knew that, no matter how much I hated it, you had to want to walk away.”

Sage’s fists unclench slightly.

“And I get it, okay? I get why you’re worried. I get why you don’t like this. But you have to understand that what I have with Liam isn’t…” I shake my head, searching for the right words. “It isn’t straightforward.”

Sage watches me, eyes flicking over my face like he’s trying to read me, like he’s trying to find something he can use to pull me back. But there’s nothing to pull me back from because this is where I want to be.

“You wouldn’t understand,” I murmur.

His face twists like the words sting. “Try me.”

I inhale deeply, holding his gaze. “He’s the reason I ignore my mother’s calls now, the reason I don’t spiral every time someone touches me without warning. He’s the reason I can sleep more than two hours without waking up choking on air I can’t feel in my lungs.”

My voice cracks, but I keep going, because if I stop now, I’ll never get the words out again. My chest is tight, and everything hurts in ways I don’t even have the language for, but I’ve carried this too long. I’m too fucking tired to pretend it doesn’t matter.

Sage’s brow is furrowed, lips parted like he’s trying to figure out how the hell I could possibly be saying any of this. I know that look. I’ve seen it when he’s about to fix a problem for someone, except now I’m the problem, and he can’t fix me. Not this time.

“You think I don’t know it’s messed up?” I ask, softer now. My hands curl into the thin hospital blanket over my lap.

Sage doesn’t answer. His eyes are glassy but furious.

“I fucking know,” I whisper. “I know all of it. I know who he is, and I know what he’s capable of.

I know he can hurt me, and still—I can breathe around him, Sage.

He says something, and it’s like my brain goes quiet.

All the shit that usually eats at me? The self-doubt, the panic, the noise—it goes away when he looks at me.

Do you know how rare that is? How fucking impossible that’s been my whole life, even though I had you? ”

He flinches at that, but I can’t help it. Sage has his people, but I’ve only ever had him.

“I’m not saying he’s good for me. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m saying that I’ve never had something feel like control when everything else is chaos. Even when he’s pulling my strings, I know who I am around him.”

“Bullshit,” Sage says, his voice thick and trembling.

“You know who you were before him, and that version of you wouldn’t put up with this.

You were fierce. You were fire. You were stubborn and brave and fucking relentless, and now you just—” His throat works around the words.

“You look at him like he’s the only reason you’re still standing. ”

“He is.”

That stops him.

It’s the truth, and I say it with a calm that feels dangerous. Not because I’m trying to justify Liam, but because it’s the first thing I’ve said all night that I know deep down is completely, irreversibly true.

“I know you hate him. I know you think I’m brainwashed or trauma-bonded or whatever else you’ve been whispering to yourself.

But you weren’t there the first time he saw through all the noise in my head and said my name like it meant something.

You didn’t see the way he sat with me when I couldn’t breathe.

He didn’t try to fix me, he didn’t give me some empty speech about healing. He just fucking saw me.”

“And that’s enough for you?” Sage’s voice breaks on the last word. “Being seen by someone who manipulates you and uses your trauma to control you is enough?”

I let the silence answer for me for a second. I don’t have a neat reply. I don’t have the kind of defense that will make this make sense to someone who hasn’t lived in my skin.

“I know what it looks like from the outside,” I say. “But it doesn’t feel like that inside my head. He’s the only person who makes the noise stop without asking me to be anyone else.”

Sage leans back in the chair like I’ve knocked the air out of him. He pushes his glasses to the top of his head and drags both hands over his face, pausing at his mouth before dropping them into his lap. His shoulders are rigid.

“You think that means it’s love?” he asks quietly. “You think that because he gives you the quiet in your head, it excuses all the other shit? You told me he made you feel like you couldn’t trust yourself. You said he treated your pain like it was his fucking toy.”

“I also told you I’ve never felt safer with anyone else.”

“That’s not safety,” he snaps, eyes sharp again. “That’s dependency. That’s conditioning. That’s abuse disguised as comfort.”

“Maybe,” I admit, my voice tired. “Maybe it is. But it’s mine, and I don’t want to let it go.”

“You’re not hearing yourself, Nate.”

“No,” I say, sitting up more, wincing as pain flares across the left side of my skull. “I’m hearing myself for the first time.”

His mouth opens again, but this time, I cut him off.

“You think I’m a victim,” I say, not cruelly, just honestly. “You think he’s this monster, and I’m some helpless idiot getting dragged along behind him like I don’t have a say.”

Sage doesn’t respond.

“But I do. I know exactly what I’m doing, and I know how dangerous he is. I know he plays with people like chess pieces, and he watches reactions more than he hears words. And I still choose him.”

“Why?” Sage whispers. “Why him? Why not someone who actually gives a shit without making it a power game?”

“Because,” I say, and it takes everything I have not to flinch when I admit it, “he doesn’t look at me like I’m broken.”

“He breaks you.”

I press a hand to my temple. “Yeah, maybe. But he puts me back together, too, and the pieces fit better now. They feel like me.”

Sage stares at me for a long time, sadness and exhaustion settling behind his eyes. “You’re so far gone.”

I don’t deny it. There’s nothing left to deny. The damage is already done.

“I’m still here,” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he mutters, standing up slowly. “But for how long?”

He paces the edge of the hospital bed once, then stops beside it.

I can see the internal war raging behind his eyes.

The part of him that wants to scream at me again.

The part of him that wants to cry. The part of him that still doesn’t understand how we got here.

How I, the one who used to call bullshit on every controlling relationship we ever saw, ended up this tangled in someone as lethal as Liam fucking Callahan.

I watch as that fight reluctantly dies in him.

“I just want you to be okay,” he says. “I want you to be safe.”

I nod, meaning it. “I know.”

“I’m not going to pretend to like it,” he warns. “I’m not going to start treating him like he’s some romantic fucking hero in your story. He scares the shit out of me, Nate. He’s not wired like the rest of us.”

“Neither am I,” I murmur. “Or did you forget what my version of love looked like while growing up?”

That silences him all over again.

Sage finally sits back down, resting his elbows on his thighs, staring at the linoleum floor with a haunted look in his eyes.

“I’ll never stop looking out for you,” he says eventually.

“I know, and I love you for that,” I whisper.

We sit there in that heavy quiet, both of us knowing the line’s been crossed now. There’s no going back. No resetting this part of our friendship to what it was before Liam got inside my head and rewrote the way I breathe.

Sage exhales and doesn’t look at me when he says, “Just promise me you’ll know the difference between comfort and control before it kills you.”

I nod slowly, not because I believe I’ll ever really be able to separate the two, but because it’s the only thing I can give him.

And maybe it’s not a promise at all.

Maybe it’s just a lie he needs to hear so he can keep loving me, even when he hates who I’m choosing.