Simon had been having a quiet evening. Quiet in the way only Luca could ruin without even trying. He was halfway through cleaning his gear—mindless, grounding work—when his phone buzzed once, twice, then several more times in rapid-fire bursts. A number he didn’t recognize. Local police dispatch.

His stomach dropped before he even answered.

“Is this Simon Riley? We have a… uh— we have a Luca Morgan here. Motorcycle incident.”

Incident. Not crash. Not fatal. Not dead.

He repeated that to himself like a prayer he didn’t believe in as he shoved his boots on and bolted out the door.

By the time Simon pulled up to the scene, red and blue lights painted the street in nauseating pulses. A cruiser, an ambulance, a small cluster of officers trying—and failing—to keep a crowd back. And right there on the asphalt, roped off by cones, lay the one thing he knew Luca would cry over more than his own organs: that overpriced, custom-painted bike, laying on its side like a wounded animal.

But Luca wasn’t next to it.

Simon spotted him on the curb, propped up against the ambulance bumper, a medic trying to keep him conscious while Luca blinked at him like he was being asked to solve quantum physics. He had blood on his jaw, a long scrape down his arm, and gravel stuck in his skin. His helmet was cracked. His shirt was torn.

Simon felt something inside him snap clean in half.

He stalked toward the scene, jaw clenched, vision tunneling. The officers noticed him immediately—probably because he looked like he was about to murder someone with his bare hands.

One stepped forward, palms raised. “Sir, you can’t—”

“That’s my boyfriend.” Flat. Deadly calm. The kind of tone that made grown men reconsider their choices.

They let him through.

Simon dropped to a knee beside Luca just as the kid’s eyes fluttered, like he was trying to stay awake purely through stubbornness. He reached out, carefully cupping the side of Luca’s face, thumb brushing the dried blood at his cheekbone.

One of the EMTs started explaining—lost control, a man has swerved in front of him on purpose, flew off the bike, somehow got up afterward, tried running to the damn motorcycle before his legs gave out and he passed out cold. And now he kept drifting, blinking hard like the world was too bright and too loud.