It reaches me, but I hardly register it.
I blink on the tears clinging to my lashes.
The coarseness of the rug is harsh against my cheek. Droplets of blood fall onto the threads.
A daze clouds me.
Not the strike itself that knocks me silent, not the cracked pain splintering along my cheek or even the trail of blood forming at the corner of my mouth.
It’s that he did it.
He really slapped me, backhanded me off my feet. Right out in the open, too.
My fingers lift.
I touch them to the stinging burn of my cheek.
I touch blood.
A whisper of a breath escapes me.
I throw my gaze up at Dray, at the seething rage that hardens his face, that fills his chest with heaving breaths, and has his hands fisted at his sides, like it’s taking everything in him not to use his makut on me, not to blast me into oblivion.
A muttered curse draws in my sluggish gaze.
Asta is running down the corridor, right for me.
Dray’s jaw feathers as he takes a purposeful step back. A message.
This time, he’s not stopping her.
No one is.
I clammer to my feet, the walls bending around me. I’m barely upright when she barrels into me.
I fall back into the wall.
A portrait frame thuds, loud.
The impact grunts through me, but it’s choked when a knee comes driving into my stomach.
There’s a laugh somewhere, Mildred maybe, mere background noise before the sound of Velcro rips from my scalp—and I shriek the moment I’m yanked off my feet again.
Asta whoops my ass.
I’m ragdolled over the rug, punch after punch landing on me, my head, my neck, my shoulder, my back, and every shriek that rises through me is choked out with a blow hard enough to shove the air out of my lungs.
No one stops her.
No one intervenes.
Not until the pitched outrage of a teacher’s voice comes slicing down the corridor, “Why are you all gathered out here? Don’t you have someplace to be?”
Asta throws me into the hard wood of the phone booths.
I kick out at her running advance—but then she brings her snowboot down on me.
Right into my gut.
