Something in me breaks and snaps into an involuntary laugh that surprises both of us. It bursts out before I can stop it, surprising both of us.
Kelsey blinks, her smile faltering. “What’s so funny?”
“Lucian can’t have kids.” The words come out quieter than the laugh, but they land like a stone. “He got a vasectomy as soon as he turned eighteen; he swore the only kids he’d ever have would be adopted.”
For a second, her triumph stutters. Then anger flares, quick and ugly. “He’ll reverse it for me. He’ll do anything I want. I can make him want what I give him, I can make him forget.”
The urge to close the distance and break her teeth is a physical thing; my ears ring, and the world narrows to the scrape of her voice. I breathe slowly, count the seconds like a metronome, let the heat coil.
She’s still talking when I move.
The world tilts, the drug still a ghost in my veins, but I shove past the sway and drive into her anyway. My shoulder hits her ribs with a satisfyingthunk. It’s enough to jolt a grunt out of her and knock us both sideways into the wall before we land on the floor.
Kelsey’s moves are quick and precise as she twists her hips, trying to flip me. Whatever she drugged me with still messes with my balance, but training roots me. I need to keep my hips low and find leverage. I wedge a knee between us and buck, hard. She slips just enough for me to scramble free.
We come up in a cramped, ragged standoff. I’m half braced against the wall, shoulder pressed to cold paint, and she’s crouched a few feet away at the foot of the bed, her eyes wild and unblinking.
The room shrinks around us; there is no margin for mistakes. Fury fills the air between us like steam.
Kelsey moves first, a sudden lunge that closes the distance in a heartbeat. I sidestep, but my hip clips the dresser corner; pain flares white-hot along the bone, a hot line that steals my balance for a second. She slams into me anyway, fist arcing. The blow grazes my cheek, and the impact rattles my teeth like a bell. The hum of the fluorescent light becomes a high, thin note.
She leans in, voice low and sharp. “You can’t even hold yourself up,” she sneers, as if the words are a verdict.
“Funny,” I spit back, breath a blade, “I’m the one who keeps knocking you down.”
She launches herself at me again, and this time she doesn’t miss. Her hands find my arm and twist with a practiced, brutal economy, putting her elbow into my wrist, a wrench that turns bone into leverage. My bone pops with an obscene sound. Pain detonates, bright and searing. A scream is wrenched from me as I try to pull free; my fingers go numb with shock. She grins, as if the sound of my arm breaking is a thing she’s been waiting to hear. I taste iron at the back of my mouth, and the world tilts on a new axis: one arm useless, the other everything.
She doesn’t give me time to register the loss. Kelsey shoves me hard; my head snaps back, and the side of my skull hits the wall with a crack that blooms stars across my vision. Warmth spreads down my temple, then finds a path down my cheek, hot and slick.
Adrenaline finds a path through the fog. I twist, a desperate, ugly motion, and drive my shoulder into her midsection. She grunts, surprised, and for a fraction of a second her weight shifts. I use that fraction. With my good arm, I hook behind her knee and shove, a lever and a curse. She stumbles, and for a heartbeat I think I can turn this—until she recovers with the speed of someone who’s practiced falling and coming up harder. Her hand lashes out, a hard, precise strike that catches my broken arm at the wrong angle. Pain explodes through my arm again, white and hot, and the world narrows to a single, bright line of agony.
Kelsey throws me onto the mattress and is astride me in the next second, her thighs locking like a vise across my hips. Her forearm pins my wrists above my head; her other arm presses across my throat with enough pressure to steal the air from my lungs. The pressure is clinical, efficient, like she’s not trying to kill me, but she’s playing with me to make me feel small, feellike her victim. Rage flares through me, but it’s useless without oxygen. My lungs burn, the pain from my arm and head making my body slow to obey the orders my head is screaming.
“You should’ve stayed out of my way,” she hisses against my ear, each word a small hammer. The pressure across my throat builds into a slow crush; my chest bucks, lungs clawing for air that won’t come. The thought that this is my last chance slides through me like ice.
No. Not like this. If she wins here, I disappear into a story no one reads.
With everything I have left, I jam my knees up, find her center of gravity, and shove with everything left. My body convulses upward; the bed frame behind me becomes a springboard. For a heartbeat, her balance stutters, and I taste possibility. She flies sideways, and her head meets the nightstand corner with a dull, wet thunk that makes the rig go very quiet for a second. The sound is sickening. She crumples face-first to the floor, and the world tilts.
I roll, coughing, my lungs on fire, and pull in deep, ragged breaths. That’s when I look over and see the blood already spreading under her hair, soaking into the rug in a slow, obscene bloom. The sight should steady me, but instead, a cold spike of fear cuts through the heat. My broken arm screams when I move it; something inside it has given in a way that makes the limb a dead weight and a map of pain. The head wound at my temple pulses with each heartbeat, warm and sticky against my fingers when I touch it.
Rage that had been a living thing in my chest collapses into something harder and colder: the jagged knowledge that if she dies here, she never answers for what she did.
I don’t want a corpse. I wantjustice.
Hands shaking, I scramble to her and flip her over. Her body is limp in a way that makes my stomach twist, but her pulse isthere, even if it is thready, and the relief that floods me is so sharp my eyes sting.
“Damn it, Kelsey.”
The closet next to us is a small mercy: a tangle of clothes and a drawer with more than I hoped. I rip shirts off hangers with impatient fingers, the fabric rough against my palm. My broken arm hangs useless at my side, a dead weight that tugs at my balance and sends hot lightning up my shoulder every time I move. It slows me, but it doesn’t stop me. One of my old shirts goes to her head first; I press it hard into the wound, feeling the warmth soak through, as I watch the fabric darken.
I need to find a way to keep her here, but I want her to be unable to finish what she started. My broken arm protests with every movement; the head wound keeps time with a steady, sticky rhythm. I glance at the nightstand, and my eyes catch on a thick, braided phone charger. It’s not a weapon I want to use, but it’s something to secure her with if I have to—long enough to bind, sturdy enough to hold. Good enough.
I yank the braided cord free with my good hand and work it into a rough handcuff knot, fingers clumsy but determined. The loop cinches; it’s not neat, but it will hold.
“Stay alive. You don’t get to take the easy way out.”
My breath is loud in the quiet rig, each inhale a rasp that tastes of iron and adrenaline. My legs wobble like they belong to someone else, but I force them under me.
