So I hold him there.
Not out of mercy.
Out of calculation.
Out of the last, brutal thread of self-control I still possess.
He sees that too. I can feel him understanding, little by little, that the most frightening thing in the room isn’t the violence. It’s the effort it’s taking not to use it.
Still, beneath the fear finally working its way into his face, there is defiance.
Kadin should stop here.
He has the chance. I can feel it in the way his breathing stutters under my forearm, in the way his hands finally come up to my wrist and shirt not to fight, but to create space. He knows now that this is no longer some smug little confrontation in a bathroom or a clean argument in a doorway. He knows he has stepped into something older than campus jealousy, much more dangerous than his idea of me had accounted for.
Somehow he still opens his mouth.
“The rumors about her,” he says, voice strained but still carrying enough spite to make the sentence clear, “must have been true.”
Something in me goes absolutely still.
He sees it too late.
“The damaged ones,” he says, a sick little curl pulling up the corner of his mouth, “are always the tightest-”
My fist collides with his face before he can finish.
The first punch lands hard enough to snap his head sideways into the wall. There is a crack, not of bone, but of impact, his breath leaving him all at once. His body folds badly under the force, my grip on his shirt preventing him from falling away from it.
I hit him again.
This time in the mouth.
His head jerks back, blood appearing where his lip splits. The sight of it should stop me. It doesn’t. All I can hear is the sentence he just said and the room around it collapsing into red. The worst part is not the insult. It’s that he took the ugliest partsof her history and turned them into a joke men tell each other in locker rooms and every other place women aren’t meant to hear what their bodies become in men’s mouths.
The third punch lands lower, catching cheekbone and jaw. He tries to get his hands up properly then, but it’s too late for that. He is no fighter. Not really. Not against this. Not against me when I’ve already crossed into the place where everything narrows into the need to make him pay for every syllable.
He goes down crookedly, sliding partly along the wall before I drag him back up by the front of his shirt.
“Say it again,” I hear myself snarl, though I don’t know if I want him to. “Say it again.”
He can’t. Not clearly. He’s gasping now, blood on his chin, eyes wide with the kind of shock that always comes when men mistake cruelty for strength before finding out too late there’s a difference.
Hitting him once more for good measure, I can still hear the almost-finished word in the room, still feel it trying to stain the air where her name exists.
Then I drag him.
Not far at first. Just enough to get him moving, stumbling under his own feet, one hand clawing at my wrist, the other trying and failing to stay useful. I pull him out of my room and into the hall like dead weight with a heartbeat, his shoes skidding badly on the wood. He manages one weak attempt to wrench free. I slam him into the wall again for that.
By the time we reach the top of the stairs, he’s half-doubled over, breathing like every inhale hurts.
Good.
Fisting the front of his shirt tighter, I force him upright enough that he has no choice but to look at me.
“If you come near her again,” I say, my voice low now, too low, the kind of quiet that always meant danger in my father before he stopped pretending with words at all, “I will kill you.”
I mean him to believe it.
