Octavia is not a door.
She is not a wound for someone else to crawl into and call it love.
Kadin Anderson has mistaken her scars for an invitation one too many times.
By the time I find him in the university weight room, the place is nearly empty. Afternoon classes swallowed most of the students already. The echo in here is all metal, rubber and fluorescent hum, the kind of cold institutional quiet that makes violence feel clinical if you let it. Weight plates clink somewhere in the back. A fan turns overhead with a dry little tick that sounds like a countdown.
Kadin is on the bench press.
Who would have guessed?
He is flat on his back, under a bar he wants everyone to think looks easy, his shirt dark with sweat down the center. The bruises on his face are fading into ugly greens and yellows, but the line along his jaw where Octavia punched him still lingers like a signature.
He does not see me at first.
I let him finish the rep. Let the bar come up. Let his elbows lock out.
Then I step forward.
My boots whisper over the rubber flooring. His head turns. The shift in his expression is small, just a flicker, a catch in the eyes, a half-second where instinct speaks before ego can cover its mouth.
There you are you little fucker.
Racking the bar too fast, it clatters against the hooks as he sits up with his usual sneer already halfway built, trying to wear confidence before I get close enough to peel it off him.
“Corvin,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You stalking me now?”
I say nothing.
Silence is useful. It makes men like him rush to build bridges out of words, every bridge they build showing you exactly where they think the weak spots are.
Stopping beside the bench, I glance down at the bar, then back at him.
"You should stop ending up alone with me,” I say.
His mouth twitches. “Yeah? And what exactly are you going to do?”
He starts to stand.
I move before he finishes.
My hand grabs his shoulder, shoving hard enough to send him flat onto the bench again, the other snatching the racked bar. Surprise blows through him before anger can catch up, swears rolling off his tongue as he grabs for the bar on instinct.
That instinct is what traps him.
I press down.
Not all at once. Not with enough force to crush him immediately. Just enough to make the bar dip lower than he expected. The metal gives a hard, ugly clank against the rack teeth before I shift it free of the catches completely, settling the weight down over him.
His eyes flare.
Both his hands lock around the bar, his elbows buckling.
The plates on either side wobble with a metallic chatter as he realizes, in one quick clean flash, that the game has changed and he is underneath it.
“That’s right,” I say softly.
The bar hovers an inch above his chest because I let it. My palms flatten over the knurling, his muscles jumping under the strain. He could probably press this weight on a good day, with a spotter at his back, music blaring in his ears, and a room full of people to applaud him for surviving his own vanity.
