40
Cade
Thought for one second and Luke Lunged. I saw the movement, the smallest tell before the violence came loose.
I’d watched enough men hit the boards, enough defensemen drop weight before impact, enough cheap-shot cowards move wrong right before trying to make a hit look accidental. Bodies warned you before mouths did. Always. A twitch in the jaw. A shift in the hips. A breath held half a second too long.
Luke had all of it.
The warning.
The rage.
The knife.
I moved because instinct got there before thought did, twisting just enough that the first slash missed the center of my chest and caught me lower instead. Heat opened along my side, sharp and immediate, not pain at first. Not really. More like my body filing a report my brain refused to read.
Then the pain hit.
White.
Blinding.
Mean.
I drove my forearm into his wrist and shoved him back hard enough to send his shoulder into the concrete wall. The impact cracked through the service corridor, swallowed almost instantly by the hum of the arena around us. Somewhere beyond the thick cinderblock, students were still laughing. Families were still drifting toward the exits. Bliss was still outside, probably rolling her eyes at something one of her brothers said,completely unaware that the monster who had haunted her for years was standing ten feet from me with her name rotting in his mouth and a knife in his hand.
That thought kept me upright.
Luke recovered fast, faster than I wanted him to. Not clean. Not trained. Desperate. Ugly. The kind of violence that didn’t care what it broke because it had never learned consequences from the right end.
“You think she’s safe with you?” he snapped, breath already rough, eyes too bright beneath the fluorescent lights. “You can’t even keep track of your fucking phone.”
My attention flicked once.
Too quick, but it was enough.
His smile widened, and the truth settled cold beneath my ribs before he even said another word.
“You took it,” I said.
He tilted his head, pretending innocence badly. “Needed to get you alone somehow.”
My pulse slowed again, brutal and steady, even as wet heat spread beneath my dress shirt where he’d cut me. He had taken my phone. Waited in a blind hallway. Brought a knife. He had not come here to scare me, and he sure as hell had not come here to talk.
He had come here because Bliss was outside and he couldn’t get to her without going through me.
Something inside me went very quiet.
“You really are stupid,” I said.
His expression tightened. I smiled, and I knew there was nothing human in it. “You had one move left, and this is what you picked?”
Luke shoved off the wall, knife low at his side. “You don’t know who she is.”
“I know exactly who she is.”
“You sit here bleeding for a bitch who begged me to fuck her.”
