Dad’s hand dropped from my shoulder. “Identify who?”
Knox didn’t answer them. He listened, his face going harder with every word coming through that phone.
Then he said the name. “Luke Dempsey?”
The parking lot fell out from under me. No sound came from my mouth at first. Just the hard, empty shape of a scream that hadn’t found its way out yet.
Cade was hurt.
Luke needed identifying.
Those two facts tried to exist in my mind at the same time, and my brain rejected every version where Cade did not walk out of that building alive.
Because if Luke was there, if Luke had found him, if Cade was bleeding because of the monster I had finally stopped obeying, then the math became unbearable. It became a kind of cruelty I could not survive. Cade had loved me in public and Luke had answered in blood. Cade had kissed me through glass and Luke had found a hallway. Cade had made me feel safe enough to smile, and somehow that safety had become the thing Luke punished.
No.
My body went hot and cold at the same time. My hands tingled. My lips felt numb. The arena doors blurred and doubled, then snapped back into focus with terrible clarity.
Life had become a language I didn’t understand.
I shoved past my dad and ran toward the arena doors. I didn’t think. I didn’t decide. I didn’t weigh safety or logic or thefact I was still not fully healed from what Luke had done to me days ago. I ran because Cade was inside and my body knew only one thing. Get to him.
Ryker caught me around the waist before I made it far, hauling me back against his chest so hard my feet nearly left the ground.
“No!” I shrieked, clawing at his arm. “Let me go. Let me go. Cade is in there!”
“You’re not going in there,” Ryker said, voice breaking against my ear. “Bug, you’re not going in there.”
“Let me go!”
Students stopped all around us now. People stared. Someone said my name. Someone asked what happened. The whole parking lot started changing shape around the panic, excitement curdling into confusion as the sound of my scream cut through the postgame high like a blade.
I twisted hard in Ryker’s arms, pain ripping through my ribs, but I didn’t care. My body barely registered it. Pain belonged to another universe now. Pain was a thing that happened to people with time to feel it.
I didn’t have time. Cade was inside.
“Ryker, please,” I sobbed, trying to pry his arm from my waist. “Please, please, please. I have to get to him. He’s alone. He’s alone in there.”
“He’s not alone.” Ryker sounded like he was trying not to fall apart while physically holding me together. “Ryan’s with him. EMS is with him.”
“You don’t know that!”
“I do. Knox just said—”
“I need to see him!”
Dad grabbed my face with both hands, forcing me to look at him. His eyes were wild. Terrified. Wet in a way I had seen only a few times in my life and never wanted to see again.
“Bliss,” he said, voice shaking. “Bug, look at me.”
“No. No, Dad, no. He’s inside. Cade is inside.”
“I know.”
“He’s hurt.”
“I know.”
