The room went silent as my heartbeat stumbled. “What?”
“There’s video,” Knox repeated. “Not from the angle Luke thought. The service hallway camera near the loading access was half-obstructed by an equipment cart, but it picked up more than he knew. The visual is grainy. It only shows part of the attack.”
His jaw tightened.
“But the audio tells enough.”
My stomach dropped. “Audio?”
“We heard him, Bug.”
Dad’s face turned to stone.
Ryker pushed off the wall. “Heard what?”
Knox didn’t look away from me. “Enough.”
“Knox.”
“Enough,” he said again, sharper this time, and something in his face begged Ryker not to make him say it in front of me.
But I already knew.
I knew because I had heard Luke’s voice in nightmares for years. I knew because Cade had gone into that hallway with rage in his soul and love in his blood, and Luke would have done what Luke always did.
He would have used me as a weapon.
Knox swallowed. “He admitted to taking Cade’s phone. He made it clear he planned to get Cade alone. He had the knife visible before Cade closed distance. Cade kept his hands visible. Cade very clearly tried to provoke him into showing exactly what he was.”
A strange, terrible pride cracked through my chest.
Even furious, even lethal, even standing across from the man who had ruined whole years of my life, Cade had understood the room before the fight started.
“And he did,” Knox said.
My dad’s hand found mine beneath the table.
“Luke attacked first,” Knox continued. “No question. The first cut happened when Cade turned away from a strike aimed at his chest. The second…” His voice changed. “The second one nearly killed him before the fight was over.”
Maren spoke gently. “The video makes clear that Cade was defending himself against an armed attacker.”
Kellen’s voice came small from the wall. “Then why are we talking like there’s something else?”
Nobody answered fast enough, and my skin went cold.
Knox looked down once, then back at me. “Because of what was found on Dempsey.”
The room changed then, not with noise but with a certainty that everyone understood we had reached the thing beneath the thing.
Ryker’s eyes narrowed. “What was found?”
Knox’s mouth pressed into a hard line. “There were letters carved into his chest.”
Dad’s hand tightened around mine so hard my fingers went numb.
Kellen whispered, “Letters?”
Knox looked at me.
