“No,” Drew said, eyes still on Tristan. “Let him say it. Let him stand here in front of everybody and pretend he wasn’t halfway with Isa while his whole damn heart was still following Stella around campus.”
Tristan’s jaw worked.
Drew’s laugh was vicious.
“Yeah. That’s what I thought.”
Stella inhaled like she had been punched.
And that was enough.
Not because I suddenly liked her.
I did not.
Not because Tristan deserved saving.
He definitely did not.
But because all of them—Drew, Tristan, the boys holding them, the girls watching, the campus vultures already pretending not to film—had turned me into the center of a fight I had not asked for.
Again.
Poor Isa.
Pretty Isa.
Rejected Isa.
Drew’s girl.
Vale’s mistake.
The thing men defended, lost, claimed, warned each other about.
No.
Absolutely not.
I stepped between the fires and let every bit of pageant training, Texas steel, injury pain, humiliation, and pure female exhaustion rise into my spine.
“Stop.”
No one listened.
Of course they didn’t.
Men never heard the first warning.
So I did what my mother had raised me to do when polite failed.
I made my voice beautiful and lethal.
“Stop this bullshit right now!”
That landed.
Drew’s head snapped toward me.
