Aura turned so fast her braids swung over one shoulder, and then she was gone, pushing through the gap between tables toward the back hall.
She didn’t walk. She fled.
There was no pretty word for it and no graceful way to dress it up. Aura dropped everything and ran because Maddox had ripped her open in front of half of KFU athletics and smiled while he did it.
The second she disappeared through the back hallway, something inside me broke clean, and I rose slowly.
Briggs’s hand came down against my forearm. “East.”
“Move.”
His grip tightened. “Think.”
“I am thinking.”
“No, you’re about to put him in the ground.”
I looked at Maddox.
He was standing now too, his chest puffed as if being surrounded made him brave. Two basketball players had risen beside him, but neither looked eager.
Smart.
At least someone at their table had a survival instinct.
Maddox pointed toward the hallway Aura had vanished into. “Man, don’t look at me like that. She’s the one who ran. I didn’t make her do shit.”
I moved so quickly Briggs lost his grip.
Rider caught me halfway around the table with one arm across my chest, and it took both him and Briggs to hold me there. The bar shifted around us, hockey standing, basketball standing, football turning in their seats with the hungry attention men got when violence started smelling real.
“Say another word about her,” I said, and the sound of my own voice scared even me. “Say one more fucking word, and I’ll make sure you need someone else to explain the rest of your life to you.”
Maddox’s jaw flexed, but his eyes flicked toward Briggs, then Rider, then the rest of the bar now standing behind me.
“You don’t even know what you’re defending,” he snapped. “You hear one little story, and now you’re acting like you’re her hero?”
I stepped into him hard enough that Rider had to move with me or let me go. “Hero?”
Maddox’s lip curled. “Yeah. What are you, her boyfriend?”
I smiled, and whatever he saw in it changed his face.
“No, I’m worse,” I said, low enough that he had to stop breathing to hear me. “I’m the man who is going to make sure you understand exactly what happens when you open your mouth about my girl.”
I leaned closer, my body still locked against Rider’s arm and Briggs still gripping my shoulder from behind like either of them could stop what was coming if I truly decided they couldn’t.
“You mean Aura?” Maddox asked, and the way he said her name nearly ended him right there.
“I know her, and my ass she wanted that.” Every word came out clear enough to cut glass. “You and your buddies raped her.”
The color began draining from his face.
“That’s my girl. The one you raped. The one Darian filmed. The one you passed around like a joint at a high school party and thought you could intimidate here.”
Good.
I wanted him pale, shaking, and sick. I wanted him to feel even one breath of the terror he had put on Aura’s face.
