Chapter 40 #2
His fingers tightened near the knife. “You don’t know anything.”
“I know enough.”
“You know what she told you.”
“I know she looks at me without fear.” I stepped closer, just one slow pace, and watched his eyes flicker. “That part bother you? Knowing she crawls into my bed and sleeps like nothing can touch her?”
The hallway seemed to pull tight around us, and Luke’s nostrils flared.
I smiled.
Not happy or amused.
I smiled with something uglier.
“She laughs with me too,” I said. “Real laugh. Not that survival shit she used to give you so you wouldn’t ruin her life. Not the fear you trained into her. Real. Loud. Annoying as hell sometimes.”
His mouth twisted.
“She wore my jersey,” I continued, voice quiet, cruel, precise. “My name on her back. My number. Walked through an arena full of people wearing it like she belonged there.”
Not because she belonged to me the way he meant it.
Because she had chosen me, and I knew that was the one truth he couldn’t survive.
I laughed snidely. “She let me claim her as mine in front of the entire arena. In case you missed it, Luke. I know it gets you hard watching us from dark corners.”
“She doesn’t belong to you.”
“Oh, she does though,” I said. “She chose me. That’s probably the part you can’t wrap your washed-up head around.”
His eyes sharpened, mean and fast.
I kept my body loose. Shoulders easy. Hands empty and visible.
Make him swing first.
“You were never chosen,” I said. “Not by a woman. A fourteen-year-old child trusted you, and you groomed her. The woman knew better. You were a familiar face she trusted, and you groomed her, you fucking pedophile. You waited until grief made her easier to corner, then you stole her fucking childhood.”
The charm vanished.
Completely.
Luke pushed off the wall, and the knife shifted in his hand. Not raised yet. Not enough to make the hallway explode into motion. Just enough that the blade caught the light again, cold and thin and real.
“You think she’s innocent?” he asked, voice low. “You think she didn’t know what she was doing?”
Rage hit me so hard the edges of the hallway sharpened, but I didn’t give him the explosion he wanted.
I let it go cold instead, let it settle into the part of me that understood timing, pressure, weak points, and exactly how long a man could pretend he wasn’t afraid before his body betrayed him.
Luke’s grip tightened near the knife. Mine stayed loose at my sides.
Then I smiled, slow and mean enough to make his confidence flicker, and for the first time, the monster blinked.
“Say that again,” I said.
His hand flexed around the knife, and I took another step toward him.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me she wanted it. Tell me she asked for it. Say it loud enough for the cameras you were too stupid to check.”
“There are no cameras here,” he said.
I laughed once, sharp and humorless. “That’s what you think?”
His expression faltered for half a second. I had no idea if there were cameras, but it didn’t matter. All I needed was that moment of doubt, and it hit him like a crack in glass.
“You’re not smart, Luke.” I said his name like it tasted bad. “You’re just a tired, washed-up prick who likes little girls.”
“You don’t know me.”
“I know exactly what you are.”
His lips peeled back slightly. “What you think and what I know are not the same.”
“You—” I pointed at him, slow and deliberate. “A coward with a scrapbook full of high school highlights and a deeply perverted, depraved attraction to young girls. You are grotesque.”
The knife lifted a fraction, and he wanted a reaction, but if he thought I would run screaming down the corridor, he was a dumb motherfucker too.
“You think prison’s gonna be kind to you?” I asked softly. “You think those boys are gonna care about your old stat sheets? You gonna tell them you used to be somebody in Kimball Falls? Maybe bring up your best season? Maybe they’ll let you hang a little newspaper clipping above your bunk.”
His face went red, and the mask finally split.
Finally.
The real Luke Dempsey had arrived.
“I’ll make sure they know what you did,” I said. “Every guy in whatever cage they toss you into. Every guard. Every inmate. Every person who hears your name. You wanted to be famous, Glory Days? You’re gonna be famous.”
His breathing changed when I stepped closer again.
Stupid? Maybe.
Worth it? Absolutely.
“I can see it now. ‘Child rapist given sixty years.’” I looked at him with a dramatic glint. “You will go to bed in fear every night once the world knows who you are.”
Luke moved so fast most people would have missed the shift from standing to threat. I didn’t. His shoulder rolled first from his right side.
His blade hand.
The kind of movement that should’ve made me step back if I was a sane person with any interest in self-preservation.
But I saw Bliss’s throat in my head.
The bruises and the way her voice broke when she tried to turn unbearable things into something I could survive hearing. The way she had looked at me and asked me to read between the lines because she did not want to hand me the worst part of herself in detail.
The way Luke had sat at her family’s table for years while she suffered in silence.
So, I smiled at him.
“You gonna do something?” I asked. “Or are you just here to prove you need a weapon because you can’t take me without one?”
His control snapped.
“Fuck you,” he snarled.
“There’s the truth,” I said, and my voice dropped into something almost pleased. “That’s the guy Bliss knows.”
He lunged.
I expected the hit. I expected fists. A shove. Maybe a wild swing I could use to put him through the nearest wall and let every cop in Sutton County find him bleeding on concrete with the truth on the floor beside him.
I did not expect the blade to come first.
For one brutal second, the silver line of it flashed toward my ribs, and everything in me narrowed to instinct, movement, and the sudden, vicious realization that Luke Dempsey had not come here to scare me.
He had come here prepared to spill blood.
And Bliss was still outside waiting for me.