Chapter 41
Cade
Thought for one second and Luke Lunged. I saw the movement, the smallest tell before the violence came loose.
I’d watched enough men hit the boards, enough defensemen drop weight before impact, enough cheap-shot cowards move wrong right before trying to make a hit look accidental. Bodies warned you before mouths did. Always. A twitch in the jaw. A shift in the hips. A breath held half a second too long.
Luke had all of it.
The warning.
The rage.
The knife.
I moved because instinct got there before thought did, twisting just enough that the first slash missed the center of my chest and caught me lower instead. Heat opened along my side, sharp and immediate, not pain at first. Not really. More like my body filing a report my brain refused to read.
Then the pain hit.
White.
Blinding.
Mean.
I drove my forearm into his wrist and shoved him back hard enough to send his shoulder into the concrete wall.
The impact cracked through the service corridor, swallowed almost instantly by the hum of the arena around us.
Somewhere beyond the thick cinderblock, students were still laughing.
Families were still drifting toward the exits.
Bliss was still outside, probably rolling her eyes at something one of her brothers said, completely unaware that the monster who had haunted her for years was standing ten feet from me with her name rotting in his mouth and a knife in his hand.
That thought kept me upright.
Luke recovered fast, faster than I wanted him to. Not clean. Not trained. Desperate. Ugly. The kind of violence that didn’t care what it broke because it had never learned consequences from the right end.
“You think she’s safe with you?” he snapped, breath already rough, eyes too bright beneath the fluorescent lights. “You can’t even keep track of your fucking phone.”
My attention flicked once.
Too quick, but it was enough.
His smile widened, and the truth settled cold beneath my ribs before he even said another word.
“You took it,” I said.
He tilted his head, pretending innocence badly. “Needed to get you alone somehow.”
My pulse slowed again, brutal and steady, even as wet heat spread beneath my dress shirt where he’d cut me. He had taken my phone. Waited in a blind hallway. Brought a knife. He had not come here to scare me, and he sure as hell had not come here to talk.
He had come here because Bliss was outside and he couldn’t get to her without going through me.
Something inside me went very quiet.
“You really are stupid,” I said.
His expression tightened. I smiled, and I knew there was nothing human in it. “You had one move left, and this is what you picked?”
Luke shoved off the wall, knife low at his side. “You don’t know who she is.”
“I know exactly who she is.”
“You sit here bleeding for a bitch who begged me to fuck her.”
That got under my skin, but I didn’t give him the reaction yet.
I couldn’t afford to. My side was burning now, each breath tugging at the cut hard enough to make my vision sharpen around the edges.
Not deep enough to drop me. Not yet. But enough to remind me that knives didn’t play by hockey rules.
There were no whistles here. No refs. No bench doors.
No penalty box waiting after someone took it too far.
Just concrete and my blood.
Luke’s gaze dropped to the dark stain spreading beneath my jacket, and something smug crawled over his face. “She was mine before she was anything to you.”
“You stole a fourteen-year-old’s voice. That makes you putrid, and it makes her your victim.”
The sentence landed in the corridor like something diseased.
For one second, everything in me wanted to stop being controlled. I wanted the wall to break. Wanted the rage to get loud enough to turn my body into nothing but impact. Wanted to hit him until every tear, every fake smile, every demand of silence was paid back in a language monsters understood.
But Luke wanted the explosion.
He needed it.
Predators built entire lives around making other people look unstable.
So I didn’t explode.
I stayed cold and controlled.
I stepped closer, slow enough to make him watch it happen. “She didn’t belong to you. She survived you.”
His breath punched out through his nose.
“And now?” I tilted my head. “Now she laughs in my bed. Sleeps in my shirts. Wears my name across her back in front of anyone that wants to look at her. You can keep choking on what you used to have, Glory Days, but every version of her that matters sees you for what you are.”
The knife came up, and his control cracked wide open. I expected the next lunge, but I didn’t respect the speed of it enough.
He rushed me with a guttural sound that barely resembled words, and I turned into him, catching his wrist with both hands before the blade could reach my chest. Momentum carried us hard into the opposite wall.
My shoulder hit first. Pain ripped down my side, hot enough to make my breath stall, but I held onto his wrist and drove my knee into his thigh.
Luke grunted, staggering half a step, and I used the opening to pummel him, taking every shot I could. My fist connected with his jaw, and his head snapped sideways. The sound of it echoed through the corridor with a sick, flat crack that should have satisfied something in me.
It didn’t.
He came back smiling through blood at the corner of his mouth. “You hit like a man who knows he’s gonna die,” he spat.
I hit him again and felt his nose crunch.
He stumbled, but the knife stayed in his hand because cowards loved their advantages. I grabbed for his wrist again, but he twisted at the last second and drove forward with all his weight.
The blade went in under my rib, sickeningly smooth.
For one suspended second, my brain refused to understand it.
Then my body did.
Pain detonated through me, deep and wrong, a vicious internal pressure that stole every bit of air from my lungs.
My hand locked around his jacket to keep myself from going down.
Luke was close enough that I could see the broken red veins in his eyes, could smell beer and sweat and old anger on his breath.
His mouth curled near my ear. “She’ll cry at your funeral and I’ll fuck her then too.”
The world went silent.
Not metaphorically but actually silent.
The buzzing lights, the distant crowd, the hum through the walls, the wet sound of my own breathing—everything dropped away beneath that sentence.
Bliss.
I saw her outside in my head.
My jersey. Her smile. Her hand in mine. The way she looked at me that morning in the kitchen when I said I loved her like the words had cracked something terrifying and beautiful open between us.
The way she had survived him. The way she was still surviving him.
The way she would blame herself if I didn’t walk out of this hallway.
No.
My hand clamped around Luke’s wrist so hard something shifted beneath my grip as he tried to pull the knife free, but no way was I letting him.
Pain tore through me as I moved, but I used it. Used the fact that he was close. Used the fact that he thought the blade had already decided the fight was over. I drove my forehead into his face, brutal and fast, and his grip loosened for half a second.
Half a second was enough.
I slammed his wrist against the wall once.
Twice.
The knife clattered loose, skidding across the concrete toward the opposite side of the corridor.
Luke lunged for it, and so did I.
We hit the floor hard.
My shoulder took most of the fall, but my side screamed anyway, the kind of pain that made my vision flash dark around the edges.
Luke’s elbow caught me in the mouth. I tasted blood.
My hand found his throat long enough to shove him back, but he was slippery with my blood now.
He fought me with all his rage and survival and years of getting away with things finally crashing into the one moment he couldn’t talk himself out of.
He scrambled toward the knife, fingers scraping concrete.
I caught his ankle and dragged him back.
He kicked me in the ribs, the same spot he’d stabbed me in, and air vanished. A horrible pressure bloomed through my chest, tight and wet and wrong. I tried to inhale and felt the breath catch halfway, like my body had forgotten how lungs worked. The hallway tilted. My grip slipped.
Luke crawled another foot.
No.
I forced myself forward, every movement tearing something open inside me, and wrapped an arm around his waist from behind. We rolled hard into the wall near the service door. He slammed the back of his head into my face, and stars burst behind my eyes.
Then his fingers closed around the knife again.
I saw it happen.
Saw the choice form in his body before he turned.
He wasn’t done. He would never be done. Not with me. Not with Bliss. Not with anyone who had the misfortune of knowing his truth.
Luke twisted with the blade clutched tight, aiming low this time, wild and desperate.
I caught his forearm before it could sink into me again, but the angle was bad.
My strength wasn’t right. Blood loss had made my hands sluggish, my muscles untrustworthy.
The knife shook between us, silver flashing inches from my stomach while he drove his weight down, teeth bared, face gone monstrous with effort.
“You are nothing,” he hissed.
I pushed back with everything I had left. “No,” I said, my voice filled with hate and filth and every fucking thing wrong with him. “You ignored every no she cried, and now I’m going to carve it in your fucking chest.”
His eyes flickered, but I didn’t care.
I moved, not cleanly and not heroically.
It was ugly, desperate, survival carved down to bone. I shifted my hips, used the wall behind me, and turned his momentum sideways. His wrist bent with mine around it. The blade changed direction between us as we slammed into the concrete again, and for one second, the entire fight became pressure.
His weight.
My grip.
The knife.