Chapter 41 #2
My pulse hammering behind my eyes.
His breath in my face.
Then I drove the knife through the center of his chest.
The resistance stopped, and Luke made a sound that was more surprise than pain as his body went rigid against mine.
The knife was between us, buried beneath rib and muscle, clean through his heart, where his own momentum and my last brutal push had driven it.
His eyes locked on mine, wide and disbelieving, like even at the end he couldn’t understand that consequences had finally found him in a hallway beneath fluorescent lights.
I held him there because I wanted to watch him die.
Not because I was confused. Not because the pain had blurred the line between survival and vengeance. I knew exactly what I was doing.
Luke’s mouth moved, but no words came out. Just a wet, broken sound that should’ve meant something to me.
It didn’t.
Not when I could still see Bliss’s bruised throat in my head.
Not when I could still hear the way her voice broke when she tried to hand me the truth without making me look directly at every piece of it.
Not when I knew how many times this piece of shit had heard her say no and decided the word didn’t matter because he wanted something more.
My hand tightened around the knife.
“She told you no,” I said, my voice low and wrecked, but steady enough for him to hear every word. “A million times.”
His fingers twitched weakly toward mine as I shoved his hand away.
“A million times, and you ignored it.”
The blade dragged through blood-soaked fabric and skin, rough and ugly and final, but my hand didn’t shake from doubt. I carved the first letter into him because men like Luke understood loss in any language, and I wanted him to die carrying the only word he should’ve ever acknowledged.
N.
His breath hitched.
I carved the second beside it, jaw locked so hard pain sparked behind my teeth.
O.
No.
The word sat there in blood and torn cotton, brutal and undeniable just beneath the hole in his chest.
I threw the knife aside and grabbed his chin, forcing his fading eyes back to mine. “Look at me.”
His pupils jumped, unfocused and terrified now.
I leaned closer, every breath ripping wrong through my chest. “Look at the man who ended your life.”
His mouth opened.
Closed.
“You were never getting out of this hallway,” I whispered.
He made another attempt, smaller this time, pathetic and weak.
“No isn’t just a sentence, Luke.” The words came out barely above a whisper, but they landed. I saw the exact second they did. “It’s a whole fucking sentence.”
Then his body sagged, and whatever had been left of him went still.
I wasn’t sorry.
I was bleeding out on concrete, my lung refusing to work, my abdomen on fire, my body already starting to fail beneath me, but regret never came.
Maybe it should have. Maybe a better man would’ve found some moral line in the middle of all that blood and knelt there, horrified by what his own hands had done.
I didn’t.
Luke Dempsey was dead, and all I cared about was that Bliss was safe.
And for me, in that hallway, that was the only math that mattered.
I let him fall because I didn’t have the strength to lower him, and because I wasn’t good enough to care whether the concrete was kind. His last breath expelled with a heavy, final sound that seemed too small for the thing he had been in this world.
For a second, I stayed on my knees as breathing became work, then impossible.
I pressed one hand to my side, then the other to the wound lower in my abdomen, but there was too much blood and not enough pressure and my fingers didn’t seem to know what I wanted from them anymore.
My chest pulled tight again, refusing to fill all the way.
Every inhale came shallow and sharp, dragging wet pain through the left side of my body.
I made it to my knees, then fell sideways until my shoulder hit the wall, and I slid down it, leaving a smear of red against the pale concrete.
The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, too bright and too far away.
My phone was somewhere. Luke had taken it.
Maybe in his pocket. Maybe thrown in a trash can.
Maybe sitting twenty feet away like some stupid, meaningless prize that had gotten me into this hallway.
Bliss was outside, and I just wanted her.
I planted one hand on the floor and tried to push myself up, but it was useless.
My body didn’t move.
That was new.
And completely unacceptable.
I tried again, harder this time, and pain ripped through me so violently my vision went black at the edges. My elbow gave out. I went down onto my side, cheek hitting cold concrete, breath tearing in and out of me in broken, shallow pulls.
I stared down the corridor toward the distant turn that led back to the main hall.
I heard footsteps.
For one small second, I thought maybe Luke was moving again, and whatever was left of my body tried to drag itself back into the fight on pure hatred and defective survival instinct.
My fingers scraped against the concrete, searching for the knife, for anything I could use if that piece of shit somehow found his way out of hell and decided to crawl toward me and finish me off.
My hand closed around nothing.
Awesome.
Dying on arena concrete, one lung valiantly fighting for my life, and I couldn’t even locate the murder weapon.
Very impressive final performance from the captain of the Fury.
The footsteps got faster.
“Mercer?”
Ryan.
Relief hit so hard it almost felt like pain, which was rude considering pain had already overcommitted to the evening.
I tried to answer, but nothing came out.
“Cade?”
The second time, his voice changed.
That was how I knew it was bad.
Not the blood. Not the way my chest wouldn’t pull right.
Not the cold spreading beneath my skin, slow and steady and wrong.
Ryan Decker did not panic. Ryan looked at chaos the way most people looked at weather, like it was irritating but manageable.
If Ryan’s voice broke around my name, I was not in the “lost the fight but won the war” category.
I was in the “oh fuck” category.
He came around the corner at a run and stopped so hard his shiny black dress shoes skidded against the concrete.
I watched his face take in the hallway in pieces.
For half a second, every terrible thing in the world entered Ryan’s body at once. I saw it happen. Saw the color drain from his face, saw his eyes go too wide, saw his mouth part like whatever he found here had knocked the air out of him too.
Then it vanished.
He locked down so fast I almost missed the fear.
Almost.
Ryan dropped beside me hard enough that I heard the impact as his knees hit the concrete floor, and his hands were already moving.
“Fuck—” He sounded panicked. “Cade. Hey… stay with me.”
I tried to tell him I was staying exactly where I was because mobility seemed wildly optimistic at this point, but my mouth didn’t cooperate.
Ryan pressed both hands against my side, and pain burned white through the entire left half of my body.
My back arched off the floor, and a sound came out of me I didn’t recognize. Not a groan. Not a shout. Something ripped loose and ugly, swallowed by the corridor before I had enough air to be embarrassed by it.
“I know,” he snapped, voice tight but controlled. Too controlled. Like he was holding the whole thing together with his teeth. “I know. I’m sorry. I’ve gotta put pressure on it.”
“Pip…?” I forced out.
It barely sounded like her name. Ryan’s eyes flicked to mine, fierce and immediate. “She’s outside. She’s safe, Cap.”
Safe.
That should be enough.
It wasn’t, because I was apparently a selfish bastard even while bleeding out. I didn’t just want her safe. I wanted to see her safe. Wanted to look at her face and make sure Luke had not somehow reached beyond death and put fear back in her eyes.
I tried to breathe deeper, but I couldn’t.
The air caught halfway and shredded on the way back out.
Panic tried to crawl up my throat, not for me, never for me, but because outside was too far away.
Outside was another world. Outside was Bliss wrapped in noise and family and postgame chaos while I was on the floor with Ryan’s hands in my blood and Luke dead by my hand.
“Don’t let her—”
“I won’t.” Ryan’s voice cut through the haze, hard and absolute.
My fingers grabbed weakly at his sleeve. “Knife.”
“I see it.”
“He—”
“Stop talking.” Ryan yanked his phone from his pocket with one bloody hand, hit three numbers, and put it on speaker without ever taking pressure off me. “You’re wasting air.”
That was probably supposed to be practical, but he sounded terrified.
The call connected.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
For half a second, Ryan didn’t sound like Ryan at all. He sounded like a kid, scared and furious and trying to shove panic back down his throat with both hands.
“Listen to me,” he said, voice rough as hell.
“We’re at the Kimball Falls University hockey arena, in the back hallway behind the locker rooms. My friend’s down.
He got stabbed—fuck, he got stabbed. It looks like a lot.
He’s bleeding everywhere, and he can’t breathe.
The other dude’s down too. Send somebody now. Please. Now.”
Barely breathing.
It seemed important but also dramatic.
No way was I that bad.
I stared at the ceiling while the operator’s voice crackled through the phone, asking questions Ryan answered with a crazed kind of fear.
“Is he conscious?”
“Yes, barely.”
Conscious.
Gold star for me.
“Cade.” Ryan’s face appeared above mine again, too focused, too pale beneath the arena lights. “Look at me.”
I tried.
His face blurred.
“Don’t do that,” he said sharply. “Don’t you fucking do that. Look at me.”
My eyes found his again with effort that felt insulting. I had played through injuries that would have made normal men cry in a shower, and now blinking on command was apparently my Everest.