Chapter 36 #2
He recovers faster than I’d like. He comes up swinging, aiming for my ribs and then my throat, fast and dirty enough to tell me he’s used to men who underestimate him.
I’m not one of them. I block the first punch, take the second on my shoulder, and drive my knee into his stomach hard enough to fold him.
He grunts. Real pain now. Good.
I grab the back of his shirt and slam him face first into the wall before he gets his breath fully back. The frame rattles. Drywall cracks. He spits blood onto the floor and still somehow manages a laugh that makes me want to tear his spine out.
“There you are,” he coughs.
I hit him again. This one lower, across the kidney.
He drops to one knee and twists hard, catching me with an elbow to the ribs that actually lands clean enough to sting.
Then he’s up and driving into me with all his weight, taking us both through the cheap dining table with a crack of wood and a rain of dust and splinters. Pain flashes bright across my back.
Ignored.
He scrambles for the gun at his waistband. Mistake.
I catch his wrist, slam it once against the floor, then again harder until the weapon goes spinning under the couch. He lands a punch to my cheekbone that snaps my head sideways and makes the room flash white for half a second.
I grin at him. Blood in my mouth.
Murder in my hands.
Wrong man, you pathetic bastard. He sees it too. For the first time all night, real fear flickers behind his eyes. Too late.
I drive my forehead into his nose. Cartilage gives with a wet crunch. He shouts this time, one hand flying up, blood spilling instantly.
I use the opening. Hit him in the throat. Then the sternum. Then the jaw again. No wasted movement. No showboating. No lesson dragged out for its own sake.
Just brutal efficiency.
He gets one more decent hit in, catches me at the temple with enough force to make the cabin lurch sideways for a second. Then I bury my fist in his ribs and feel one of them go.
His breath leaves him in a broken sound.
“Get up,” I tell him.
He stares at me from the floor, blood running over his mouth, one eye already swelling. “Go fuck yourself.”
I kick him hard enough in the side to roll him.
He screams.
There. That’s the sound. Not power. Not control. Not cool. Just pain. Exactly where he should’ve been living this whole time.
I grab his shirt and haul him up just enough to slam him back against the broken wall.
“You say one more word about her,” I tell him, voice low enough to scrape the room raw, “and I’ll remove your teeth one at a time and make you swallow every last one.”
He laughs anyway. Blood on his lips. Insane bastard. “You love her,” he says.
Not mocking now. Realizing. The truth of it hits him in real time and I watch his face shift around the understanding. “That’s what this is.”
I don’t answer. Don’t need to.
He sees it. And because he’s exactly the kind of rotten he’s been all night, he decides to use that too. “Then you already lost,” he says hoarsely. “Because men like you always think love makes you dangerous.”
He coughs once, spits blood at my boots, and smiles. “It just makes you weak in all the places I know how to cut.”
That one almost earns him death right there. Almost. But no. Not here. Not yet.
Because I promised him something. And I keep promises.
I slam his head into the wall one more time, hard enough that his body finally goes slack. Not dead. Not for lack of wanting on my part.
Just out.
For now.
The room smells like blood and busted wood and old dust. My chest is heaving. Knuckles split. Face throbbing. Temple ringing. None of it matters.
I look down at him where he hangs half-collapsed in my grip and all I feel is disappointment that unconsciousness came before I was finished.
Logan steps into my line of sight carefully. “You done?”
I look at Cal. Then at Logan. “No.”
He nods once, like that’s exactly the answer he expected. “Then don’t finish it here.”
Fair.
This place is too random. Too temporary. Too quick. This deserves better. Worse for him. Better for me.
I let Cal’s body drop to the floor in a heap and wipe blood out of the corner of my mouth with the back of my hand.
Then I turn to the brothers at the door and say the only thing left to say. “Bring him back to the garage.”
Shadow just nods.
Cain looks entirely too pleased by the instruction.
Blaze’s brows go up and he smiles for a minute. “Bro, you didn’t even ask him why so serious?”
For a minute the tension is lifted by my dumbass brother.
I step over Cal’s body and head for the door before anybody can get clever with a comment. The night air hits me like a slap, cold and clean after the heat inside the cabin, but it doesn’t cool a damn thing in me.
Because now that he’s down, now that the first part is finished, all I want is one thing.
Her. Not abstractly. Not sentimentally.
Raven.
Her face. Her hands. The sound of Lexi breathing safe and warm and alive somewhere I can reach.
I want the proof that this ended where it was supposed to. With me standing. With them untouched. With his blood on my hands instead of theirs.
By the time I get back to the clubhouse, the adrenaline’s burned off enough to leave behind the ache. Split knuckles. Bruised ribs. Cut cheekbone. The kind of pain that feels almost clean after a night like this.
The garage is lit up when we pull in. Men moving. Voices low. A shape on the floor where they dragged Cal in and tied him to a chair like exactly the kind of problem he is.
I don’t look at him. Not yet.
Because before anything else, before the rest of the promises get collected, I need to see my family. That thought lands with enough force to stop me in the middle of the yard for half a heartbeat.
My family.
No flinch. No hesitation. Just truth.
I head inside.
Raven is in my room exactly where I knew she’d be, Lexi asleep against her shoulder in the bed, Bunny hanging by one ear from a limp little hand. The lamp is low. The room smells like baby shampoo and my sheets and the last of Raven’s tears.
She looks up the second I step in. And everything in her face changes at once.
Fear first. Then relief so sharp it nearly takes me out where I stand.
She sees the blood. The cuts. The swelling. But she also sees me upright. Breathing. Back.
That’s all that matters.
I close the door softly behind me, rip my soiled shirt over my head and cross the room fast enough that she’s already moving before I get there, sliding Lexi carefully onto the pillow just long enough to throw her arms around my neck.
I catch her. Hold her. Bury my face in her hair for one brutal second and breathe.
She’s here. She’s warm. She’s real.
Lexi stirs but doesn’t wake, just rolls closer until one little hand pats blindly against my side like she knows I’m there too.
That about fucking ends me.
Raven pulls back just enough to look at my face. “Are you hurt?”
“Nothing important.”
Her eyes flash. “Don’t do that.”
I almost smile. Because that’s her. Even now. Even after all of this.
I slide one hand to the back of her neck and the other around both her and Lexi, pulling them in so close there’s no room left for air.
“It’s done,” I tell her.
The words come out rough. Low. Final.
Not fully done. Not until the garage. Not until every promise is paid.
But enough that he will never reach for them again.
Raven’s face crumples just slightly before she presses into me harder.
Lexi sighs in her sleep and scoots closer until she’s half tangled across both of us, and I stand there in the center of my room with the two of them in my arms and the taste of blood still in my mouth and realize something so clean and simple it almost hurts.
I don’t just want them alive. I want them mine.
Permanently. Not in the broken, twisted way Cal meant ownership. Not control. Not possession.
I want mornings and bedtime and little pink shoes by the door. I want Lexi asleep in the next room and Raven in my bed and a life so solid no man like him ever gets to cast a shadow across it again. I want permanence. Walls. A home. Their names folded into mine in every way that matters.
I lower my mouth to Raven’s forehead. Then to Lexi’s hair.
And in the quiet of that room, with danger still breathing in the garage and violence still waiting for me outside that door, one truth settles all the way through me.
He came for the woman and child I love.
He was dumb enough to touch what’s mine.
And now that I know what having them in my arms feels like after nearly losing it, there is no version of this life where I ever let them go.