Chapter 15 #3
Kadin notices the movement but keeps going anyway. “She looked off before the party even got bad,” he says. “Then you showed up near the pool, and everything about her changed. She was tense. Distracted. Like she was trying too hard to act fine.”
His gaze stays level on mine.
“I don’t know every detail. I’m not pretending I do. But I know enough to recognize when someone is getting under a person’s skin in a way that isn’t good for them.”
I lean back against the sink because if I don’t anchor myself to something, the urge to shut him up with force is going to start looking too reasonable.
“You’re making assumptions.”
“I know what you are,” he says.
There is no hesitation in it now. He wants me to know.
“I saw enough,” he continues, “to know you’ve got a past that follows you around for a reason.”
The fluorescent lights hum overhead. My reflection waits in the mirror behind him, face hardening by degrees. Looking at Kadin, I see the shape of his confidence, the ease with which he thinks he can stand in front of me and say these things because what protects him is not strength.
It’s her.
He knows it too.
“If you care about her at all,” he says, “then stop making your damage her problem.”
The sentence lands and sits there.
I could tell him he doesn’t know what damage looks like.
I could tell him he kissed her once in a pool and decided he understands the architecture of her hurt.
I could tell him that if he had ever had to live inside a body that reacts before your mind can save you, he’d stop speaking in clean moral lines and start understanding that want and fear are not opposites for some people.
Instead, I ask the only thing that still sounds honest.
“What do you want from her?”
Kadin exhales through his nose, almost impatient now. “I told you. I like her.”
“That’s still not an answer.”
His mouth tightens. “Fine. I want whatever she wants to give. Time. A chance. Something normal, if she wants that. I don’t want to own her. I don’t want to confuse her. And I sure as hell don’t want to drag her into whatever this is with you.”
Whatever this is.
My hands flatten against the edge of the sink behind me.
He sees the reaction and presses harder.
“You want her,” he says again, more quietly this time. “And that’s exactly why you need to stay away from her.”
That one does it.
Not all at once. More like something inside me finally gives way.
I look at him. At the certainty in his face. At the moral neatness of him. At the way he thinks if he says the right things in the right order, he can stand here and reduce me to the worst lines on a page and call it protection.
Maybe he’s right about some of it.
Maybe that’s what makes me move.
I don’t hit him.
I want to.
Instead I turn sharply, one violent step away from him, and my fist goes through the mirror over the sinks before thought can catch up.
Glass explodes outward with a crack that rips through the bathroom.
It rains into the basin, onto the counter, onto the floor in glittering shards.
Pain flashes white-hot across my knuckles and up my wrist, immediate and useless and exactly not enough.
My reflection breaks into a dozen fractured versions of itself, each one warped, split, and ugly in a different way.
The sound leaves Kadin dead still behind me.
My hand comes back bloodied.
The fluorescent lights buzz on like nothing happened.
For a second, neither of us says anything. The only sound in the room is the slow tick of broken glass settling in the sink and my own breathing, too rough now to hide.
When I finally look at him again, it is through a spiderweb of shattered reflection.
He stands a few feet behind me, shoulders tight now, eyes fixed on my hand and then my face and then the ruined sink between us. The confidence is still there, but it has changed shape. He believes me now in a way he didn’t have to a minute ago.
Good.
Turning fully toward him, blood still tracks down the side of my hand, the look on his face almost pushing me over the edge all over again. Not because he looks scared. Because he looks like he’s still trying to decide whether I’m proving him right or proving something worse.
“Go,” I tell him.
The word comes out rough, scraped raw by the effort it takes not to close the distance between us.
He doesn’t.
I take one step forward.
“Go,” I hiss again, louder this time, every bit of control I have left packed into the shape of the sentence. “Before I break you too.”
That lands.
Not because it sounds theatrical. Because it doesn’t. There’s no raised voice in it. No dramatic posture. Just the truth of what I am capable of if he stays in this room another thirty seconds and keeps looking at me like he understands anything.
Kadin finally exhales, glancing once at the broken mirror, once at my bleeding hand, then back at me.
Whatever else he wants to say dies in his throat.
For a second I think he might test it anyway.
Might say her name again. Might try to hold onto the moral ground he came in here standing on.
But he must see something in my face that talks him out of it, because he gives a small nod instead.
Not agreement. Not surrender. Just the acknowledgment of a line.
Then he steps backward toward the door.
His hand finds the handle behind him without his eyes ever leaving mine.
When the door opens, hallway noise spills briefly into the room, bright, careless, and disgustingly normal.
He pauses there for one final second, jaw tight, as if he’s still debating whether there’s something worth saying over his shoulder.
There isn’t.
He leaves.
The door swings shut again, and I’m alone with the shattered mirror, the sting in my hand, and the ugly certainty that none of this fixed a goddamn thing.