Chapter 24 #2
He has the chance. I can feel it in the way his breathing stutters under my forearm, in the way his hands finally come up to my wrist and shirt not to fight, but to create space.
He knows now that this is no longer some smug little confrontation in a bathroom or a clean argument in a doorway.
He knows he has stepped into something older than campus jealousy, much more dangerous than his idea of me had accounted for.
Somehow he still opens his mouth.
“The rumors about her,” he says, voice strained but still carrying enough spite to make the sentence clear, “must have been true.”
Something in me goes absolutely still.
He sees it too late.
“The damaged ones,” he says, a sick little curl pulling up the corner of his mouth, “are always the tightest-”
My fist collides with his face before he can finish.
The first punch lands hard enough to snap his head sideways into the wall. There is a crack, not of bone, but of impact, his breath leaving him all at once. His body folds badly under the force, my grip on his shirt preventing him from falling away from it.
I hit him again.
This time in the mouth.
His head jerks back, blood appearing where his lip splits.
The sight of it should stop me. It doesn’t.
All I can hear is the sentence he just said and the room around it collapsing into red.
The worst part is not the insult. It’s that he took the ugliest parts of her history and turned them into a joke men tell each other in locker rooms and every other place women aren’t meant to hear what their bodies become in men’s mouths.
The third punch lands lower, catching cheekbone and jaw.
He tries to get his hands up properly then, but it’s too late for that.
He is no fighter. Not really. Not against this.
Not against me when I’ve already crossed into the place where everything narrows into the need to make him pay for every syllable.
He goes down crookedly, sliding partly along the wall before I drag him back up by the front of his shirt.
“Say it again,” I hear myself snarl, though I don’t know if I want him to. “Say it again.”
He can’t. Not clearly. He’s gasping now, blood on his chin, eyes wide with the kind of shock that always comes when men mistake cruelty for strength before finding out too late there’s a difference.
Hitting him once more for good measure, I can still hear the almost-finished word in the room, still feel it trying to stain the air where her name exists.
Then I drag him.
Not far at first. Just enough to get him moving, stumbling under his own feet, one hand clawing at my wrist, the other trying and failing to stay useful.
I pull him out of my room and into the hall like dead weight with a heartbeat, his shoes skidding badly on the wood.
He manages one weak attempt to wrench free.
I slam him into the wall again for that.
By the time we reach the top of the stairs, he’s half-doubled over, breathing like every inhale hurts.
Good.
Fisting the front of his shirt tighter, I force him upright enough that he has no choice but to look at me.
“If you come near her again,” I say, my voice low now, too low, the kind of quiet that always meant danger in my father before he stopped pretending with words at all, “I will kill you.”
I mean him to believe it.
He does.
That’s the thing I see first in his face. Not only pain. Not only anger. Belief.
Letting go, he staggers down the first few stairs awkwardly, catching himself on the banister before he can pitch forward entirely. His breath is ragged now, one hand over his mouth, the other grabbing for the railing while he tries to orient himself through shock.
At the bottom, he turns back just enough to look up at me.
There’s bewilderment there first, because men like him never fully expect violence until it finds them. Then that gives way to something meaner. Something promising.
Wiping his mouth, he stares at the blood on his hand as if it personally offends him.
“You’re going to regret that.” He hisses, speaking through a torn, gasping breath.
The sentence doesn’t come out as a threat so much as a vow.
Opening the front door, he leaves, shutting it hard enough to rattle the frame. Silence rushes in after him, consuming the space in an eerie quiet.
For a second I stay where I am at the top of the stairs, chest heaving, blood running warm over my knuckles, trailing down into my palm.
The whole house feels like it’s holding its breath around me.
I can feel the violence still in my body, not fading, just settling deeper, finding places to live now that the movement is over.
Then I turn.
Octavia is standing halfway in the doorway of her room.
Or maybe she was. By the time I fully face the hall, she is already slipping back inside, her hand on the frame, her face emptied out into something so blank it unsettles me more than if she’d screamed.
She saw all of it.
The punches. The dragging. The threat. The exact shape of my violence when I stop trying to keep it inside.
Yet, she didn’t say a word.
That realization lands harder than Kadin’s fists ever could have.
Because now I don’t know what the silence means. Fear. Shock. Recognition. Confirmation of every terrible thing she should think of me. The blank look on her face before she disappeared is worse than hatred would have been, because hatred at least would be clear.
Instead, I’m left standing there in the hallway with blood on my hands, the echo of my own threat still in the house, realizing she watched me become exactly what everyone has always warned her I am.
Worst of all…she didn’t even try to stop me.