Chapter 18 Bellamy
EIGHTEEN
BELLAMY
I’m already moving.
Lola’s voice somewhere to my left, Ryder’s mouth forming words I don’t catch—I’m already gone.
“Stay with them.”
“Wait—where are you going?” Lola yells.
The crowd swallows me before I have to answer.
I cut between bodies, ducking past shoulders and elbows, past the sharp surge of noise as the fight to my right spikes louder.
The farther I push from the main floor, the more the heat drops out of the air, the bass thinning to something I feel more than hear. A side corridor opens up. I take it.
He slips into the last door at the end of the hall. It drifts open behind him, a thin blade of light falling across the concrete floor.
I follow.
The room is smaller than it looks from the doorway. Concrete walls, low ceiling, a bench, two chairs, a sink bolted crookedly to the far wall like an afterthought. The overhead light flickers once, then holds—the kind of light that makes everything look like evidence.
Bishop is braced over the sink, both hands locked around the edges, knuckles pale with the effort.
Blood moves in slow lines down his forearms, gathering dark at his wrists before it drops into the basin.
More of it at his cheekbone, the skin split and already beginning to swell, a thin trail working its way from his brow toward his eye.
“Get out.” There’s no inflection in his voice. He doesn’t look up.
I close the door. The latch catches with a soft click.
For a second, I just watch him.
The way his shoulders rise and fall, steady despite the fight he just finished.
I watch the muscles in his back shift when he adjusts his grip on the sink.
The way his tattoos curl around his body, like they’ve always been a part of him.
The way he tilts his head a fraction to the left, blinking once—blood getting too close to his eye.
Why the fuck is he so goddamn attractive like this?
I step closer, stopping a few feet behind him. “Let me help you.”
I don’t know if it’s an entirely altruistic offer.
He huffs something under his breath that might be a laugh, but it doesn’t carry any humor with it. His head lifts just enough that our eyes meet in the mirror—his gaze catching mine through the scratched, clouded glass above the sink. There’s nothing soft in it.
“What the fuck are you doing here, Bellamy?” he grinds out.
My gaze flicks to the blood dripping into the sink and back to his eyes. “I’m going to help you.”
“Shouldn’t you be with your date?” The last word slithers out of his mouth like it’s sour on his tongue.
It takes a second to figure out what he means, but when I do, I don’t bother smothering my smirk.
“You sound jealous.” I tilt my head, tsking my faux displeasure.
He barks out a laugh—sharp, humorless, the kind that’s more scoff than anything else. “I don’t care who you talk to, Hale.” His eyes cut back to mine in the mirror. “But my brothers might.”
“Okay, Calloway.” I mimic his tone on his last name as I roll my eyes. I’m not worried about his idle threats.
Blood slips into his eye then, and he swears under his breath, blinking hard as he drags one hand up to wipe at it. It only makes it worse—smearing red across his skin instead of clearing it.
“Jesus Christ.” I step fully into the space next to him now. “Stop being so stubborn and let me help you.”
“I’ve got it.”
“You really don’t.”
He goes still when my fingers close around his wrist. We hold there for a beat, his eyes lifting back to mine in the mirror, something sharper sliding into his expression.
“Fucking everywhere,” he murmurs, voice low and edged in irritation.
“Your blood? Yeah, so sit down.”
For a second, neither of us move. Then he straightens slowly, turning just enough to face me fully before stepping back and dropping onto the narrow bench. The movement is controlled and deliberate. Like he wants to make sure I know that he allowed it rather than conceded.
“Relax, Bishop.” I pull a towel from the top of his bag, run it under the tap, wring it out. “No one’s watching. You can drop the act.”
When I turn back, he’s watching me with his elbows on his knees, hands loose between them.
I step between his knees. He doesn’t move back—but his hands pull in, and even that small retreat costs him something, I can tell. Not before one grazes my outer thigh, though.
His breath snags. “It’s not an act.”
“Hold still.” I press the damp towel to the cut above his brow, careful without being gentle.
He doesn’t flinch, not that I expected him to. But I feel the tension move through him anyway—not dissolving, just rerouting, finding somewhere else to live.
“Or what?” His voice has dropped.
I roll my eyes as I grab a few butterfly bandages from the small first-aid kit on the chair. “Or I make it worse.”
“Isn’t that your specialty?” he bites out. “Making things worse for everyone you get involved with?”
I meet his eyes again, this time without the mirror between us. “Is that what this is about? You trying to sabotage my relationships with your brothers?”
I press the last butterfly bandage flat against his cheekbone, smoothing the edges down with my thumb—and his jaw tightens, a muscle feathering beneath the skin just under where my fingers rest.
His hand comes up without warning, catching my wrist where it rests against his face. “Is that what you’re calling it these days? A relationship?” A caustic laugh scrapes out of his throat. “Tell me, sweetheart, do my brothers know that you’re fucking all of them and some random asshole?”
Surprise sinks its fangs into me, a quick, venomous strike. I pull my hand free and step back until my ass hits the sink.
It doesn’t surprise me that he’s playing this card. It’s shocks me that he’s playing it so hard… which means I can probably use this to my advantage.
Bishop’s spent so much time hating me these last few months that it’s clouded his memory. But I haven’t forgotten.
He watches me as I drop the bloody towel in the sink. My head tips to the side as I connect some dots.
“So you haven’t told Gage what you saw at the party.” Not a question. “Or in Sableine.” I let that land, then let my gaze travel down—slow, deliberate, unhurried—across his throat, his chest, the blood still drying on his forearms. “How interesting.”
The air between us pulls taut. Whatever this is, it has teeth.
He leans back slightly on the bench, head tilting a fraction, eyes narrowing like he’s rearranging pieces on a board he thought he already had figured out. “Was that your plan? Have me break my brother’s heart with the news of you and Rafe?”
I let a beat pass. Two. My lashes lower just slightly as I plant the toe of my sneaker on the bench between his spread knees without touching him and use it to perch back against the sink’s edge. I look down at him.
“Would that break Gage’s heart?” I sink my teeth into my bottom lip for just a second before releasing it. “Do you think he’d fight for me, Bishop?”
He trails his gaze along my bare leg before his eyes lift to mine. His mouth curves—just barely, just enough.
“You got daddy issues, Bellamy?”
A slow grin pulls at my mouth and I tilt my knee left, then right. “Are you auditioning, Bishop?”
Something in his expression shifts. The curve dies. His eyes slink over me like a silken feather. “Not even if you paid me.”
I lift a shoulder and let it fall. “Daddy is a state of mind, Bishop. And Rafe gives me—”
“No one’s giving you shit once my brothers find out you’re fucking random assholes at The Pit.” Anticipation lights up in his face when he says it.
Something slots into place.
I let my expression go soft. Let my teeth catch my bottom lip. Let my eyes do the rest. “What do you want, Bishop?”
His hands close into fists against his thighs. “Leave Hollow Beach.” His voice is flat. “Don’t come back.”
I let my leg sway again and something close to a laugh moves through me. “C’mon, that’s not what you really want. Besides, that defeats the whole purpose.”
“Alright. Option one: leave town. Option two: on your knees.” He nods a few times, his gaze intense as he flashes his teeth with a grin.
The words hang between us.
It’s a taunt and a bullshit test. He expects me to snap back, to storm off so he’s justified in whatever conclusion he’s already come to about me and his brothers.
I can see it in the way his shoulders have already rolled back slightly, weight redistributed, chin lifted—the posture of a man who has already decided how this ends.
But I live to surprise this man.
I hold his eyes as I lower my foot to the ground and so very slowly sink to my knees. Just enough to change the angle between us, to shift the balance, to make him remember who the fuck I am. Because this is a position of power, and he just handed it to me.
Something moves across his face before he can stop it—a sharp pull at the corner of his jaw, a single blink that comes just a half-second too late. His hand closes into a fist against his thigh.
“Come on, sweetheart.” His voice has dropped, the grin gone now, replaced with something quieter and more dangerous. “Now crawl to me.”