6 #3
I turned toward him slowly. “That’s rich from the man who let Brinley climb him like a campus landmark five minutes ago.”
His jaw tightened. “Brinley didn’t mean anything.”
“And Gage did?”
“No.” His voice dropped. “That’s the point.”
The words should not have hurt. They were aimed at him as much as me, a confession wrapped in cruelty, but they cut anyway because he was right.
Gage had not meant anything. Brinley had not meant anything.
They were bodies we dragged into the room because neither of us knew how to touch each other without drawing blood anymore.
I stepped around the island, closing enough distance to make Cade shift. “You don’t get to decide what means something to me.”
Easton laughed beneath his breath. “You spent a year making sure I knew I didn’t.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then say what is.”
My chest tightened. “Don’t start demanding truth from me after seven months of public punishment.”
“Public punishment?” His eyes flashed. “You think that’s what this has been?”
“You make sure I see them.”
“Good.”
He stepped into my space before the word finished cutting through the air. His eyes moved over me with lazy, brutal familiarity, and my stomach turned because I knew that look.
I had seen it in the dark, against his sheets, and beneath his body. I knew what it meant when it was hunger, when it was want, and when he was two seconds from putting his hands on me and ruining my ability to think.
The word came out so fast and honestly that the kitchen went quiet in a different way.
Bliss whispered, “Easton.”
He ignored her. For once, there was nothing controlled in his face. The cold remained, but it had cracked apart, exposing heat and hurt in rough, ugly pieces.
“Good,” he said again, rougher now. “I wanted you to see them. I wanted you to know I could let someone touch me and not fall apart. I wanted one minute where you looked at me like losing me cost you something.”
My breath caught before I could stop it.
Easton saw.
His mouth twisted, and he laughed. “There. That. That’s what I wanted.”
I hated him.
I hated him so much in that moment it felt exactly like wanting him, which made the hate worse.
“You’re disgusting,” I said.
“No, I’m tired.” He leaned closer, and Cade’s hand rose without touching him yet. Easton didn’t even look his way. “I’m tired of being the idiot who played your game by my rules and got fucked in the end.”
“Your rules?” I laughed, mean and humorless. “Do you think that makes you a martyr?”
“No. Did you think having your ‘rules’ made you innocent?”
He made air quotes around the word, and the gesture struck too close to the center.
Bliss and Charm both lowered their heads because they knew exactly what button he had pushed.
Maybe now they saw my point.
Easton’s gaze flicked toward them, quick and lethal, and I saw the precise second he caught the movement. The slight change in his breathing told me he had found a seam.
His eyes returned to mine. “What?”
I lifted my chin. “Nothing.”
“That was not nothing.”
“It is to you.”
“It becomes something to me when I’m the one paying for it.”
Cade stepped in then, settling a palm against Easton’s chest. “Wade, back off.”
Easton stared at me over Cade’s shoulder. “No. I want to know what the hell I’ve been punished for.”
“You were punished?” My voice turned sweet in the way that meant I was about to become unforgivable. “Poor Easton. Did the girl with rules hurt your feelings?”
His face changed, and for half a second, I saw the boy from his bedroom the night everything ended—the one standing there in sweats, exhausted, beautiful, and furious, asking me to stop making him feel pathetic for loving me.
Then that boy disappeared.
“Yeah,” he said. “She did.”
That was somehow worse than a comeback.
I looked away first, and the room noticed because it was full of traitors with eyes.
Easton stepped around Cade, and Cade caught his hoodie in one fist before he could get too close. Easton stopped, but barely.
“You want to talk about hurt?” he asked. “Fine. Let’s talk about the year I spent being careful with you. Every move I made around your fucking rules was done with absolute fucking respect. Every time I broke one, you allowed it because with me, you didn’t want those rules.”
His mouth curled around my name.
“No names, right, Aura?”
My lungs stopped working correctly.
His voice lowered, which made everything worse. “I broke every rule you put between us because I thought I made you feel safe. And for what? For you to treat me like I was the burden?”
The kitchen blurred around the edges as he laid it all out for everyone to hear. Then, to add insult to injury, he started ticking the rules off one finger at a time.
“No lights. No names. Never fully naked. No phones in the room. No promises, and never give anyone proof that it was an actual fucking thing.”
He didn’t know.
He didn’t fucking know.
I repeated it to myself as if I were padding his landing, but the words still slipped beneath my skin like they had been made to find that exact wound.
Bliss stepped forward. “Easton, you need to stop now. This is too far. Please.”
His eyes cut toward her. “Please what?”
She froze.
Charm moved beside her, her shoulder brushing Bliss’s. “Aura, maybe you should just tell him enough to—”
“No.”
The word snapped through the kitchen as rage fueled me because how fucking dare she.
Charm’s mouth closed, but it was too late.
Easton went still.
Ryan lifted his head from where he stood by the island, his expression tightening for the first time all night. Rider shifted near the archway like he knew the room had changed direction, and Briggs stopped pretending this was something humor could survive.
Easton looked from Charm to Bliss before slowly returning his gaze to me.
“What does that mean?”
“It means nothing.”
His eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.”
“Easton,” Cade warned.
“No.” Easton shook him off, not hard enough to hurt him but enough to lock Cade’s jaw. “Apparently everybody gets to know why I’m the villain except me.”
“You’re making yourself the villain just fine,” I said.
His laugh came out jagged. “Then tell me who fucked you up and why I got stuck being the sacrifice.”
Bliss’s eyes filled. “Ay, he doesn’t know where he’s hitting.”
I looked at her, and the pain came so hard I almost stepped back because she had said it right there in front of him.
In front of Cade, Briggs, Rider, Ryan, and whoever remained close enough in the living room to hear the ugliness moving through the kitchen.
She had confirmed I was hiding something integral.
Charm swallowed. “She’s right.”
I stared at her too.
They were my best friends, my sisters, and the women who knew every detail of my rape, standing in the middle of Hockey House and telling me to unlock a door while everyone watched.
I laughed once, and it sounded nothing like laughter. “Wow.”
Bliss shook her head quickly. “No. That’s not what I meant.”
“It’s exactly what you meant.”
“No, I meant—”
“You meant I should make this easier for him.” My voice stayed calm, which was how I knew it was bad. “Right here. Right now. In front of everyone.”
Charm’s face crumpled. “No, Aura. I meant you should stop letting him tear into a wound he can’t see.”
Easton’s breath changed, and I hated her for that.
Not forever. Maybe not in a way that would survive morning.
But in that kitchen, with my skin too tight and my name still living in places I never wanted touched, I hated that Charm had given him enough to keep digging.
Of course she wanted the reasonable middle. Ryan had spent months teaching her that Easton’s pain deserved equal space.
Easton locked his eyes on mine. “What wound?”
I didn’t answer.
“Tell me.”
“No.”
His jaw flexed. “Tell me whose mistakes I’ve been paying for.”
The sentence hit so hard the room disappeared.
Whose mistakes.
My throat tightened, and for one horrible second, I was no longer in Hockey House.
I was beneath lights too bright to hide from, seeing myself on that bed from a distance I had never asked for. My face was the only face anyone could see.
Mine. Always mine.
The rest of them remained shadows, hands, and voices beyond the frame, laughing softly, mocking me, and saying my name like it was the punch line.
They repeated it until the name stopped sounding like mine, until it became proof and a vulgar image I could never peel from my head no matter how many years I spent dressing it in lip gloss, grades, rules, and rage.
Aura. Aura. Aura.
Then I was back.
Easton stood in front of me, breathing hard, furious, broken, and so fucking blind I wanted to scream.
“You don’t get to ask me that.”
“I do when you made me suffer inside it.”
“No.” I stepped toward him before anyone could stop me. “You lived inside your version of it. You took every rule I had and decided it was about you. You took every locked door and made yourself the poor man standing outside it.”
My hands had started shaking, but I no longer cared.
“Now you want answers because my damage inconvenienced your heartbreak, and you refuse to see that I will never hand you the worst thing that happened to me just so you can feel better about being hurt.”
His face tightened. “I respected you in every way. Do not act like I didn’t.”
“Then respect this one.”
“What one? What rule?”
I leaned closer. “The one that says you don’t get to know.”
The room went dead silent.
Easton looked like I had slapped him. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”
“No.” His voice broke roughly around the edge. “You don’t get to keep doing this. You don’t get to keep me in the dark over shit that hurts you, then turn around and make me the villain every time I get too close to the nerve.”
“You are cruel.”
“I am destroyed!”
The words tore out of him, and no one moved.
Easton looked like he hated that he had said them. His chest rose hard, his eyes bright with rage and humiliation as the whole room stared while the truth he had tried to freeze for seven months burned through what remained of his control.