Chapter 9
ALICE
THE CHOICE
It’s been three days, and I still haven’t gone back to the darkroom.
I tell myself it’s because I’m busy. Because I have readings to finish, a paper due, laundry turning into a small fabric landslide in the corner of my room. Because the project can wait. Because nothing in those trays needs me badly enough to drag myself back under red lights and chemical stink.
All lies.
The truth is simpler and worse.
Johnny ruined it.
He took the one place I could hide behind a lens and made me feel watched from both sides of the camera.
He made distance feel fake. Made my hands feel wrong holding something that used to make sense.
Every time I think about going back, my stomach folds in on itself, and I find something else to do.
Dishes. Sweeping. Reorganizing my bookshelf by whatever system my brain invents at two in the morning.
Anything except touching my camera bag.
So now my apartment is the only place left that still feels like mine.
The radiator hisses under the window. Rain taps against the glass in uneven little bursts, and the whole building creaks around me every time someone takes the stairs too hard. It’s a shitty second-floor walk-up with thin walls, bad lighting, and a lock
The lock I’d turned on him the other night.
The same one that clicked into place right before I heard Jagger breathe like it hurt.
I hate that I know exactly how he looked at it.
I hate that I keep thinking about him sitting outside my door all night, bloody and furious and too stubborn to leave.
That some part of me felt safer knowing he was there.
A tiny scrape comes from the tank near my desk.
I turn my head. “Please tell me at least one of you has your life together.”
Ernie is sitting in the water dish, fully committed to doing nothing.
Bernie is beside the food bowl, dragging a piece of dried fruit across the sand for no reason I can understand.
He drops it.
Picks it back up.
Drops it again.
“Okay,” I say. “So no.”
Ernie shifts in the water dish and immediately goes back to ignoring me.
Bernie abandons the fruit completely and walks straight through the food bowl, knocking half of it into the sand.
I stare at him.
“Cool. Love the leadership in this apartment.”
My phone buzzes on the bed.
I almost ignore it.
I should ignore it. Every vibration lately feels like a warning.
Jagger.
Johnny.
Milo asking why I look like I got cursed by a Victorian ghost. Campus gossip. Fight clips. Blurry photos. People whispering about Wraith like he isn’t a person, like he’s a campus cryptid with fists.
The phone buzzes again, so I grab it with a sigh and unlock the screen.
It’s a story post from an account I don’t even follow, shared to me by someone with no caption.
Black background. White block letters. Grainy photo of the cage.
brOTHER VS brOTHER.
CUTTER BLOOD IN THE CAGE.
FRIDAY NIGHT.
WRAITH DOESN’T LOSE. FAMILY DOESN’T COUNT.
For a second, I just stare at it.
My brain reads the words once.
Twice.
Then everything inside me drops.
“No,” I say to my empty apartment, sitting up so fast my blanket slides off my lap.
Jagger agreed to fight Johnny.
Amazing.
Fucking perfect.
Because apparently the best solution to trauma, blackmail, and two brothers with enough issues to qualify as a research project is a cage fight while half the campus films it.
I’m not scared at first, which probably says something terrible about me. The first thing I feel is anger. Hot and fucking immediate. Sharp enough to get me on my feet before I even know what I’m doing.
A cage fight won’t fix what happened. It won’t erase the photos. It won’t give me my darkroom back or make Johnny safer, saner or less capable of turning anything he touches into a weapon.
It will put Jagger exactly where Johnny wants him, and he knows that.
That’s what makes it so much worse.
I’m already grabbing my boots.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell the crabs, even though neither of them is looking at me because they are crabs and somehow still the most emotionally stable males in my life. “This is not a spiral, or anything. It’s just an errand.”
Ernie stays half-hidden near the water dish.
Bernie knocks into the food bowl, pauses, then keeps going.
“Very helpful,” I mutter as I head out the door, clicking the lock into place.
Jagger’s loft sits above a mechanic shop on the edge of campus.
By the time I get there, my anger hasn’t cooled. If anything, the walk made it worse. Every step gave my brain more time to picture him in that cage across from Johnny while people scream for blood and pretend it’s just another Friday night.
I pound on his door harder than necessary.
Nothing happens at first.
Then it opens.
Jagger stands on the other side in black sweats and no shirt, damp hair pushed back from his face, a towel thrown over one shoulder. There are bruises across his ribs, one blooming along his jaw, and his knuckles look awful.
Split. Red. Swollen.
Hands that don’t just know violence. Hands that enjoy it.
His eyes move over me, quick and sharp, taking inventory before he can stop himself.
For half a second, surprise cracks through.
Then he buries it.
“What are you doing here?”
I shove past him into the apartment. “Apparently stopping you from doing something stupid is becoming my unpaid internship.”
His place looks too much like him, which pisses me off because I don’t want to know that. Rough. Sparse. Too neat in some places, a disaster in others.
A couch with a tear in one cushion. Fight tape on the coffee table beside a lighter and three empty water bottles. Laundry folded on a chair. Boots by the door. The air smells like detergent, old smoke, and oil from the shop downstairs.
Jagger shuts the door behind me. “Alice.”
“No.”
His brows pull together. “No?”
“No, you don’t get to say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re trying to calm me down before I remember I’m pissed at you.”
“I didn’t know you were pissed.”
I turn on him. “You’re going to fight Johnny.”
Something in his face goes still.
No sign of surprise or guilt.
Which is worse, because that means he already had his answer ready before I even got here.
I laugh once, but it comes out meaner than I expect. “Wow.”
“It’s handled.”
“Oh, okay. Great.” I point at the fight tape on the table. “Love that. Very fucking mature. Nothing says healthy conflict resolution like scheduling violence in advance.”
His jaw tightens. “This isn’t about being mature.”
“Well no shit.”
“He fucking hurt you.”
The words land between us hard enough to make the room feel smaller.
I hate the way my body reacts to them. Hate the little pull low in my stomach, the burn behind my ribs, the ugly mix of fear and heat and memory that comes with both of them now.
Johnny’s hands. Jagger’s mouth.
My own stupid choices sitting on my skin like bruises no one can see.
I fold my arms because I need something to do with my hands. “And you punching him in front of a crowd fixes that how?”
Jagger’s eyes darken. “It’s not about fixing it.”
“Then what is it about?”
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
Exactly.
I step closer, anger climbing higher because I can feel the hurt under it now, and I don’t want hurt. Hurt is embarrassing. Hurt means I came here hoping he’d care enough to listen.
“Say it,” I snap. “Go on. Tell me how this helps me.”
His shoulders shift. “It keeps him away from you.”
“No, it doesn’t.” My voice cracks, and that pisses me off even more. “It gives him a stage, Jagger. It gives him lights, witnesses, noise, and your fucking fists doing exactly what he wanted them to do.”
“He needs to know there are consequences.”
“Johnny gets off on consequences.” I throw a hand toward the door, toward campus, toward whatever fucked-up universe decided I needed to be stuck between the Cutter brothers. “He wants you mad and bloody. He wants everyone chanting Wraith while you lose your shit because of me.”
Jagger flinches.
“You know I’m right,” I say.
His stare cuts back to mine. “I’m not letting him think he can touch you and walk away.”
“And I’m telling you that if you do this, it isn’t for me.”
“It is.”
“No.” I shake my head, stepping back before I get too close, before I do something stupid like touch him.
“It’s for you. It’s because you feel helpless, and you hate it.
It’s because Johnny found a way to hurt you through me, and now you want to hurt him back badly enough that you’re pretending it’s fucking protection. ”
His face hardens.
Good.
Let it.
“This isn’t noble,” I say. “It’s not romantic or some dark, tortured, I’ll-kill-for-you bullshit. It’s two brothers using me as the match and acting shocked when everything around us catches fire.”
His voice drops. “You’re not a match.”
“Then stop fucking treating me like the reason to burn everything down when I didn’t ask to be..”
His eyes darken. “You think I don’t know what he’s doing?”
“I think you know exactly what he’s doing, and you’re still walking into it because you think knowing it’s a trap makes you smarter than the trap.”
“I’m not letting him walk away from this,” Jagger says.
“This isn’t about letting him walk away. It’s about not letting him lead you around by the throat.”
“I’m not scared of Johnny.”
“No.” My voice drops. “You’re scared of what he can do to me.”
He goes quiet, not for long, but long enough that I hear the answer he refuses to give.
It would be easier if I didn’t understand it. If Johnny were only a monster to me.
If all I felt when I thought about him was disgust, fear and the sick black smear he left across my life.
But that isn’t the truth.
The truth is uglier than that.
Johnny terrifies me because he means it.
Because when he looks at me, there’s no game of pretend underneath.
No line he’s quietly promising not to cross.
No hidden softness waiting to catch me if I fall too hard.
He makes my body hum in ways I hate because it feels like standing too close to something live and dangerous, wondering what would happen if I stopped being smart for one second.
With Jagger, the fear is different.