Page 268 of Cross Checked
“I know exactly what you are.”
His lips peeled back slightly. “What you think and what I know are not the same.”
“You—” I pointed at him, slow and deliberate. “A coward with a scrapbook full of high school highlights and a deeply perverted, depraved attraction to young girls. You are grotesque.”
The knife lifted a fraction, and he wanted a reaction, but if he thought I would run screaming down the corridor, he was a dumb motherfucker too.
“You think prison’s gonna be kind to you?” I asked softly. “You think those boys are gonna care about your old stat sheets? You gonna tell them you used to be somebody in Kimball Falls? Maybe bring up your best season? Maybe they’ll let you hang a little newspaper clipping above your bunk.”
His face went red, and the mask finally split.
Finally.
The real Luke Dempsey had arrived.
“I’ll make sure they know what you did,” I said. “Every guy in whatever cage they toss you into. Every guard. Every inmate. Every person who hears your name. You wanted to be famous, Glory Days? You’re gonna be famous.”
His breathing changed when I stepped closer again.
Stupid? Maybe.
Worth it? Absolutely.
“I can see it now. ‘Child rapist given sixty years.’” I looked at him with a dramatic glint. “You will go to bed in fear every night once the world knows who you are.”
Luke moved so fast most people would have missed the shift from standing to threat. I didn’t. His shoulder rolled first from his right side.
His blade hand.
The kind of movement that should’ve made me step back if I was a sane person with any interest in self-preservation.
But I saw Bliss’s throat in my head.
The bruises and the way her voice broke when she tried to turn unbearable things into something I could survive hearing. The way she had looked at me and asked me to read between the lines because she did not want to hand me the worst part of herself in detail.
The way Luke had sat at her family’s table for years while she suffered in silence.
So, I smiled at him.
“You gonna do something?” I asked. “Or are you just here to prove you need a weapon because you can’t take me without one?”
His control snapped.
“Fuck you,” he snarled.
“There’s the truth,” I said, and my voice dropped into something almost pleased. “That’s the guy Bliss knows.”
He lunged.
I expected the hit. I expected fists. A shove. Maybe a wild swing I could use to put him through the nearest wall and let every cop in Sutton County find him bleeding on concrete with the truth on the floor beside him.
I did not expect the blade to come first.
For one brutal second, the silver line of it flashed toward my ribs, and everything in me narrowed to instinct, movement, and the sudden, vicious realization that Luke Dempsey had not come here to scare me.
He had come here prepared to spill blood.
And Bliss was still outside waiting for me.
