Page 270 of Cross Checked
That got under my skin, but I didn’t give him the reaction yet. I couldn’t afford to. My side was burning now, each breath tugging at the cut hard enough to make my vision sharpen around the edges. Not deep enough to drop me. Not yet. But enough to remind me that knives didn’t play by hockey rules. There were no whistles here. No refs. No bench doors. No penalty box waiting after someone took it too far.
Just concrete and my blood.
Luke’s gaze dropped to the dark stain spreading beneath my jacket, and something smug crawled over his face. “She was mine before she was anything to you.”
“You stole a fourteen-year-old’s voice. That makes you putrid, and it makes her your victim.”
The sentence landed in the corridor like something diseased.
For one second, everything in me wanted to stop being controlled. I wanted the wall to break. Wanted the rage to get loud enough to turn my body into nothing but impact. Wanted to hit him until every tear, every fake smile, every demand of silence was paid back in a language monsters understood.
But Luke wanted the explosion.
He needed it.
Predators built entire lives around making other people look unstable.
So I didn’t explode.
I stayed cold and controlled.
I stepped closer, slow enough to make him watch it happen. “She didn’t belong to you. She survived you.”
His breath punched out through his nose.
“And now?” I tilted my head. “Now she laughs in my bed. Sleeps in my shirts. Wears my name across her back in frontof anyone that wants to look at her. You can keep choking on what you used to have, Glory Days, but every version of her that matters sees you for what you are.”
The knife came up, and his control cracked wide open. I expected the next lunge, but I didn’t respect the speed of it enough.
He rushed me with a guttural sound that barely resembled words, and I turned into him, catching his wrist with both hands before the blade could reach my chest. Momentum carried us hard into the opposite wall. My shoulder hit first. Pain ripped down my side, hot enough to make my breath stall, but I held onto his wrist and drove my knee into his thigh.
Luke grunted, staggering half a step, and I used the opening to pummel him, taking every shot I could. My fist connected with his jaw, and his head snapped sideways. The sound of it echoed through the corridor with a sick, flat crack that should have satisfied something in me.
It didn’t.
He came back smiling through blood at the corner of his mouth. “You hit like a man who knows he’s gonna die,” he spat.
I hit him again and felt his nose crunch.
He stumbled, but the knife stayed in his hand because cowards loved their advantages. I grabbed for his wrist again, but he twisted at the last second and drove forward with all his weight.
The blade went in under my rib, sickeningly smooth.
For one suspended second, my brain refused to understand it.
Then my body did.
Pain detonated through me, deep and wrong, a vicious internal pressure that stole every bit of air from my lungs. My hand locked around his jacket to keep myself from going down.Luke was close enough that I could see the broken red veins in his eyes, could smell beer and sweat and old anger on his breath.
His mouth curled near my ear. “She’ll cry at your funeral and I’ll fuck her then too.”
The world went silent.
Not metaphorically but actually silent.
The buzzing lights, the distant crowd, the hum through the walls, the wet sound of my own breathing—everything dropped away beneath that sentence.
Bliss.
