Page 15 of Blades Out
Maybe not consciously. Maybe not clearly. But something in her remembered me the same way I remembered her.
And that was the most dangerous thing possible.
The memory slammed into me before I could stop it.
Screams through apartment walls. High-pitched, desperate. The kind that said someone wasn't playing around anymore—that whatever was happening had crossed a line most people pretended didn't exist in their neighborhood.
I'd been younger then. Still playing, still angry, still carrying too much rage with nowhere to put it except the ice. I'd hesitated for maybe three seconds before I'd gone next door. Pounded hard enough to rattle the frame.
The silence that followed was worse than the screaming.
Then the door cracked open.
And I saw her.
Small. Bleeding from somewhere I couldn't immediately place. Eyes too wide, too shocked, like she'd stopped processing reality somewhere between the screaming and my fist hitting wood. A child. Maybe six or seven. Standing in a hallway that reeked of alcohol and violence and something darker I didn't have words for.
She'd looked at me like I might be another monster.
I'd carried her out, anyway.
Social services came. Police came. The whole ugly machine ground through its process while I gave my statement and tried not to think about the blood on her shirt or the way she'd flinched when the EMT touched her shoulder.
I never saw her again after that night. Never knew her name until I overheard it years later—a case file mentioned in passing, something about protective custody and a relative who took her in. Olivia. The little girl from 4B who'd survived her father's latest breakdown.
The screams had been hers.
That realization hit me months too late, when I couldn't do anything about it except carry the weight of knowing I'd heard her terror through the walls and almost hadn't acted fast enough.
I shut the memory down. Hard. Slammed it back into the mental box where it belonged.
I refused to think about her father. Refused to picture what had been happening before I knocked. Refused to imagine the nights I hadn't heard screaming—the ones where she'd learned to stay quiet, learned to survive without making noise, learned that help might not come at all. Refused to think about what she'd endured after that night. After I'd handed her off to strangers and walked away because I wasn't equipped to do anything else.
My hands had curled into fists without permission.
I forced them open. Breathed. Focused on the present.
She was here. Alive. Functioning. Working a job she desperately needed to keep.
That had to be enough.
You're not responsible for her.
The thought arrived sharp and clear, like a voice from outside my own head. Logic. Reason. The kind of detachment I'd spent decades perfecting.
She was an adult now. Had her own life, her own battles, her own path. What happened fifteen years ago didn't create some permanent obligation. I'd done what anyone should've done that night—intervened when intervention was needed. Nothing more.
The debt, if there'd ever been one, was paid.
You shouldn't even be looking at her.
That one landed harder.
Because I had looked. In the café, when her eyes met mine and something tightened low in my gut that had nothing to do with memory or guilt. When I'd cataloged the shape of her mouth, the nervous energy in her hands, the way she held herself like she expected the world to hit back. When I'd noticed she was beautiful in a way that made my chest ache.
Wrong. That entire line of thinking was wrong. Tainted by history—by the image of a terrified child that would never fully separate from the woman standing in front of me. How could I look at her as anything other than someone I'd failed to protect completely? Someone who carried scars I'd only witnessed the beginning of?
The attraction felt like a violation. Not of her—she didn't even know I felt it—but of something fundamental in myself. Some line I'd never imagined crossing.
