Page 82 of Beautiful When He Breaks

I don’t know who spotted us first or how much they saw, only that the timing is perfect enough to feel like divine intervention and terrible enough to make my knees go weak after the fact.

Blakely sees them and drops his hand from the reflexive half-curl it had started into. He steps back, smoothing his shirt as if resetting his image will somehow erase what just happened.

Eli doesn’t slow down at all.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he demands, and there’s no mistaking who he’s talking to.

Luca catches Eli by the arm before he can fully launch himself into the other man’s throat. The move is smooth and practiced, almost casual, if you don’t know how much force Luca can put behind a grip when he wants to.

“Easy,” he says, low and hard, though there’s nothing remotely calm in his face either. “Not here.”

“I’ll kill him right here,” Eli snaps.

Ryan looks between all of us, brain not catching up. “Hold on, what the hell is happening?” he asks, frowning, then turns to Blakely. “Coach?”

Watching the confusion hit him in real time makes my stomach turn sour all over again. This is what power does. It hides in roles people trust.

Blakely straightens his shirt and goes for dignity so fast it would be laughable if I weren’t still shaky with adrenaline. “There seems to be some misunderstanding.”

Eli actually laughs, but there’s no humor in his tone. “Yeah? Looked pretty clear to me.”

Blakely’s eyes cut to him with immediate contempt, which is exactly the wrong move when Killian King is standing six feet away.

Killian looks at Blakely with that dead-flat expression that says he already knows enough and what he doesn’t know yet is only a scheduling issue. “You should leave,” he says.

Blakely looks at him the way men look at boys they think haven’t earned the right to speak in grown-up conflicts. He has no idea who the fuck he’s standing in front of. “This doesn’t concern you.”

Killian’s mouth twitches once, but there’s nothing close to amusement in it. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

Eli tries to jerk free of Luca’s hold. “I’ll make it concern me.”

Luca tightens his grip just enough to stop him without making a scene of it. “Not here,” he says again. “Not like this.”

I know he’s right. Eli knows he’s right too, which only makes the fury on his face worse because there’s nowhere for it to go. His eyes cut to me for half a second, and what I see there almost undoes me all over again.

Blakely’s gaze moves across the group, probably calculating rank, risk, and which one of us is most likely to be a problem in the shortest amount of time. He makes the mistake of landing on Killian last.

“You leave now, and maybe the next conversation we have about this happens somewhere with witnesses and paperwork,” Killian says. “Or you keep standing close to him, and I stop being polite.”

Blakely scoffs, but it’s thinner than he wants it to be. “You’re threatening me?”

Killian gives him the smallest tilt of the head. “No. I’m promising that whatever you thought you had under control is over. Walk away now while you still get to pretend this was a misunderstanding.”

I don’t think Ryan has ever heard Killian sound like that before. Judging by the expression on his face, he doesn’t know whether to be confused, scared, or ready to throw up.

Blakely knows, though. That’s the thing I clock immediately. He finally looks rattled because of the social terrain shifting under his feet. Killian is exactly the kind of wealthy, well-connected nightmare that turns “misunderstandings” into career-ending realities if you push him in the wrong direction. Whatever he sees in all of us, when added together, makes him recalculate.

He smooths one hand down the front of his polo and says, “You should all think very carefully about what you’re assuming.”

Eli takes one hard step forward before Luca can fully stop him. “We’re not assuming a fucking thing.”

“Eli,” Luca says sharply, and there’s enough command in it that Eli actually checks himself.

Blakely’s gaze flicks to me once. Whatever he expects to find there—fear, shame, or second thoughts—isn’t enough to keep him rooted. He backs off first in the only way men like him ever do, by pretending retreat is a choice he was already considering.

“This conversation isn’t over,” he says to me, trying for control and landing closer to a threat.

“The fuck it isn’t,” Killian answers before I can.