Page 86 of Where Your Scars Meet Mine
Whatever this is.
My hands flatten against the edge of the sink behind me.
He sees the reaction and presses harder.
“You want her,” he says again, more quietly this time. “And that’s exactly why you need to stay away from her.”
That one does it.
Not all at once. More like something inside me finally gives way.
I look at him. At the certainty in his face. At the moral neatness of him. At the way he thinks if he says the right things in the right order, he can stand here and reduce me to the worst lines on a page and call it protection.
Maybe he’s right about some of it.
Maybe that’s what makes me move.
I don’t hit him.
I want to.
Instead I turn sharply, one violent step away from him, and my fist goes through the mirror over the sinks before thought can catch up.
Glass explodes outward with a crack that rips through the bathroom. It rains into the basin, onto the counter, onto the floor in glittering shards. Pain flashes white-hot across my knuckles and up my wrist, immediate and useless and exactly not enough. My reflection breaks into a dozen fractured versions of itself, each one warped, split, and ugly in a different way.
The sound leaves Kadin dead still behind me.
My hand comes back bloodied.
The fluorescent lights buzz on like nothing happened.
For a second, neither of us says anything. The only sound in the room is the slow tick of broken glass settling in the sink and my own breathing, too rough now to hide.
When I finally look at him again, it is through a spiderweb of shattered reflection.
He stands a few feet behind me, shoulders tight now, eyes fixed on my hand and then my face and then the ruined sink between us. The confidence is still there, but it has changed shape. He believes me now in a way he didn’t have to a minute ago.
Good.
Turning fully toward him, blood still tracks down the side of my hand, the look on his face almost pushing me over the edge all over again. Not because he looks scared. Because he looks like he’s still trying to decide whether I’m proving him right or proving something worse.
“Go,” I tell him.
The word comes out rough, scraped raw by the effort it takes not to close the distance between us.
He doesn’t.
I take one step forward.
“Go,” I hiss again, louder this time, every bit of control I have left packed into the shape of the sentence. “Before I break you too.”
That lands.
Not because it sounds theatrical. Because it doesn’t. There’s no raised voice in it. No dramatic posture. Just the truth of what I am capable of if he stays in this room another thirty seconds and keeps looking at me like he understands anything.
Kadin finally exhales, glancing once at the broken mirror, once at my bleeding hand, then back at me.
Whatever else he wants to say dies in his throat.
