Page 193 of Cross Checked
Cade.
Get to Cade. He was in The Furnace, and I could see the lights in the distance. Cade would help me. Protect me.
God, please let me live through this, and I will call Knox. I will tell every single thing he ever did to me.
Survival instinct slammed violently through me, and no fucking way did my life end here.
Luke stood over me, breathing hard while blood dripped steadily from my mouth onto the pavement beneath my cheek. Rainwater soaked through my clothes. My ribs screamed every time I tried dragging air into my lungs, and somewhere far off near campus, I suddenly heard voices drifting faintly through the trees.
Laughter.
Car doors.
Somebody shouting across a parking lot in the distance.
Luke heard it too.
His head snapped sharply toward the sound.
For the first time all night, panic flickered across his face.
Not guilt.
Not horror over what he had done to me.
Fear of being seen.
Fear of being caught standing over the woman he beat like the coward he was beneath all the charm and manipulation and false control.
Because men like Luke only felt powerful in silence. Only in private. Only when nobody bigger or stronger was there to expose them for what they really were.
“Hey!” a male voice shouted from somewhere beyond the tree line. “What the fuck?”
Another voice followed, closer now, sharper. “Yo, is somebody down?”
Luke’s eyes cut back toward me, fury and calculation twisting together across his face while I fought to stay conscious beneath him. For one horrifying second, I thought he might try to finish it anyway, even with footsteps pounding against wetpavement in the distance and voices tearing through the fog toward us.
Then something shifted in his expression.
Not guilt.
Not horror.
Fear.
The cowardly, exposed kind that only surfaced when someone might actually see what lived beneath the charm and control.
He backed away quickly like the little bitch he was.
The truck door slammed hard enough to echo through the trees before headlights swung violently across the road and disappeared back toward town, tires spitting rainwater and gravel behind him while he ran before anybody could get close enough to stop him, leaving me broken in the road with rain soaking through my jeans and pain pulsing through every inch of my body.
For a second, I couldn’t move.
I couldn’t breathe.
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Cade
