Page 87 of Break Away
I looked at him. “You planning to force me?”
“If I have to.”
“I’m a fight you don’t want, Ry.”
His face didn’t change. “You’re a fight I’ve already seen, and you’re boring when you’re bleeding.”
Briggs released one humorless breath. “That almost sounded poetic.”
“Don’t encourage him,” Rider muttered.
For one second, the old rhythm of the four of them, the house, and the team tried to surface. It was the stupid, damaged version of family we had built through too many workouts, late nights, and too much blood on the ice with not enough sense off it.
Then I saw the front door again and Aura walking through it.
Aura looking at me like I had put her beneath a spotlight and asked the whole room to clap.
My stomach twisted hard enough that I nearly folded with it. I turned before any of them could read my face and shoved past Ryan toward the stairs.
Nobody celebrated the win or said it was a good call. They followed me, heavy footsteps behind mine, while the party tried to stitch itself back together below us.
I made it to the upstairs hallway before I put my fist into the wall.
I didn’t hit hard enough to break the plaster because the guys would kill me and Cade would probably send me an invoice with interest, but I hit hard enough to hurt.
That was the point.
Pain with a clean source made sense. Split knuckles, bruised bone, torn skin—anything honest enough to admit what it was doing to me. I could handle hockey hits, stitches, blood in my mouth, a puck off the ankle, a forward trying to take my head off, or a fight in the corner boards with three thousand people screaming for someone to fall.
I could not handle her looking at me like she had finally realized I mattered after making damn sure I knew I didn’t.
I braced both hands against the wall and lowered my head between my shoulders, breathing through my teeth. Downstairs, the party continued in uneven bursts, but the hallway felt airless, narrow, and too familiar.
Like I had walked over the grave of someone I used to be and discovered the body was still warm.
“Not really in the mood for company,” I said.
Ryan answered behind me. “Yeah, we gathered that from the public self-immolation.”
Briggs muttered, “I thought it was more of a hostage situation with tongue.”
“Lawson,” Cade said.
“What? I’m processing through metaphor.”
I turned around.
Ryan stood at the top of the stairs with his arms folded and his jaw set like he had driven back from whatever semi-pro fantasy he lived in now just to be disappointed by me in person. Briggs came up behind him without a smile, which made him look younger and more dangerous at the same time. Rider leaned against the opposite wall, quiet and observant, his beer gone and his hands shoved into his pockets.
Cade stood last, his expression carved from that familiar Mercer control that meant he was furious and deciding how much of it I was stable enough to survive.
I looked past them toward the stairs. “She leave?”
“If you mean Brinley, yeah,” Ryan said.
We all knew I didn’t care whether Brinley had left. I wasn’t sure I had even known her name before tonight, and that made me feel worse because she hadn’t deserved being used as a weapon.
None of them had.
