Page 27 of Break Away
“I never said I wanted you gone, Clarke.”
The words hit too softly for the damage they did. My throat tightened, but I refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing it. “No. You just treat me like I am.”
I walked away before he could answer, before Bliss could stop me, before Charm could follow, and before the shaking in my hands became something everyone could see. The kitchen doors swung open hard beneath my palm, heat and fryer smoke rushing over me as I stepped into the narrow back hallway and pressed one hand against the cool metal shelf beside the walk-in.
I stood there until my breathing steadied, the ache in my chest stopped trying to climb out of my mouth, and the girl who had once loved Easton enough to almost be brave crawled back inside where she belonged.
Then I wiped beneath my eyes with the heel of my hand, checked that my mascara had not betrayed me, and went back into the noise.
Because I was Aura.
I didn’t disappear just because a man finally saw what damage I carried.
2
Easton
The Sin Bin had thinned out around us, leaving behind sticky tables, half-dead baskets of fries, neon bleeding over empty glasses, and the kind of late-night noise that came from people refusing to admit the night had already peaked. It was my first night as captain, the guys were loud and happy, and Cade was back in the room—healthy, upright, and smiling at Bliss like life had finally decided to stop swinging at him. The season stretched ahead of us, and Friday was waiting.
I should have felt proud.
Instead, one sentence kept crawling through my head and setting up camp behind my ribs.
“You don’t get to take what I survived—when you don’t know what I survived—and twist it into a personality flaw.”
I reached for my water, then stopped before I touched it. The glass had gone warm thirty minutes ago.
Cade noticed because he noticed everything whenever Bliss wasn’t actively distracting him by breathing. His eyes shifted from my hand to my face, and his jaw worked once like he had been waiting for me to decide whether I wanted to be an idiot in silence or out loud.
I picked out loud, apparently.
“What did she mean?”
Briggs, Rider, and Ryan didn’t move at all, which somehow made them more obvious.
Cade looked at me for a long second. “You’re going to need to narrow that down.”
“You know what I’m asking.”
Bliss glanced over from the register, then back down fast enough to make it clear she had heard and had no plans to save me from the answer.
Cade kept his voice low. “I don’t know what she survived.”
“Bullshit.”
His eyes came up hard. “Careful.”
I laughed once, short and ugly. “That your word now too?”
“No,” Cade said. “That’s me telling you not to take a bad night and make it worse because you’re mad she said something that made you feel guilty.”
Briggs set his wing down with the kind of reverence usually reserved for funerals and championship trophies. “For the record, I am on Easton’s side emotionally, but I am also scared of where this conversation is going.”
Ryan looked at him. “That might be the most mature thing you’ve ever said.”
“I contain unexpected depth.”
Rider sighed. “You asked if blue cheese was made from sad milk ten minutes ago.”
