Page 173 of Filled

Then his mouth curls, and he looks past me at her like she's something he stepped in.

“Look at what they made you, Dakota. Passed around that gym like a rag—four men rutting you, and you spread your legs for every one of them. You were perfect when you were mine. Clean. Now you’re a used-up little slut nobody could ever love. They don’t know you like I do. Nobody ever will.”

Something in me stops calculating. It isn't even the slur that does it. It's clean—that one word, everything buried underneath it, and how almost tender he sounds saying it.

I close the distance and swing for his face.

This fight is nothing like the cage. No rules, no ref, no mat under my feet—just furniture and darkness and a man who fights like he’s owed anything he wants, and he wants our Dakota. He’s stronger than he looks. The knife comes across in a flat arc, and I twist away from it, almost fast enough. Almost. The blade opens a line across my shoulder, and the fire arrives before the wetness does, heat sheeting down my arm inside my sleeve.

I bury a hook in his ribs. Another across his jaw. He staggers into the bookshelf and doesn’t go down.

Dakota’s screaming behind me—words I can’t make out over the roar in my ears—and furniture scrapes across the floor. Gerald recovers faster than any fifty-something construction worker should and comes again, knife leading, and I catch his wrist with both hands, but he’s driving forward with all his weight, and the point creeps toward my chest an inch at a time.

We hit the wall. Drywall cracks behind my skull. He’s got the leverage, got the mass, and my cut shoulder is screaming as my grip starts to slip on his wrist, and a thought arrives withterrible clarity.This is how it ends. Bled out on Dakota’s floor, protecting her from the monster she ran a thousand miles to escape.

Then Dakota is there.

Not frozen.

She moves the way she moves in the cage—economy, cunning, and violence fused into one motion. A knee spears into Gerald’s kidney and he goes down hard. An elbow cracks against his temple. His grip on the knife falters and she sweeps his legs out from under him with a technique I’ve watched her drill a hundred times, and he goes down hard, the blade skittering across the hardwood. She kicks it under the couch.

Then she’s on him.

Her hands find his throat and close, and her face is a stranger’s face, blank and burning at the same time, and Gerald’s heels drum against the floor and his fingers claw at her wrists and she doesn’t stop. She’s not going to stop. Years of terror have finally found a direction, and it points straight down through her palms into his windpipe.

“Dakota.” I grab her shoulders. “Dakota. Angel.Stop.”

Pulling her off him takes everything I have left. My slashed arm howls. She fights me—actually fights me, an elbow catching my ribs—and I wrap her up from behind and haul her backward while Gerald flops onto his side, gagging, sucking air in wet, horrible pulls.

“He’s done,” I say against her ear. “It’s over. He’s done. You can stop fighting now.”

The sound she makes isn’t crying.

Somebody pounds on the apartment door. A voice shouts, asking if everyone’s okay. Sirens rise in the distance, getting closer, and Gerald lifts his head from the floor and looks at us with his face purpling and his eyes promising this isn’t over.

It is, though. We both know it is.

The next hour blurs. Uniforms and radios and questions asked three different ways. A paramedic peels my shirt away from the cut and makes a face that tells me I’ll need stitches. Gerald tries the routine—I was just checking on my troubled stepdaughter, this man attacked me unprovoked—but the picked lock and the hunting knife tell the truth louder than he can lie. They cuff him for breaking and entering, assault with a deadly weapon, and a list of other charges the officer rattles off like a grocery list. He’s not getting out anytime soon.

He looks at Dakota once as they walk him past the ambulance. She looks back and doesn’t flinch.

Small victories.

Cruz and Dante push through the crowd in the hallway around the time the paramedic starts threading a needle through my shoulder. I don’t know who called them—a neighbor, maybe, or Dakota while I was being cleaned up. Doesn’t matter. Cruz sees me sitting on the ambulance bumper with blood down my arm, and all the easy warmth he wears collapses instantly into fear, and then Dakota breaks away from the officer taking her statement and crashes into his chest.

Everything she’s been carrying pours out at once, and Cruz just holds her, one massive hand cradling the back of her head, his eyes finding mine over her shoulder.

Dante comes to me. His hand lands on my good shoulder and stays there. He takes in the blood, the bandages, the tremor in my hands that won’t quit. “Tell me.”

“Gerald broke in. Picked the lock. Bastard had a knife.” The words come out in pieces that don’t quite connect. “He wanted to take her back. I tried to stop him. She finished it.” I look at my hands. “She almost killed him, Dante. I had to pull her off.”

“Good.”

“Good that she almost?—”

“Good that she fought. Good that you were there. Good that he’s in a police car with his hands behind his back instead of anywhere near her.” His grip tightens. “You’re allowed to be shaken. You fought a man with a knife tonight.”

“It doesn’t feel real. It feels like it happened to somebody else.”