Page 125 of Angels Are Falling

“You’re high.” He said it without heat, an observation. “Does Amelie know about this habit of yours?”

“Don’t—” I swung wild. “—you don’t get to say her name.”

“I’ll say my wife’s name whenever the fuck I want.”

I fought back, my movements fast and chaotic. He fought like he did everything else, his movements organized, patient, and thorough.

I was shouting, or trying to, the sentences kept breaking apart on their way out. “Months. You’ve lived in my house, with my family, for months. Every single day, you knew and you fucking lied to us.”

I got him against the farmhouse table and split his lip with an elbow, and the blood came down to his chin. I felt joy, actual joy, seeing him hurt. He put two fingers to his chin and looked at the red like he was adding that to my bill.

Then the world rotated, and the same table pressed against my cheekbone. I got up. I kept getting up. Somewhere under the drugs, my body was keeping score of the pain in my ribs, cheekbone, the knuckles I’d opened on his jaw.

“Stay down,” he said, and the almost-gentleness of it was worse than anything he could have built to insult me. “Consider it the only favor I’d ever do for you.”

“Fuck you.”

I got up and swung again and again.

Though we were both banged up and bleeding, I could not take him down. No matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t knock him off his feet. He merely absorbed everything I threw his way.

My breath was tearing in and out of me. His hadn’t changed. Somewhere under the drugs, I realized one of us was at his limit, and it wasn’t the man with blood on his chin.

We broke apart, both panting, the grill smoke drifting between us like a referee.

Then he stopped. Mid-guard, mid-breath.

His eyes went over my shoulder and fixed on the middle distance, and every line of him went to stillness. And I wondered, absurdly, why he was admiring the ocean view in the middle of a fight.

I didn’t care.

I charged. I hit him square in the jaw, twice, with everything I had left.

Unlike the rest of the fight, he took the assault without complaint. Then he waited a beat. One beat, deliberate, and then Kai Cavendish, whom I had not been able to knock off his feet this entire fight, fell to the ground.

Behind me, Amelie screamed.

The sound went through me the way no punch had. I knew every register of my wife’s voice, and I had never heard this one. It took me a full second to understand it wasn’t for me.

It came apart in my head with terrible speed. He hadn’t been looking at the ocean. He’d been looking at the side gate, at my wife coming through it, and he had stood there and let me attack him so that what she saw was Kai taking a beating from me and going down as a result.

He made sure she saw me when I struck him like a maniac and had intentionally chosen not to fight back.

She went past me like I was scenery. My hand went up as she passed and closed on air. On her knees in the grass, the scarf off her neck in one pull, pressed to his lip, her hands moving over him fast and sure, nurse’s hands. “Kai. Oh my God, Kai. Are you okay?”

“Amelie. He—he provoked me.” I heard how it sounded even as it left my mouth, a boy’s sentence, and I said it anyway. “You don’t know what he’s done.”

She didn’t bother looking at me or assessing my wounds. It wasn’t that she was ignoring me. It was worse. I had stopped transmitting on any frequency she received.

“Our money problems, Am. Our debt. He was behind it all. Kai intentionally tried to ruin us.” I was scrambling for a way to make her believe me. To help her understand that I wasn’t the bad guy.

But she was in a different world, only concerned with Kai’s injuries.

Not sure what else to do, or how else to explain it, I blurted, “His parents killed mine! His parents were driving the other car when the crash happened. That’s how they died. He hid it from us.”

Her hands stopped.

For one breath, the whole yard hung. She looked down at Kai, and a question started assembling on her lips.