Page 79 of Mayhem

I climbed out of the creek and wiped wet hair away from my face as I followed him up the bank. “You still think this is about making a point?”

Nichlas forced himself upright and moved backward rather than turning his back on me again. His chest rose too fast beneath the torn shirt, and the bandage around one hand had loosened enough that I could see blood along his fingers. He kept retreating until his shoulders hit a tree, then looked around as though the woods might offer another direction before I reached him.

I stayed several feet away. He had nowhere useful to go, and both of us knew it now.

“You tortured me,” he said, struggling to pull air deep enough to speak. “You hunted me through the fucking woods. I know you hate me. I know what I did was wrong. What else do you need?”

The question brought me closer. “You keep telling me you know what you did, and then every time you explain it, somehow you’re still the frightened little victim who only made the choices available to him.”

“I was frightened.” His voice cracked as his attention moved to my knife. “You think saying that makes me weak? Fine. I was fucking terrified. The Quorum knew things they shouldn’t have known, and they made it clear what would happen if I didn’t cooperate. I thought giving them the ledger ended it. I didn’t know they needed you.”

I pulled the knife free but left it loose beside my thigh. Nichlas flinched anyway, pressing harder against the tree while I closed the space between us. “And when you learned giving them the book hadn’t ended it, you came running back to warn me?”

His jaw worked without producing an answer.

“When people kept looking for me, you found me and told me what happened? When you discovered I hadn’t died on that sidewalk, you decided maybe the woman you supposedly tried to save deserved to know somebody was still hunting her?” I caught the front of his shirt and dragged him away from the tree before shoving him back hard enough that bark scraped against his shoulders. “You keep trying to make the ledger the betrayal. It wasn’t. Giving them the book was one choice. Everything you did after it was another.”

Nichlas grabbed my wrist with both damaged hands and tried to pull me away. Pain weakened his grip, but desperation gave him enough strength to wrench sideways and drive his shoulder into me. My foot slipped on the wet ground. He hit me again before I recovered, caught the side of my face with his forearm, then shoved past me and ran.

I tasted blood where my teeth caught the inside of my cheek.

That made me laugh.

Nichlas heard it.

He looked back once and immediately regretted it.

I caught him around the waist before he reached the next line of trees. We went down together, my shoulder driving into his lower back while his hands tore through leaves searching for anything he could use. He found a rock before I realized what he was reaching for and swung it backward hard enough to glance off my temple.

Pain burst through my head.

I rolled away before the second swing and kicked his injured leg.

Nichlas screamed.

The rock dropped from his hand as he curled around the thigh, and I was on him again before he recovered. I caught the front of his shirt, hauled him partly upright, and drove my fist into his mouth. Blood coated my knuckles immediately. He swung blindly, catching my shoulder, then tried to get his knee between us while I hit him again.

He fought harder than he ever had for me.

Years too late.

I drove him onto his back and pinned one wrist beneath my knee while he clawed at my arm with the other hand. His nails scraped skin. He tried to buck me off, but the injured leg could not give him enough leverage, and every movement reopened something Echo-from-last-week had already done to him. Blood began spreading through the dressing again, soaking into his pants and smearing over the leaves beneath us.

“Get off me!” Nichlas twisted violently enough that I had to shift my weight to keep him down. “What do you want me to fucking say?”

I caught his jaw and held his face still. “The truth.”

“I told you the truth.”

“No. You told me why you think I should forgive you.”

“I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

“You absolutely fucking do.” I pressed my thumb into the bruise beneath his eye until his face tightened. “Maybe you don’t expect me to like you again, but every time you tell this story, you give me another reason I’m supposed to understand. You were scared. You thought the book was enough. You didn’t know they’d hunt me. You thought I was dead. You were already protected. You keep piling excuses on top of what happened because you cannot stand the simple version.”

His breathing had turned ragged beneath me. Tears mixed with the blood around his mouth, but I had watched him cry before. He had cried in the lounge while telling me he was trying to save me, and he had still refused to say the one thing I wanted.

I eased my weight off his wrist enough to drag him upright. Nichlas tried to use the opening, twisting away and scrambling onto one knee, but I caught his hair and pulled until his head snapped back. The knife settled against the skin beneath his ribs while I kept him there, his body shaking against mine.