Page 292 of Face Off

He nods. “I heard her shout my name and turned. It caught me above the eye.”

Temple covers her mouth.

“The bottle didn’t break,” Briggs adds quickly. “It hit the wall afterward. The cut is from the edge of the glass maybe... I don’t know.”

“You’re explaining the structural integrity of the bottle like that changes the fact that she threw it at your face,” Aura says.

“She was angry.”

“So were you,” Cade tells him. “Did you throw anything?”

“No.”

“Did you hit her?”

Briggs’s head jerks up. “I would never hit her.”

“Then stop using her anger as an explanation for violence you would never permit from yourself.”

Briggs’s mouth closes.

I look at the enormous man folded over a coffee cup and understand why everyone is angry enough to tear the castle apart. Briggs has always occupied every room as though joy requires physical space. He talks with his hands, laughs with his entire body, and feeds people before asking whether they’re hungry.

This morning, Lyric has made him look afraid to move.

“What happened after she threw it?” I ask.

“I told her we were upgraded to super-sized done.”

Ryan watches him closely. “Exactly what did you say?”

““That I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t keep waiting for the next lie or finding out she had been with someone else, then apologizing because catching her hurt her feelings.” He looks at Ryan, then Cade and Easton. “She’s hit me before. She just never left a mark.”

His voice cracks. Briggs clears his throat and stares into his coffee as the weight of that confession moves through all of us. I expect Ryan to take off running while yelling Bliss’s name because she’ll commit a felony when she hears this, but he doesn’t move. He sits perfectly still, his expression empty and his eyes fixed on Briggs.

Somehow, that’s worse.

“She said I was choosing all of you over her. I told her she made me choose when she asked me to stop loving myself enough to notice how badly she treated me.”

Bliss would’ve cried hearing that.

I nearly do.

“Then she apologized,” Briggs continues. “She said she loved me, called me baby and I know that’s corny—but I never had an endearment before.” He shrugs like what he admits doesn’t matter. “She promised the bottle scared her too.”

Ryan’s scarred hand closes into a fist on the table. “Because she knew all of it would work.”

Briggs nods.

“But it didn’t,” Cade says.

“No.” His voice becomes quieter. “I wanted it to. That’s the shitty part. I wanted to hold her while she cried and tell her we could fix it. Then I looked in the mirror and saw blood running into my eye.”

Temple wipes both hands over her cheeks.

“I called security,” Briggs says. “They helped her pack and drove her to a hotel near the airport. She left before six.”

“And you haven’t contacted her?” Rider asks.