Page 48 of Make Them Bleed (Pretty Deadly Things #1)

I don’t remember deciding. I’m between him and the hinge in a breath, shoulder to his chest, forearm up to take any stray motion. He’s quicker than he looks. He pivots, slips, gets a hand on the back of my neck and tries to drive me into the jamb like he’s been in a bar fight he saw on TV.

“Stop,” Juno says, sharp enough to cut. He has that look—the one some men wear when they’re sure you won’t call their bluff. He doesn’t stop.

He jerks Juno over the threshold by her wrist and she stumbles a step inside.

The cycle I have lived my whole life— don’t go in, don’t go in, don’t go in —hits the line where theory breaks.

I shove the door with my shoulder to keep it from closing on her and we’re in a wedge: me in the frame; him braced; Juno off-balance six feet in, hand braced on granite, breath punching out of her.

Devin lets go of her wrist and grabs her throat.

Everything narrows. I see his hand on her skin and my body learns a new verb.

I slam him. He twists. He’s wiry, gym-strong, adrenaline-stupid. We go into the island, a chorus of glass and wood and two grunts, mine with less pride in it. He scrapes at my face, I’d bet my rent he bites if you give him the chance, and we carom along the counter like a bad pinball.

“Stop,” Juno says again, louder. He doesn’t. He drives his shoulder into me and shoves hard, uses the torque to pivot back to her like I was the coffee table in his way.

She’s got her palm flat on the granite. Her other hand scrabbles for purchase and finds a handle in the knife block. She pulls without looking. The blade is a chef’s knife—eight inches, sensible, a domestic tool. Her knuckles are white. Her eyes are wide and very, very bright.

“Don’t,” she says, and now her voice is a place you could live if you weren’t an idiot.

Devin isn’t listening. He lunges for her again, open hand to her face, dumb and cruel.

It all happens inside two heartbeats and neither of them belongs to me. He lunges, and she flinches and brings the knife up not like a fencer, not like a warrior—like a person holding a long metal no between her and harm. He’s moving. She’s braced. He runs into it.

It doesn’t look like anything on TV. It’s a dull sound, not a wet one.

His body jerks with surprise, not with cinema.

His mouth makes an O of disbelief before it makes an O of pain.

He reels back, eyes wild, looks down stupidly at the handle in his chest like someone handed him a microphone mid-speech.

Juno makes no sound. Then she makes all of them—tiny, quiet, a gasp that feels like the room tipping. Her hand is still outstretched, empty now, fingers curled like they’re trying to remember how to belong to her.

“Devin,” I hear myself say, because there’s a world where you say a man’s name and he remembers he’s not a piece on a board. He blinks at me. He sways. The granite island catches him with a thud of hip and thigh, and then he slumps.

We move. Quickly.

I’m at his side in three steps, two fingers to his carotid, the skin hot, the thready flutter there and then not. He’s breathing in those wet, shallow pulls people make when their bodies are figuring out if staying is worth it.

“Juno,” I say, and I have to say her name twice to get her eyes back to me. “Look at me. You’re okay. You hear me? You’re okay.”

Her mouth opens and closes once. “I didn’t— I didn’t go— I?—”

“You defended yourself,” I say, as steady as I can make it. “He attacked you. You said stop.”

“I—” She swallows and the room goes sharp again.

I grab Devin’s phone, holding it close to his face to unlock. I hit 9-1-1. The operator answers with weary calm.

“There’s been an accident,” I say for the second time in seven days, and the universe can subpoena me for being a liar but not for this sentence.

“Man stabbed. 301 Franklin Avenue, Unit 4C. He needs an ambulance now.” I don’t give a name.

I don’t give mine. I end the call with a throat that feels like I swallowed knives.

“Knight,” I rasp into our comm. “EMS incoming. Get ready for lights. We have to move.”

“Copy,” he says, and there’s an edge there that says again? and makes me want to break my own jaw so the world doesn’t have to help.

“Render,” I say. “Camera in the hall?”

“Blind spot still holds,” he says, a second’s lag while he checks the angle. “Neighbors? One on four is watching TV with captions. Two is out. Six is a dog. You have ninety seconds.”

“Ozzy,” I say, and I’m not sure what I’m asking him to do beyond be alive with me.

“I’m at the back stair,” he says softly. “If anyone asks, I’m a DoorDash. I brought soy sauce.”

“Gage,” I say, and the name feels like a prayer. “We called. It’ll be logged.”

“I can put a pin in the system for an anonymous caller at that tower last night,” he says, calm with fangs. “It won’t erase, but it’ll make it less weird you always stumble across emergencies.”

“Arrow,” Juno says. The voice is scraping the edges of panic now. I am at her before I finish turning toward the sound.

Her hands are shaking like a vibration you can’t trace with your eyes. She looks at me and there’s a question in her face I’ve dreaded my whole life: Am I the monster?

“No,” I say out loud, in case the quiet thing in both our chests decides to answer first. “You are not.”

“We need to go,” Knight says in our ears. “Now.”

“I can’t move,” Juno whispers, throat tight.

I place her hand in mine like I’m returning property. “We called. They’re coming. We need to not be here when they do.”

For a second she doesn’t move. Then she does, like an animal hearing a flood from down the mountain.

I lead her to the door and my body does exactly what it did the last time: catalogs everything it isn’t going to touch and everything it will have to answer for later and all the ways this will rearrange who we are.

The hallway is so bright. The elevator is too slow. We take the stairs and the air down there tastes like dust and the sweat of men who try to outrun their sins. Ozzy appears at the landing like a raccoon who learned to open trash bins with a charm offensive.

He looks at Juno’s face and something in him cracks, then hardens into a line that reads as I will push the world back with my hands if I have to. “This way,” he says, and we move.

Knight’s car is at the curb with the engine running.

He doesn’t say a word, which is how he says we’ll grieve later.

Render slides into the passenger seat without seeming to come from anywhere.

The first siren smears the far end of the block, and the dog in 4B opens its mouth to complain about the disruption.

We’re three turns away before anyone breathes loud enough for the car to hear it. Juno stares at her hands like she could read minutes off them. I reach and she lets me. We sit with that, the way people sit with bad news they can’t yet say out loud.

“I can’t believe what I did,” she says finally, broken, furious in the way only the honest get to be.

“It was an accident, Juno,” I say, hoarse. “And if they try to pin this for something different, I’ll take the fall.”

“No,” she whispers.

“Yes.” And then there’s nothing but silence as she stares at me with new eyes.

Her jaw flexes. Outside, the city makes siren-noises so loyal you could set your watch to it.

Gage breaks the quiet with a surgical whisper. “Huxley just got a ping for an ambulance at that address. She hasn’t connected it to you.”

“Good,” I say. My voice is sandpaper.

Ozzy stares at his soy sauce packet as if it’s a relic from a different life and then tosses it into the cup holder like a tiny surrender. “Devin’s channel is going to post a scheduled video about winning brand wars in twenty minutes,” he says. “You think the algorithm knows how to grieve?”

“No,” Juno says, still looking at her hands. “It only knows how to keep watching.”

Knight takes the bridge like a man who has learned to respect wind.

Gage texts me a map of the block with three dots that mean cameras you don’t want to be on, and I text him back a single dot that means the one we were.

He replies with a skull and a heart because we are terrible people in the good way.

We drop Render and Ozzy on opposite streets because paranoia has taught us how to breathe. Knight pulls into Juno’s lot and kills the engine. The silence that fills in where the motor was feels like a system reboot.

Upstairs, Juno freezes in the doorway long enough that I almost touch her shoulder, then thinks better of robbing her of the choosing. She picks the couch, sits on the edge like the world is on a slant and the cushion might slide out from under her.

“I didn’t mean to,” she says to no one, to me, to a version of herself that is going to want to judge this moment until the day we don’t get. “I held it up. He hit it.”

“You told him to stop,” I say. “We were outside. He dragged you in. He put his hands on you. You defended yourself.”

“You said we don’t go inside,” she whispers.

“I said we don’t,” I say. “And then Devin pulled you in.”

She looks up, eyes shining and furious. “Do you hear yourself? You sound like a man making excuses for a story he planned.”

I nod because if I say no, she won’t believe me. “I hear it. I hear all of it. You still defended yourself.”

She folds forward, elbows on her knees, hands in her hair. I crouch in front of her and put my hands on her shins, the way you ground someone who might leave their body without asking permission first.

“Breathe with me,” I say. “Five in. Five out.”

We do. Five in. Five out. Her fingers loosen. My heart slows to something less ridiculous.

When we surface, the clock says 8:58 and the YouTube page counts down like a bomb that has decided to be polite about it.

“Do we watch?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “We make our own tape.”

She barks a laugh that tastes like tears. Then she sets her shoulders and wipes her face with the back of her hand in a move that says I’m not done being a person tonight.

“Devin’s dead, isn’t he,” she says.

I don’t answer. We both know that when sirens arrive late to stories like this, they write endings whether you asked them to or not.

My phone buzzes. It’s a number that is Huxley’s without saying it, because she’s careful and she respects my version of careful. “Is there anything you want to tell me about an ambulance on Franklin,” the text reads, “or should I pretend I don’t know you read the news faster than my radio?”

I stare at it until the screen dims. Then I type: “We were not there when the ambulance arrived. I called. A man hurt a woman I love. She defended herself.”

A long pause. Then: “Tell her to drink water. And come see me in the morning with something I can use that looks like it didn’t come from a ghost.”

I hand Juno the phone. She reads, nods, and the nod is the first real thing she’s done with her head since the knife.

“What now?” she asks.

“Now I sit next to you,” I say. “And when you want silence, I give you silence. When you want noise, I put on Hold The Peppers and let you yell. And when you want to go back out into rooms with rules, we go. And we stop knocking on doors that teach us the same lesson.”

She looks at me a long time, then leans forward and rests her forehead against mine, our noses almost touching, breath mingled. “I wanted him to hurt,” she says, so quiet I can feel the confession more than hear it. “I wanted him to say it and then I wanted him to hurt.”

“I know,” I say, and the part of me that will always want to be better for her says, me too.

We stay there until the timer on Devin’s channel hits zero and keeps counting, streaming a scheduled victory lap into a city that just learned what it costs.

We don’t watch it. We sit with our own bad tape, the one made of adrenaline and yes and stop and the sound a knife makes when the world doesn’t want it.

Outside, sirens quiet. Somewhere, Gray pours a drink.

Somewhere, Coleman’s onyx ring taps a glass.

Somewhere, Rook checks his anchor in the mirror.

Somewhere, Beau picks a shirt that won’t solve the hole in his chest. The map just lost another shape, and if there’s any meaning in this, it’s that each line we draw now has to be straighter, cleaner, longer.

We’ll take them to daylight. We’ll get there by not lying to ourselves about who we became tonight.

I rest my palm on Juno’s knee and let it be heavy. She puts her hand over mine, squeezes once like a seal on a document neither of us wanted to sign and both of us will honor.

And then I kiss the ever loving fuck out of her.