Page 85 of Burn

Nothing.

Where the fuck did she go?

I step back to the door, and pull it open at the exact moment an older woman with cropped gray hair pushes it. She shrieks when she sees me. Actually shrieks, like I’m the monster under the bed.

“Excuse me,” I say, moving to step past her.

She holds her hand up to stop me. “Are you looking for the girl with all the tattoos?”

“I am. Did you see where she went?” I ask.

“She went with the other guy.”

Other guy?

When I don’t respond, she adds, “I think he might be her boyfriend?”

Interesting.

I nod and stalk out into the hall. She doesn’t follow me, and I take the momentary silence to scan the corridor. Left takes me back to the wedding, where I know she’s not. To the right, the hall ends abruptly with an emergency exit. I’m about to head back toward the reception because the alarms would have sounded if she had left through that fire exit, right? I feel a slight breeze, realizing that the door is slightly ajar.

Something sour twists in my stomach. The door shouldn’t be open; if it is, an alarm should have sounded through the building. But the only sound inside is the pulse of the bass in the deafening music. Mentally, I make a note to chastise the event staff for the lack of precautions and walk toward the door.

There’s no way she left.

No way she slipped out through a back door and into the night, leaving me here.

With another guy?

I press my hand against the cool metal of the door and listen. I can hear a male voice outside, but the music is too loud, and he’s too quiet, so I push, cracking the door open a little more. The words I hear do something to my heart. They shatter it.

“You’re so wet.”

His voice is thick with desire, and I angle myself to peer out, seeing Lex against a wall with her ex pressing into her.

“It’s not what you think.”

Words Claire said back then. Words Lex said tonight.

My heart slams against my chest, splintering apart. I want to walk away, but I just can’t do it. I can’t force myself to turn back down the hall, get into my car, and leave. I watch him pull his hand out from under her dress and suck his fingers into his mouth. She doesn’t move, still as a statue, watching him, wide-eyed like she’s watched me. It’s so much worse than the night I found Claire and Jordan, because she means somuch more.

I don’t think I realized how much more until this moment, as I watch her allow another man to put his hands on her body like this. The pounding on my heart echoes in my ears, blocking out every other sound. I see her leg move. It shifts up in a clumsy move, connecting with his groin. It’s so… nonviolent that I assume it’s an error.

She couldn’t have meant to do that.

He says something, but I can’t hear it over the roar in my ears. I’ve had enough, and I shift to walk away, but then, he hits her. Closed-fist, full force. Her head slams back into the brick wall, and my blood runs cold. Red snakes into the edges of my vision until the only thing I can see is her, blood pouring out of her nose, over her lips. I can see now how tense her body is. That the wide-eyed look on her face isn’t desire, it’s terror.

Everything inside of me rips loose at once, my pain morphing into something dark. Deadly. I shift my focus, zeroed in on him, his hands on her throat. He’s going to kill her. I’ve never been more certain of any one fact in my life, and I move. It takes me less than a second to close the distance, and he feels feather-light when I grab him and rip him away from her.

He slams into the ground with a heavy thud and immediately scrambles backward. His movements are panicked and jerky, and he holds one hand out in a feeble fucking attempt to keep me away. I stalk toward him, allowing him to move further away, needing him further away from her.

“Whoa, man!” he exclaims. “This isn’t my fault. She came onto me!” I’m towering over him, hands clenched into tight fists, when he begs me, in the most pitiful fucking voice. “Please.”

The strangest sense of calm washes over me as I land the first punch. The chaos in my head goes silent, and I focus on the sound of his bones and cartilage crunching and cracking upmy powerful blows. The first hit breaks his nose, the second connects with his jaw, and it shifts so far that I know it’s fractured. He lands one kick, and it pushes me back slightly, so I land a punch to his stomach. The air rushes out of his lungs, and he heaves, gagging and sputtering.

I lose track of the hits I land.

I lose track of how much blood splatters onto my clothes.

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