Page 109 of Make Them Bleed
He doesn’t look at me. He looks at Juno and does that little half-smirk some men are born knowing. “No way,” he says. “Are you— you’re Juno Kate.”
“Hi, Devin,” she says, with a kind that’s sharpened. “Can we talk?”
He glances down the hallway, back at her, catalogs the under-eye circles and the set to her mouth. It takes him a second to find his footing. He tries charming. “If you’re here about doing a collab, this is not how you book my time.”
Fucker. He acts like he isn’t even guilty of killing Arby Kate.
“I’m here about HOLO-BURST,” she says.
It wipes the smirk right off him. Not fear. Not yet. Annoyance, then calculation. He leans one shoulder in the frame casually, like he watched a video about casual and learned the angle. “I don’t know what you think you know,” he says. “But you can’t just show up at my door.”
“Actually, you can,” I say, keeping my tone low and office-friendly. “The city still allows doors.”
“And conversations,” Juno adds, softer and more dangerous. “You got paid when my sister backed out. You celebrated. You taunted her in DMs and then deleted them. Nereus paid you through HOLO-BURST’s agency.”
He blinks and I can see the page turning in his head. It lands on a sentence you recognize in a stranger’s eyes when they decide you don’t get to be a person. “I don’t talk to grief junkies,” he says, and tries to shut the door.
I catch it with the edge of my shoe and the heel of my palm. It jolts him, and he steadies. He glares at me. “Back up, man,” he snaps. “What are you, security?”
“Math,” I say, because men like him hate being told numbers exist. “The kind that adds up.”
He tries to slam it again. Juno steps into the gap a fraction, face alight with the kind of calm that unsettles lesser predators. “You can talk to us,” she says, “or you can talk to Detective Huxley when she knocks. You pick the poison."
He hesitates. That half-second where fear and pride try to figure out who gets the wheel. Pride wins. It always does in boys who grew up being told they were important for showing up.
“Fine,” he says through his teeth, and swings the door open a third of the way. “Ten minutes. In the hall.”
He doesn’t mean it. I know he doesn’t mean it. His hand is already tightening on the inside edge of the door.
“Get out here,” I say, and that’s when he moves.
It’s not a punch; that would be too honest. It’s a lunge. He clamps his fingers around Juno’s wrist where her phone sits and yanks, not hard enough to break, hard enough to pull her to the threshold and off her axis.
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 metalnobetween 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 anOof disbelief before it makes anOof 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 stilloutstretched, empty now, fingers curled like they’re trying to remember how to belong to her.
