Page 52 of Pucked Around and Found Out

The silence that follows is total.

Xaden's eyes cut to me for one fraction of a second.

I look at the ground.

“You should be in bed.” Xaden's voice shifts, not softer, just redirected. “You're still healing.”

“I know.” Carnage's chin lifts fractionally. “Didn't stop me getting here to her.”

“The bullet wound in your side disagrees.”

“The bullet wound in my side is my business.” He holds Xaden's gaze with the particular steadiness of someone who has already decided how far he's willing to go and has made peace with it. “Same as Toren is mine.”

Everything in Xaden's face goes blank.

Blank the way it goes when he's at his most dangerous.

“Say that again,” he says. Very quietly.

“She is my⁠—”

Xaden moves.

I've seen fast.

I've watched Xaden move with the kind of speed that makes you understand why people are afraid of him, the way violence looks different on some men, not like a loss of control but like a door being opened. He has that quality. The capacity to shift from still to devastating in the space between one breath and the next.

I've never seen Carnage match it.

Until now.

He moves at the same moment Xaden does, and for the space of half a second they meet in the middle of the lot in the particular collision of two men who are both accustomed to being the fastest thing in the room. There's no elegance to it. There's no careful choreography. There's fists and concrete and the ugly grunt of impact, then the specific sound of pain that someone tries to swallow and can't quite manage.

Carnage.

His side.

“Stop it!” I'm already moving, already between them before I make the decision to be, one hand against Carnage's chest and one arm extended toward Xaden. “Stop. Both of you. Right now.”

Neither of them listens.

Xaden catches Carnage's arm and twists, using his weight to drive him back against the side of the car. Carnage takes it. Absorbs it, and then pushes back with the kind of force that tells me exactly how badly he's been holding back up to this point. That all that careful stillness has been retention, not absence, and now he's spending it freely.

He gets a hand against Xaden's chest and shoves.

Xaden stumbles back two steps, then catches his footing.

They face each other across four feet of parking lot, both breathing harder than they should be, both bleeding from different reasons, and neither one of them looking at me.

“If you hit him again,” I say, my voice has gone somewhere very flat and very clear, “I will shoot you with your own gun!”

That gets their attention.

Xaden looks at me.

Carnage looks at me.

“He's injured,” I say, still in that same flat voice, looking at Xaden. “He has a bullet wound in his side that is three weeks from being field-dressed and not yet healed. You know that. I know you know that because you know everything about every person in my orbit, that's the whole point of you.” I watch him absorb this. “So if you hit him again knowing that, then you're not the man who couldn't put the scalpel through my throat. You're the other one. And I need to know which one I'm dealing with.”