“Becca—”
“We fought all the time. I couldn’t take it anymore.” I kept my voice level. I was calm, in the way you get when you’ve finally stopped being afraid. “You knew I had nowhere to go and you counted on that. You used my financial situation as a leash and called it love. You proposed to me while you were still lying to me, and when I finally left—when I finally said enough—you treated my decision like a temporary inconvenience you could wait out.” I looked at him without flinching. “I’m not going to feel differently. I’m not going to come around. What we had is over, and it should have been over a long time before it was.”
His jaw flexed. The mask cracked. “So who is it then? Who are you fucking?” Not a question. A demand. “Is someone in there with you?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“It is if it’s someone I know.” Eyes narrowing. “Is it Barrett?”
I didn’t answer. Silence was answer enough, and he didn’t deserve anything else from me.
His face changed completely. The performance vanished. Possessive rage rose underneath. “Levi fucking Barrett,” anger rolled off him in waves. “You threw away everything we had for?—”
“I threw away nothing,” I cut in, sharp. “You threw it away. I stopped pretending.”
“After everything I did for you.” Voice dropping, turning colder. “After everything I put up with. Your job. Your money. The way you needed?—”
“You used that against me. All of it,” I said. “Don’t rewrite it.”
“I loved you,” he snapped.
“Yeah, at first maybe. But in the end, you controlled me,” I said. “And you called it love because it was easier than looking at what it actually was.”
Something moved through his face—fury, humiliation, the kind of rage of a man who has never been told no by someone he thought he owned—and he stepped into the doorway. Into my space. Deliberate and slow, the way he’d always moved when he wanted me to feel the size of him.
I held my ground. “You need to step back,” I ground out.
“I need you to stop being dramatic and listen to me?—”
“Hey.” Levi’s voice came from right behind me, carrying the quiet authority of a man who walked into fires for a living.
He filled the doorway behind me, stepping out from behind the door, dressed now in sweatpants and a T-shirt, hair tousled, arms loose. Six-foot-four inches of immovable certainty. He looked like he’d just woken up and found a minor inconvenience on the porch—completely unbothered as he slipped in front of me.
Travis stared. Then stepped backward down the porch stairs to the gravel lot as Levi forced him down with a hand on his shoulder, boots crunching when he stopped at the bottom.
Travis shoved both hands against Levi’s chest.
Levi didn’t move.
Not an inch.
He absorbed it like a mountain absorbs wind. Arms relaxed. Expression unchanged.
Travis’s face went scarlet.
“Feel better?” Levi asked, almost pleasantly.
Travis’s face went red. “Get out of my way.”
“No.”
“I said, get out of my way. I need to talk to Becca—” He shoved again, harder this time, using both hands, and Levi still did not move, did not change expression, did nothing except stand there, immovable, making Travis much more furious than any retaliation could have.
Levi didn’t budge. “You’re embarrassing yourself,” he said mildly.
“You think this is funny?” Travis’s voice cracked. “She was mine, Barrett. We had a?—”
“She’s not yours,” Levi cut him off, quiet and final. “She was never yours. And she asked you to leave, so get the fuck out of here before I make you.”
