The words went through her.
I watched it happen. I watched Aura, who could skin a man alive with nothing but tone, go perfectly, terribly still.
“Maddox,” she said, her voice low.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, laughing under his breath. “I’m not the one who made it public.”
Something inside me stopped breathing.
“What did you just say?” I asked.
Maddox looked at me, but he wasn’t smart enough to be afraid yet. “Man, I’m not trying to start shit.”
“Then stop talking,” Rider said.
Maddox ignored him because stupid men always confused being warned with being challenged. “I’m just saying, it was a whole thing back then. She knows.”
Aura’s face had gone smooth. Too smooth. The kind of smooth that wasn’t control. It was survival.
She looked at Maddox like he was a stain on the floor. “You were always a coward with an audience.”
His grin twitched. “And you were always real good at acting like the victim after getting exactly what you wanted.”
Briggs stood so quickly that his chair scraped hard enough to make heads turn.
“Sit down,” Rider said beneath his breath, but he was already half-standing too.
I didn’t move.
Not yet.
Because if I moved, I wasn’t sure the room would remain intact.
Aura’s hand tightened around the order pad. “Careful. I’m not as naive as I was at seventeen.”
Maddox laughed. “That word again. You used to say that a lot, didn’t you? Careful, stop, don’t, no. Then Darian would show everybody proof you weren’t as untouchable as you acted.”
My vision tunneled. “What proof?” I asked before looking at Aura. “What is he talking about?”
Aura’s eyes closed for half a second, and Maddox finally noticed my voice. Finally noticed the way I looked ready to rip his spine out through his throat. Finally noticed that my calm had gone lethal.
But he had already opened the door, and like most cowards, he decided the only way out was to make it worse by excusing his shit away.
Maddox swallowed, then tried to laugh like there was still a version of this where he walked away untouched.
“There was a video, okay?” he said. “Darian filmed it.”
The table went quiet in a way bars weren’t supposed to go quiet. The Red Wings game still played over the speakers, people still laughed near the dartboards, and glasses still struck tables, but everything around me narrowed to Aura standing at the end of ours with an order pad in one hand and a tray tucked against her hip.
She didn’t move.
That was what scared me first.
Aura always moved. A shift of her weight. A tilt of her chin. A slow blink that could make a man feel stupid for breathing too loudly. Her body was language when her mouth was done cutting. But she was so completely still now that itlooked unnatural, like every part of her had locked itself down to keep something worse from spilling out.
Maddox’s eyes flicked toward her, then away.
Coward.
