Page 169 of Make Me Mean It

“Ask your brother,” I spit, bitterness cutting through the words before I can stop it. “Since he apparently feels like sharing now.”

I turn away as Connor rounds the corner because I can’t fucking look at him. Not now. Not when Marcus has already dragged every thought I’ve spent days trying to bury straight back to the surface and Connor’s standing there close enough that I can feel him without even seeing him.

A hand slams into my shoulder.

I stumble forward a step, my skate scraping hard against the ice, and every muscle in my body locks.

For fuck’s sake.

I swallow the growl that tries to tear out of me, rolling my shoulder as heat surges straight back through my chest. I’m already hanging on by a fucking thread and Marcus apparently wants to see exactly how far he can pull it before it snaps.

“Marcus, stop.”

Connor’s voice cuts across the rink, breathless and sharp, and it hits me harder than the shove did.

My eyes close for half a second.

I tilt my neck slowly, trying to work out some of the tension before I turn back to Marcus. It doesn’t help. He’s still standing there looking at me like I’m something he scraped off the bottom of his shoe, and my temper spikes all over again.

“You really wanna do this?” My voice drops low as I stare at him. “We’re supposed to be friends.”

“You forgot that first when you screwed my brother.”

He shoves me again.

My gaze flicks to Connor.

Fuck.

He flinches.

It’s small, but I see it. See the way his eyes drop immediately to the ice, the colour climbing up his neck, spreading across his cheeks as his mouth presses into a tight line.

Embarrassed.

Marcus made him fucking embarrassed.

Whatever anger I was holding onto shifts instantly, sharpening into something else entirely.

I smack Marcus’s hands away and shove him back hard enough to put space between us. “Stop fucking talking about him like that.”

Marcus laughs, but there’s nothing funny in it. He’s too far inside his own anger to hear what I’m actually saying, too fucking determined to make me the villain in whatever version of this he’s already built in his head.

“That’s all anyone ever is to you, Knox,” he spits, his voice rising across the empty rink. “A warm hole.”

My fist connects with his jaw before I even realise I’ve swung it.

The crack echoes through the rink.

For one suspended second, everything goes completely still.

Then Marcus’s hand fists in my collar.

He yanks me forward and his fist catches me across the mouth hard enough to snap my head sideways. Pain explodes through my lip, bright and immediate, the metal of my ring cutting into already split skin as blood floods hot across my tongue.

After that, there’s no thinking.

I grab him and drive him backwards, his shoes scraping across the ice as he catches himself and comes straight back at me. His fist glances off my cheek. Mine catches somewhere near his ribs. We’re grabbing shirts, shoving, swinging whenever there’s enough space to get a fist between us, neither of us giving a shit about balance or where the next hit lands.