Page 146 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I turn my head to look at her.

She's looking at her hands.

“I grew up knowing what it looked like when someone was watching the room without appearing to. Knowing the difference between the men my father trusted and the ones he was afraid of.” Her jaw tightens slightly. “Knowing what it meant when one of them stopped coming around.”

“Harper—”

“I'm not saying it was bad,” she cuts in, and her voice is the voice she uses when she's already had the argument with herself. “I'm saying it's what I know. The shape of it. The smell of it.” She finally looks at me. “I knew what Xaden was the first night I saw him. Not who, I didn't know who. But what. I've been in enough rooms with men like that to read it the way you'd read a weather forecast.”

“Then why—” I stop. Try again. “Why didn't you warn me?”

Something moves through her expression that is not quite a smile.

“Because you needed him,” she says simply. “Not him specifically. But the thing he gave you, someone who didn't look at you like a sad story. Someone who took you seriously enough to fight you.” She exhales. “I watched you in Stormsend. The way you stood up straighter every time he was in the room. The way you stopped apologizing for taking up space.” A pause. “You needed that. Even if the man delivering it was a nightmare.”

I stare at her.

“You could have told me,” I say quietly. “Any of it. You didn't have to carry all of that alone.”

Harper looks at me for a long moment. The fluorescent hospital light is unkind to everyone but she looks, in this specific moment, exactly like herself. No performance, no careful brightness, just Harper. The real one.

“Neither did you,” she says. “But here we both are.”

The silence that follows is different from the one before. Warmer. The kind that exists between two people who have just shown each other something true and are deciding what to do with it.

“My father's gone,” she adds after a moment, quieter. “Has been for years. I'm not—I don't carry it around anymore. But I know this world, Tor. I know how it works and I know what it costs and I know what it looks like when someone is trying to pull you under while calling it love.” Her eyes hold mine. “And I will never, for as long as I live, let that happen to you without saying something. Even when you don't want to hear it.”

I reach out and take her hand.

She lets me.

“Thank you,” I say. “For staying. For all of it.”

She squeezes once. Lets go. Reaches for her terrible hospital vending machine coffee with both hands, takes a sip and pulls a face.

“Somebody in this friendship has to have standards,” she says. “It's clearly going to have to be me.”

I almost laugh.

It almost sounds like normal.

Before I can respond, the door opens again.

Carnage walks in, looking exhausted, but his eyes are shadowed with violence.

“Darlin’,” he says, and there's genuine relief in his voice. “Good to see you fully awake.”

“Hey, Carn.”

He pulls up a chair, and I notice Harper's posture stiffen. I choose to ignore it because I know she is pissed and worried Carnage is going to try to make a move on me. What she doesn’t know is we already had a moment. I just haven’t had the chance to tell her about it.

“Fiona?” I ask.

“Alive,” Carnage confirms. “Barely. Alex has been giving her a front row seat to why he was given the name Butcher.”

“And Xaden?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady. “Harper said he's there.”

Carnage's expression shifts, something complicated and uncomfortable.