Page 173 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“She looked down that street for you.” He takes the hits without going down, absorbing them with a grit that infuriates me. “Right up until she got in the car, she was still hoping.”

“I said shut up.” My voice fractures slightly on the last word and I hate myself for it.

He grabs my arm mid-swing and uses the momentum to throw me back. I stumble, reset, breathe.

“You absolute fucking coward.” He's breathing harder now, a cut opening above his brow, blood running into his eye. “Everything she survived. Everything she forgave you for. And you couldn't give her three words.”

I charge. We grapple, crash into the ropes together, both of us breathing ragged and burning.

“You don't know anything about what's between us,” I snarl.

“I know she loves you.” He shoves me back and squares up again, his chest heaving. “I know it the way you know something that's true all the way to the bone. Not because she told me, but because of the way she didn't talk about you. The way she'd go quiet. The way she'd look at nothing and be somewhere else entirely.” He spits blood to the side. “She loves you, Devlin. And she left anyway because loving you wasn't enough to save her.”

The fight goes out of me.

Not all at once, but gradually, like air leaving a punctured tire. I'm still standing, still breathing hard, hands still up, but something has gone slack behind my eyes.

We stand there in the center of the ring both bleeding, both wrecked and the silence is different from the silence of before. This one isn't hostile. It's just exhausted. Two men who've beaten the truth into each other until it finally landed.

Carn reaches into the waistband of his shorts and produces an envelope, slightly bent now, marked with the kind of deliberate handwriting I'd recognize anywhere.

He holds it out.

“That's for Cas,” he says quietly. “She asked me to make sure he got it. Wouldn't trust the mail.”

I stare at it for a long moment before I take it.

Carn leans back against the ropes, pressing the back of his wrapped hand against the cut above his brow. His breathing is evening out. When he speaks again his voice is low and without performance.

“She named him,” he says. “Cas. Named him as head of her family.”

Everything goes very still.

“She did what?”

“It's all in there.” He nods toward the envelope. “Cas inherits the leadership of the cartel but there's a condition. He has to finish school first. Alex runs everything in the interim.” He pauses, letting that land. “She thought it through, Xaden. Every angle. Alex won't move against Cas, not ever. And Cas won't move against you.” His eyes meet mine and hold them. “Three towns. No war. Balanced like a tripod, pull one leg and the whole thing falls, so no one pulls.” A beat. “She built you a peace you didn't even ask for, on her way out the door, because even leaving she was still trying to protect you.”

The breath leaves my body completely.

I stand there in the middle of my ring, bleeding and bruised, an envelope in my hand, addressed in her writing and feel the full, staggering weight of what she did. She didn't just leave. She arranged things. She thought about the towns, about the power structures, about the three-way balance that would keep everyone she loved alive, and she built it all on her way out the door like a final act of care from someone who never stopped caring even when she should have.

She gave Cas a future.

She gave the towns peace.

She gave me nothing to fight against.

Cas appears at the edge of the ring. He's been listening, I knew he would be. He looks at the envelope in my hand and something crosses his face that I rarely see there.

I climb through the ropes and hold it out to him.

He takes it carefully, turning it over. His jaw works.

“She didn't have to do this.” His voice is rough.

“No,” I agree. “She didn't.”

Carn drops down from the ring and lands beside us, rolling his neck, wiping blood from his face with the back of his hand. He looks between us both, the three of us standing there in the empty gym, connected by a woman who isn't here and then he looks at me directly.