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32
ANASTASIA
“What the fuck is going on?”
There’s a clipped quality to his voice. The voice that I would recognize anywhere. The voice that’s been haunting my reality and my nightmares.
I raise my head slowly, my throat drying, and my skin suddenly turns freezing cold. The air thickens with suffocating tension and my breaths become deeper but shorter, like none of it is reaching my lungs.
And I don’t think it’s only due to the lack of air or his rough, savage voice. It’s his entire presence. The tightness in his shoulders, the clenching of his jaw, the bulging veins in his neck.
Mostly, it’s the light slowly but surely leaving his golden eyes. The light I always found refuge in. The light that anchored me when I needed something to lean on.
It’s gone now.
What’s left behind is worse than rage or even anger.
It’s nothingness. A bottomless black hole that has no end in sight.
Daniel pushes me away and I scramble to my feet as he stands up, the first buttons of his shirt still undone.
He carefully walks up to Knox. “Mate—”
Whatever he was going to say is cut off when Knox drives his fist into his face with a force that makes me gasp.
Daniel reels backward, cradling his nose with both hands. When he checks his palms, I lean over and startle when I see droplets of blood. “The fuck, Knox? Not the face, you bloody wanker!”
As if not hearing a word he said, Knox lunges forward, probably about to finish what he started. I don’t know how I do it, how I get the courage to jump forward.
Usually, I don’t get involved. I’m neither a pacifier nor a shit-stirrer. I just stay in the background, watching with my mouth shut.
But I think that part was purged out of me when I started becoming Jane. When my life took a sharp dive in a direction I don’t recognize.
The old Anastasia would’ve never gotten involved in fights, but the new me doesn’t think twice as I slide in front of Daniel, flinging my arms wide.
Knox stops mid-punch, his fist still raised in the air, and he’s breathing harshly through his nostrils, uncontrollably even. “Step away.”
“No,” I whisper.
“Step the fuck away.”
“No! Daniel has nothing to do with this. I was the one who asked him to join me here. I was the one who came on to him, so if you want to punch someone, punch me.”
“No one came on to anyone…” Daniel starts.
“I did. I wanted him,” I say firmly to Knox’s face, despite feeling something splinter to a million pieces inside me.
I feel bad for using Daniel and putting him in this position without asking him about it first, but this is the only chance I have.
Knox’s fist clenches until the veins on the back of his hand pop, and just when I think he’ll punch or strangle me, he lets his hand drop to his side.
Even though it’s still balled in a tight grip.
We’re both breathing heavily, his skyrocketing adrenaline rubbing off mine, his anger scratching on my fragile emotions.
He grabs me by the arm, his fingers leaving bruising marks on my skin as he hauls me closer to him. “I don’t want to deal with you right now, so fucking disappear.”
“Why? So you can beat Daniel up?”
