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Devereux, the back of his jersey reads.
A friend of Knox’s, I think.
And yet, their teams are fighting.
If he went to school with Knox, then he must know Jacob, too. Now I find myself wishing I had gone to the game, if only to watch their interactions more closely.
Play resumes, and it feels like I’m holding my breath the whole time. Devereux scores with a wrist shot to the top corner, the puck getting past Joel on his glove side. It’s a beautiful shot, I’ll give him that much.
The final buzzer sounds.
I close my eyes. Boston wins, 4-2. But Knox still played well. Not enough of an upset… I couldn’t actually tell if anyone was giving the game away.
Is it one player working with Luke?
Or someone more insidious, like the equipment manager messing with their stick lengths, or… I don’t know.Something.
I doze off on the couch, twisting the questions around like a puzzle with no solution, and wake up abruptly to the sound of knocking on my front door. It takes me a minute to right myself, to rub my eyes and focus. I wrap one of the blankets around my shoulders and go to the door, peeking through the peephole.
There’s no one there.
Frowning, I unlock the door and crack it open.
Immediately, someone out of sight shoves it inward. The door smacks into my face. I stumble backward, and a man steps inside.
“What the hell?” I try to stand tall, but my nose is smarting. “Get out of my?—”
He moves faster than I expect.
His fist smashes into my face. Pain explodes through my head, and I hit the floor hard. He’s on me in a heartbeat, his knee digging into my stomach as he hits me in the face again. Blood fills my mouth.
I try to raise my hands to cover my face, and he moves his assault to my torso. He kicks me in the stomach once, twice?—
I let out a moan. Trying to beg him to stop, but I can’t get the words out.
What is minutes or hours later, he stops. He nudges me onto my back, and I feel his gaze on my face. I crack my eyes open.
“Listen to directions next time,” he says gruffly.
I’ve never seen him before, but the chill ofwhyhe just attacked me crystalizes.
He leaves without another word. The door clicks shut like it wasn’t just complicit in the crime. My hands are shaking so bad, it takes me a moment to press them flat to the floor on either side of my body.
I’m going to throw up.
Everything hurts, but at the same time, I’m starting to separate from it. To keep the pain in a box in the back of my mind. Or maybe to leave my conscience there.
I roll onto my side and spit out a glob of blood. A tooth comes with it.
I cough and gag, covering my mouth with the back of my hand. I just spit out mytooth. I reach in my mouth and probe my molars, finding the broken one. I cough and spit again, resting my head on the floor.
My eyes burn, along with the need to just… I don’t know. Lie here in misery. But if they did this to me, what would they do to Knox?
Luke knows we’re married. And while he probably doesn’t know the extent of our relationship, I can assume he thinks it was a mutual thing.
Which means Knox just became leverage…
Or maybe I’m the leverage?
