Page 64 of Steel Rain

“Oh, yes, you’re right. I was Shiny, wasn’t I? A princess! I thought I was above that kind of tragedy. But I wasn’t, was I? Best friends with the boss’s son, and it still happened to me!”

“That’s enough, Sinead!” He turned and marched to the bed, grabbing me by the scruff of a t-shirt that wasn’t mine. He brought my face up to his and shook me hard, sending pain through my ribs.

“That’s why Kira’s gone, isn’t it?” I was laughing hysterically, right into his pathetic face. “What did you do to her, you fucking asshole? What did you do to your wife to make her run away? What did you do?”

His fist pulled back, his other hand still holding the collar of my shirt and he growled, ready to strike me in the face.

“That’s enough!” Another voice pierced the silence. A presence I hadn’t noticed through my swollen eye. “Eoghan, we should go.”

Dairo. My other friend. The other person who I couldn’t turn to back then because he was far, far away. Maybe he would have done something. Maybe … but what are the odds?

“Let her go, Eoghan.” Dairo stepped forward, his tall, slim frame was silhouetted by the light coming through the window, reflected off the white snow. He grabbed Eoghan’s arm, the one that held me by the shirt, and pried his fingers off of my clothes one by one. “She needs to heal.”

Eoghan’s cold, angry eyes suddenly thawed, as if he only noticed his hands at that moment. He looked shocked as he saw his fist as if discovering it for the first time.

He straightened and ran a hand through his blond hair, as if erasing the insanity that had crossed his features.

He stared down at me from above the bridge of that perfect nose, and nodded.

“We’re not done discussing this, Sinead.” He pointed an angry index finger at me, before he turned and stepped out of the room.

Dairo looked at me, as if for the first time since I had come back into the life. He looked me up and down, from what I assumed was a blackened eye, to my cut lip, to the swollen, purple knuckles of my hand.

“I cannot speak to what you have gone through, Shiny,” he said, stepping forward, with his hands open as if he was going to embrace me. Then he thought better of it and stepped back. “But we will fix this.”

He walked out, following Eoghan. When the door opened for them to slip through, I heard Ajax hollering commands to the class down below.

When I was on the brink of death and in need of a miracle, I had come to him.

I felt my clavicle, where the fading bruise of his bite was still there. I pressed on the flesh, hoping to keep that mark just a moment longer. To make that mark stronger than all the rest that Keith had left on me.

And I wept. I wept because I knew that his marks would never overpower the bruises and breaks that had already been placed. I was too damaged for anyone.

Chapter 29

Ajax

Halfmyheadwasupstairs in my apartment, in the bed with the broken beauty that had shown up at my door. The other half of me was here, on the mat, and ready to commit murder.

Keith Bournes had shown up with half his face swollen. His little buddy had a chunk of his hand in a bloody bandage. The other had his ear wrapped up, blood seeping through the linen. I sent those two pin cushions home, because I couldn’t have them bleed on my mat. That was unsanitary, and how diseases spread.

But Keith? Oh, with just a swollen face, he got to stay.

We were an odd number, since Sinead was also absent. So I sparred to keep the numbers even. I sparred to keep my own demons at bay.

“What happened to your face?” I asked Keith as we touched gloves, before the bell announced the start of the bout.

“Some overzealous bitch got carried away with her passion,” Keith winked at me, as if we were sharing some joke.

An image of the frozen, blue-lipped woman that had been buried in the white snow flashed through my mind, and before the five-minute bout was done, he was on the ground, tapping furiously on his back, his face in the mat, my forearm cutting off his air.

He tapped against my arm, and I cranked things tighter, knowing that he couldn’t speak. He couldn’t scream. I controlled his body, his voice … One jerk. One quick jerk and I could break his pathetic neck. I felt his pulse weaken; his body started to go limp. I felt the struggle leave his body as his legs fell flat, ceasing their futile struggle.

“Ajax!” Eoghan’s voice from the top of the stairs that led to my apartment snapped me out of my killing haze.

I released Keith onto the floor, and he spluttered and coughed, stuck in the prone position beneath me. The bell rang, ending the bout.

I got up, and looked at Eoghan. Dairo was standing behind him.

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