Page 8 of Undisputed Chaos
Adrian
For you two, anything.
Tell Jax I'm sending him the therapy bill for my emotional trauma. His stupid perfect hair gives me nightmares.
Another photo appeared, this time just the girls, Sierra pretending to swoon while Estelle caught her.
Jax (The Girls)
OMG JAX IS THREATENING TO BREAK DOWN THE DOOR!
We made Connor buy us nachos to watch your fight.
Uh oh.
Gotta go, they’re getting that look! Byeeee!
I hearted the photo, oddly touched. The thought of them all there, watching me fight, settled something restless inside me.
Even if the guys pretended they were just there to critique my technique, and even if the girls were mostly enjoying the show and stolen nachos.
Adrian
Run fast, girls. I'll avenge your deaths at their funeral.
I tossed my phone onto the bench and let myself sink into the afterglow. The ache in my jaw, the sting in my ribs, the way my heart still hammered like a war drum.
This was living.
I stretched, rolling my shoulders, admiring how my tattoos shiftedover muscle. Each was a memory, a trophy, a piece of the life I’d survived.
I caught a glimpse of the other guy being helped out of the ring, his face a ruin of swelling and blood, and felt a surge of satisfaction.
I wasn’t cruel for the sake of it. I just liked seeing what people were made of when you stripped away the pretense. Some broke easily, some surprised you. Most just disappointed.
I pulled on my leather jacket and headed out into the night. The city was humming, neon and alive, and I felt like I could chew through steel.
I ducked into a shop, grabbed a bottle of water and a pack of sour gummies, and flashed a bloody grin at the cashier. She didn’t even flinch. Around here was tough like that.
Outside, I leaned against a streetlamp, letting the cool air sting my skin. I texted Jax again, just to annoy him and see if he’d gotten his phone back:
Adrian
Tell Leo Uncle Adrian says hi. And that I hit harder than you, Lion.
I could practically hear Jax’s indignant sputtering from here. The guy had an ego larger than the Earth, but he’d never beat me at trash talk.
The city hummed around me, neon bleeding through the cracks in brick walls, but inside my chest, it was quieter than it had been in years.
Not peace, I’d never known that particular luxury, but something like a truce with the beast that lived beneath my ribs.
I'd been chasing that silence since I was born and learned how pain felt. Pain had been the first language I'd mastered, spoken fluently in bruises that bloomed purple-black across ribs too small to take the hits.
My parents hadn't loved—they'd consumed, devoured, left me rawand feral, reading micro-expressions like my life depended on it. Because it had.
The twitch of an eye meant incoming violence. A certain tilt of the head meant the bottle was empty and someone needed to bleed for it.
I'd learned to hunt emotions in faces before I could properly read books, tracking danger like an animal scenting predators on the wind.
