Page 47 of Heartbreak Kings
Another barked, “Ow, fuck. He hit me in the mouth!”
And another one staggered back bleeding, tears brimming in his eyes.
For once, I was glad my father had stuck me in self-defense classes since I was tiny. But even that couldn’t help me if they piled on, and they just kept coming as I knocked them back and tried to get across the room. Maybe I should have focused on not getting hit, but I was too pissed off at that smug prick on the couch.
There were too many. I fought them off as long as I kept my feet, but some of them were swinging chairs. When the second one broke across my back, I went down, and they started kicking.
“Get that cuck! Kick his ass!” Their yells all blended together after a while. I grabbed one of them and yanked his legs out from under him, bringing him down to my level and disabling him with a gut punch. I used him as a meat shield against some boot party as I tried to crawl under the table.
Then the far hallway door exploded open. “What the fuck is going on in here?” the floor monitor bellowed. “Security is on its way!”
The boys stampeded instantly, pouring toward the closer door in a panic and flattening me as they ran over me. Carmody went whimpering and panting by, total panic in his voice, as if he had just now realized you couldn’t orchestrate a beatdown in a dorm common room without being caught.
“Carmody!” the monitor yelled, making the bastard whimper harder as he tried to push himself faster than a jog. “I saw your face, you fucking loser. You’re going to answer for this.”
He followed them out as I lay there catching my breath. I was sore and bloodied, but nothing broken, and Carmody had just fucked himself. As I dragged myself to a sitting position, I saw the mess his cronies had made of the room and smiled grimly around a cut lip. It was only a matter of time now before he went down.
But that wasn’t soon enough. Time had proven that when you squeezed Carmody, more and more crazy started leaking out. And he was about to get squeezed damn hard. Until he was safely behind bars, he was a hazard to Sabine.
Grabbing my briefcase and checking around for anything else I’d left, I pulled myself to my feet then picked up all of the lawsuit papers, shoving them back into my briefcase. I could hear yelling from down the hall. At least one of the unfamiliar petty thugs had gotten himself collared. Too bad it wasn’t Carmody himself.
Wiping blood off my lip, I walked out through the far exit, making myself scarce before the monitor could catch and detain me. I needed to get to Sabine as fast as I could.
Chapter 19
Sabine
It was almostten at night, and I was in the middle of editing an article for my blog. I heard a soft knock at the door, followed by a faint thud and a sigh. “Sabine?” Marcus called out, sounding exhausted.
Immediately worried, I got up and walked over to the door. “Yeah, just give me a minute.”
I opened the door—and stared in shock as Marcus nearly fell inside, battered. His shirt was torn, his dark hair askew, and his knuckles bloodied. “Hi,” he said with an awkward smile as he leaned heavily on the doorframe. “I was in the neighborhood, thought I’d visit.”
“What the hell happened?” I helped him inside and over to the edge of my bed, where he flopped down heavily. I locked the door and turned back to eye him.
“Negotiations with Carmody and his cronies didn’t go so well,” he sighed, his smile tight and embarrassment in his eyes. “I’m not bad in a fight, but it was nine-on-one, and a couple guys tried to brain me with a chair.”
“Jesus.” I grabbed my first aid kit from my closet and brought it over along with a packet of baby wipes. “You okay? Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“I’ll be fine,” he grumbled, trying to fend me off as I helped him out of his jacket. He had some ugly welts across the side of his face and the back of his neck, and one of his eyes was slightly swollen. “Okay, come on, you don’t have to fuss.”
“Yeah, I do. You’re beaten up because of me.” It came out before I even thought about it.
He eyed me tiredly. “No, I’m in this condition because of Carmody and his little hate cult of shit-disturbers. They’re the ones who smashed a chair over my back and then kicked me in my ribs.”
“We should call the police, or at least campus security.” I was getting sick of the Gentlemen’s refusal to get the police involved. I knew they were trying to save the reputations of both their fraternity and their campus, but it just wasn’t worth it. What was the point of keeping quiet about these incidents if people kept getting hurt?
“No,” he sighed, and he smirked when I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “I’ll heal. As for Carmody and the others, they’ll face consequences, all right. Security already knows about the wrecked common room and about Carmody’s involvement. Unless he recruited from off campus, the other guys will eventually get caught.And he and the others will face consequences from Alpha Omega too. We will ban anyone involved from pledging again. It’ll make Carmody go nuclear, but that just means a phone call from his mommy. Who will be very interested to know he’s been inciting riots on campus.”
My eyebrows rose. “You’re going to sic his mother on him?”
He grinned. “Let’s put it this way. His daddy is always off on business trips, which makes Carmody his mother’s responsibility. From what I’ve heard, he treats her as badly as any other woman who crosses his path—but she just takes it. Spoils him. Once she finds out he’s damaging the school’s reputation with his behavior and we’re on the brink of having him arrested, she’ll probably pull her precious baby out altogether to keep him from getting himself in worse trouble.”
“What she needs to do is cut off his money until he gets his unwashed ass into therapy,” I sighed as I started cleaning the blood and grime off his face.
He squinted and squirmed a little. “Come on, that’s unnecessary.”
“Let me fuss,” I insisted, and he finally gave in and let me tend to him. “How is your head?”
