Oops, You Bullied the Alpha Queen novel · Chapter 22 of 32

Chapter 22: One Night

I didn't tell anyone about the crack.

I wore a Band-Aid over the ring to class.

Cade saw it from across the mat room and looked at me for one second too long.

He didn't ask in front of anybody.

After class he caught me at the door.

"Come up to the cabin tonight," he said. "I'll cook."

"You cook?"

"I make one thing. It's eggs."

"That's breakfast."

"Then I'll make breakfast at night." He looked at the Band-Aid. "And you can tell me why your thumb is bleeding when your thumb isn't bleeding."

His cabin stood at the top of the ridge, a mile above the town, at the end of a dirt road.

It was one room of old logs and a loft, with a woodstove and a window that looked down on all of Madrone Ridge.

From up there the college was a handful of lights. The quarry was a black thumbprint in the trees.

He'd built it himself, the summer he turned twenty.

"Badly," he said, when I touched the crooked door frame. "My father said it'd fall down in a year."

He did make eggs.

We ate them at a table by the stove, with toast and too much pepper, and he kept getting up to put another log in when the fire didn't need it.

Finally I peeled off the Band-Aid and set my hand on the table.

He saw the crack.

He didn't say anything for a while.

"How long has it been there?"

"Since last night. In the locker room. When I saw Rhett."

"What happens if it breaks?"

"It won't hold her anymore." I turned my hand over. "Then I shift, whether I mean to or not, and the vow goes with it."

"Nine days."

"Nine days."

He reached across the table and took my hand, very carefully.

"Tell me about your father," he said.

So I did.

How he taught me to read a fence by its hinges and a man by what he did with his hands.

How the rogues caught him alone on the river road below Stonecrop the winter I was eighteen, and Garrick carried him home over his shoulders, two miles in the snow, crying the whole way.

"I wasn't there," I said. "I was at a friend's house. I was eighteen, and I was at a friend's house, watching a movie."

Cade's thumb moved over my knuckles.

"Mine died in his truck," he said. "Eighteen months ago. His heart, coming home from a board meeting. Peyton's father found him in the parking lot."

"Were you close?"

"No." He thought about it. "I loved him. He liked the Run. Both of those are true, and I still don't know what to do with them."

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