3

RICHARD's POV

The house was dark when I got back.

Uncle Darren's truck was in the driveway. I walked in quiet the way I always did. Force of habit. Survival habit.

The smell hit me first. Cigarettes and stale alcohol soaked into the walls so deep I wasn't sure anymore if it was the house or just what air smelled like now. I moved through the living room and didn't bother turning on the light. I knew every obstacle by memory. The single chair facing the TV with its ring of empty beer bottles around the base, cheap stuff, the kind that came in cases of thirty. Unwashed plates on the floor next to it. A fork still sitting in something dried and brown. The television was off but the cable box glowed green in the dark like it was the only living thing in the room.

Uncle Darren was my mother's youngest brother. The one who never enlisted, never finished school, never built a single thing. He was also the one who collected a pension check from a veteran's benefit he inherited when grandpa died and called it a career. The universe had a nasty sense of humor putting me here, in his house, under his thumb.

I dropped my bag by the door and moved down the narrow hallway toward my room.

I pushed my bedroom door open and stopped.

My drawers were yanked out and left hanging. My magazines were scattered across the floor, pages bent and face-down like they'd been thrown. My boxers, my socks, my training gear, all of it pulled out and left wherever it landed. The box on my shelf had been opened and dropped on its side. My mattress was half off the frame. My chair was pulled away from the desk and left in the middle of the room like he'd stood on it to reach the shelf.

Twenty minutes. He had spent at least twenty minutes in here.

I stood in the doorway and I didn't move.

The anger came up slow and total, the kind that didn't spike and drop, the kind that just filled everything evenly until there was no room left for anything else. I looked at my clothes on the floor. I looked at the mattress. I looked at the box on its side and I thought about the fact that he had touched everything in this room, moved through it, put his hands on every single thing that belonged to me, and felt entitled to every second of it.

I breathed in through my nose and breathed out before I walked back down the hall and knocked on his door hard enough to shake the frame.

"Uncle Darren."

Nothing.

I knocked again.

A grunt. Shuffling. The door opened and he stood there in a stained undershirt, eyes half-closed, breath sour with whatever he'd been drinking since this afternoon.

"My room," I said. "You went through it."

He blinked slow. "My house."

"That's not what I asked you."

"I do what I want in my house." He scratched his stomach. "Checking for drugs. I've got a right."

"There are no drugs."

"Then you've got nothing to cry about."

"I'm not crying." I kept my voice flat. "I'm asking you why my room looks like a tornado went through it."

"Maybe you should keep it cleaner." He smiled at that. Actually smiled.

I stared at him. "You were looking for money."

The smile thinned. "What did you just say to me?"

"You went through my drawers looking for cash to take," I said, stepping closer. "That's what this was."

"Get out of my doorway, Richard."

"Answer the question."

"I said get the fuck out of my doorway." His voice went low and mean.

"You went through my things," I said again. I was not moving. I was not stepping back. He needed to understand that I was not stepping back. "My clothes are on the floor. My fucking mattress is off the frame and you did all that for what? Money to buy another pack of fucking smokes?"

His hand reached out before I could move and ran hard across my face. He hit me hard enough to snap my head sideways and ring my ear.

I turned my head back slowly.

My hands were already fists. The urge to swing came up through my chest hot and clean and immediate, the kind of feeling that didn't ask permission. He was right there. He was right there and my right hand knew exactly what to do.

He saw it. His eyes dropped to my hands and something mean and satisfied moved across his face.

"Go ahead," he said quietly. "I'm standing right here. Take your shot."

My jaw was locked so hard my teeth ached.

"One phone call." He let that land. "That's all. One call to your officer and everything that little coach built for you is gone. You go straight back." He tilted his head. "You remember what straight back looks like do you not, Rich?"

I remembered.

My hands opened. It took everything in my body to make them open.

I grabbed my bag off the hallway floor. I walked to the front door. I didn't say anything because there was nothing I could say that wasn't going to cost me everything, and I had already paid too much to blow it in this hallway over a man who wasn't worth the consequence.

I ran.

No direction. Just out. The neighborhood moved past me in the dark, chain-link fences and porch lights, cracked sidewalks, the gas station on the corner with the busted sign that had been busted for two years. I ran until my lungs caught fire and I ran harder after that because the burning was better than standing still with what was in my chest.

His hand across my face.

I ran faster.

By the third mile my head started to clear. Not calm. Just cleaner. Like the anger had found somewhere to go other than directly into my fists.

Briggs's voice came back somewhere around mile four.

Thursday. Andre Williams.

I'd watched those clips more times than I was willing to admit. Late at night, couldn't sleep, phone screen the only light in the room. Andre Williams playing rugby like it had been personally handed to him. Reading the field before the play developed, making cuts that had no right to work, coming up clean after contact like nothing had actually touched him.

And then the rest of it. The walk off the pitch after a win. That easy unhurried stride. Head up, shoulders back, crowd screaming his name like it was a prayer and him receiving it like a man who had never once questioned whether he deserved it.

He had never lost anything.

I wanted to be the first thing that cost him.

I needed Thursday the way I needed the run right now, something to put all of this into before it put me somewhere I couldn't come back from.

My face still stung where Darren hit me.

Good.

I was going to take every single bit of it out on the smug bastard.