The PowWow

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Breaking Point

The corridor opened into a wider space and Jacob stopped me with a hand on my arm.

He turned and met my eyes. "Pray with me."

I placed my hand on his shoulder and bowed my head. He did the same. We didn't stay long. Just long enough for it to mean something. Then we moved.

Light spilled ahead across polished floors — too bright, too deliberate. Not security lighting, not the residual glow of an office left running. A hallway with its lights on because someone had decided they should be. The only way forward was through it.

This place had been prepared.

I slowed without meaning to. Jacob didn't.

Of course he didn't.

We crossed the threshold together.

Every overhead strip. Every corner. No shadows left to work with.

The gym was lit like a stage.

Nathanial stood at the far end, hands loose at his sides, with the easy posture of a man who had been waiting long enough to stop watching the door.

Between us — Alicia.

Tied to a chair. One eye swollen shut, the other dark with bruising. Dried blood along one side of her face, her lip split. She'd been here since the alley. Since that night in the dark.

But her head was up.

Her eyes were on him.

Not on us. On him.

Defiant in a way that had survived everything he'd done to her and was still standing, still pointed at him like it always would be.

Something in me went very still — not shock, but a different thing. Recognition. The particular stillness that comes just before it stops being still.

And then the rage arrived. Clean and total. Like a door being opened.

Nathanial smiled. "You came back."

I didn't answer. I couldn't look at him yet — not without what was happening inside me becoming something outside me. I kept my focus on Alicia. Her chest rose and fell, steady and controlled. She saw us. I knew she did.

She didn't call out. Didn't react. Didn't give him anything.

Good.

Nathanial took one step forward, bare feet solid on the floor. "I wondered if you would. Curiosity — or conviction?"

Jacob shifted slightly beside me. Present. Grounded. Not moving yet.

Nathanial gestured toward Alicia with the lazy ease of a man gesturing toward a piece of furniture. "She's been very resilient."

That tone.

That easy, self-satisfied ownership of what he'd done to her.

I was across the floor before I registered deciding to move.

Nathanial's smile didn't fade — but it changed. A flicker of something he hadn't anticipated, quickly filed.

He moved to meet me.

First strike, mine. Fast — faster than I'd ever moved before, something older than training singing in the lines of it.

He blocked it. Barely. His eyes sharpened.

Second — angle change. He stepped back, adjusted.

Third — feint, then the real thing. Connected with a sound that cracked off the walls and broke the silence of the room like a dropped glass.

His head moved. Not much. Just enough.

But there it was.

Surprise.

We circled. Every step calculated before it landed, every angle processed before commitment. His bare feet, my boots. He came in harder on the next pass — testing, adapting, looking for the rhythm that had worked on Jacob.

I'm not Jacob.

I was already moving before he finished committing. Inside his range, outside his line, always just ahead of where he expected to find me.

His strike missed.

Mine didn't. Two quick hits to the ribs. A third — high. He blocked it, but slower. Almost too late.

I saw it clearly now — the patterns, the openings, the shape of what was coming before it arrived. Something in the way I'd always been able to read a room, now reading a person, reading a fight, reading the space between intent and action.

"You keep saying you're in control—" I said, not slowing, not breathing hard yet.

He swung.

I slipped it. "—she doesn't look convinced."

That landed.

Not rage — not what I was carrying, not yet. But a tightening. A crack in the surface of the composure he'd been wearing since we walked in. He came in harder. Faster. Trying to match my speed, he gave up precision.

Mistake.

I stepped through it. Three strikes, clean. Shoulder, jaw, midsection. He staggered back half a step — more from surprise than damage, but half a step was half a step.

I pressed. Not wild, not reckless. Just inevitable. It was like taking the precision he'd sacrificed and returning it to him as something else entirely.

He tried to reset. I didn't give him the space. He overcorrected — fighting to drag control back into something that was no longer fully his — and that overcorrection opened him.

I took it.

My hand snapped forward and stopped an inch from his throat.

"Levi."

Jacob's voice. Low. Steady. Behind me.

The movement was still there — everything in me coiled and ready and burning. The rage hadn't gone anywhere. It was at the surface, pushing hard against the inside of my chest.

Nathanial saw it. For the first time since we'd walked into this building, he wasn't smiling.

"Levi."

Closer. Right behind me now.

My arm didn't move. Didn't strike, didn't lower. Just held there, perfectly still, between the thing it had been doing and the thing it wasn't doing yet.

A hand settled on my shoulder. Heavy. Certain. The weight of someone who had been in a much worse version of this exact moment and knew what the next second required.

Everything in me fought it. For half a second. Maybe less.

Then — stillness.

My breath came hard. Controlled, but barely. Like the anger itself, held inside something that was just barely sufficient for the job.

Nathanial straightened slowly, adjusting his stance. He watched us — both of us now — with a new quality of attention. Careful. Reassessing.

I kept my eyes on his. Didn't move.

Jacob's hand stayed on my shoulder. Unmoving. The anchor.

The moment balanced on its edge and didn't fall either way.