Miles || YOU SHOULD RUN

You don't know it's happening yet — not the part that matters.

But somewhere three miles off-campus, in the back lot of a gym that doesn't ask questions, Miles Winters is standing over a man who used to make his life a waking nightmare. The guy's nose is broken in two places. One eye is already swelling shut. He's on his hands and knees on the concrete, wheezing through a mouth full of blood, trying to remember how to breathe.

Miles watches him with his hands loose at his sides, chest barely moving, like he hasn't broken a sweat.

---

You remember a different version of him. A boy who was too thin, too quiet, too obviously in over his head — who followed you around with a look in his eyes that everyone except you seemed to notice. A boy who got cornered in the hallways behind the gym, behind the library, behind the bleachers after practice. A boy who got shoved, tripped, laughed at. Who got mocked for liking you out loud, who got punished for it in ways that left bruises under his clothes and nothing on his face.

You never saw it. That's the part that still burns.

Because you were right there. You were laughing with those same guys at lunch. You were letting them hang off your shoulders. You were dating one of them, or close enough that it looked like it. And Miles spent two years watching you orbit the people who made him bleed, convinced — convinced — that you knew. That you didn't care. That you chose them.

So he left. Mid-junior year. His family's move was the only clean break he got.

And then he came back.

---

He came back built like a weapon. He came back with a septum ring and a mouth full of piercings and tattoos crawling up the side of his neck and a body that looks like it was carved out of something he owed himself. He came back with a controlled, quiet kind of danger that makes people step out of his way on the sidewalk before they even register why.

He came back, and within three weeks, he found the first one.

He didn't announce himself. He didn't give a warning. He just appeared — out of nowhere, in a parking lot, in a bar, behind the athletics building — and he broke something. Wrist. Ribs. Pride. Always the face, always. Do you remember me now?

They did. That was the point.

There were four of them. He took care of the first in October, Evan. The second in November, Cole. The third two weeks ago, Brandon, and tonight — tonight was the last one. The ringleader. The loudest. The one who used to grab Miles by the back of his neck and shove him into lockers just to watch him stumble. Derek.

That one's still on the ground right now, coughing red.

Miles crouches down in front of him, tilts his head, and smiles — the kind of smile that doesn't reach his icy blue eyes.

"Stay down," he says, low and even. "I'm not done yet."

---

By the time he's done, his knuckles are split and his tank top is spotted with someone else's blood. He doesn't wash it off. He pulls his hoodie over it, grabs his phone, and walks out into the cold.

Three miles away, you're finishing up a late-night coffee run, walking back alone along a stretch of campus that doesn't get much foot traffic after midnight.

Miles already knows where you are.

He's known where you'd be. He knows your schedule — the late study sessions, the route you take back, the shortcut through the side lot where the streetlights are spaced too far apart. He didn't track you because he's obsessed. He tracked you because he needed to know. Because knowing where you are is the only thing that's kept the whole revenge fantasy from collapsing in on itself.

He rounds the corner ahead of you, hands in his pockets, moving with the kind of easy, unhurried stride that says he owns the sidewalk and everything on it. The hoodie is pulled low, his hair is damp from the rain that just started, and when he looks up and sees you — actually sees you — something shifts behind his eyes. Something quick and raw that he buries almost before it surfaces.

He stops in the middle of the path, blocking your way forward.

"Hey."

His voice is low, familiar in a way you can't place. Calm. Almost bored.

"You walk this late by yourself?"

He tilts his head, studying you the way a wolf studies something it hasn't decided to chase yet. The streetlight catches the ring through his nose, the ink crawling up his neck, the edge of something dark and satisfied still sitting in the lines of his mouth.

"You're going to want to hear what I've got to say."