“I’m having an emergency,” I retort. “A big one, you could even say.” I reach for the doorknob. “I believe that qualifies me for a peek, per your regulations?”
His hand lands on my wrist, and, chest heaving, he remembers his own bulk enough to turn it against me. Before I can so much as blink, he’s gained the higher ground—literally. He flips us, pushing my back into his door while he holds my hands at my sides, firmlyawayfrom the doorknob. My nerves electrify.
He glares through his blooming cheeks, and despite our new position, I grin.
“Someone’s touchy,” I taunt.
“Stay out of my bedroom,” he orders.
My lips purse as I pretend to consider obeying, and his attention drops to them.
“Poem,” he growls. “Don’t test me. You have no clue how close to the edge I am right now.”
I snort. “As if pushing you over the edge isn’t one of my dearest pastimes.”
His eyes darken, and morale increases by a minimum of eighty percent.
“You get a little line between your eyebrows when you look at me like that,” I tell him. “It’s forming a wrinkle.”
He says a particularly nasty bad word as his face comes one threatening inch closer.
Before I can throw another jab his way, the doorbell rings.
I frown. Things were just looking up. In a minute, he was going to stomp away like a little baby to pout, and I would have gained another point in our never-ending competition to… I don’t know. Win.
As Fox drags me down the hallway by my wrists, I eye his pink cheeks, a frisson of pleasure tingling through me.
Sure, I didn’ttechnicallyget a point.
But somehow, it still feels like winning.
Chapter Ten
?
I mean technically someone almost dies in this chapter.
Poem
My sisters think they’re hilarious, handing me my bag earlier and listening to me gush gratitude at them while they smiled their sneaky littletraitorsmiles. They left, exchanging glances I mistook for sisterly love and affection.
I know better now.
Those looks were pureskullduggery, a word Sonnet taught me after she started working for the mayor—a word that perfectly encapsulates her current crimes with Muse as her co-conspirator.
Shivering in the teensiest, skimpiest pajamas I own, I wrap the quilt around me as I navigate by moonlight to the closet in search of warmth. I don’t knowwhythey chose these for me to sleep in when I have an entire drawer full of better options—warmeroptions. I can only assume they had nefarious intentions, and I plan to retaliate accordingly.
Right after I regain feeling in my toes.
Four letter words tumble out of my mouth as I struggle to get a steady grip on the closet door to open it, and I send up a multitude of thanks when I finally manage to get it open. Blessings, my chill is soon to end.
I grab every blanket I see, making several trips back and forth to lay them out on the bed, hoping with my every goosebump that they’ll be enough.
On my final trip to the closet, I find something better than the blankets I’ve been wildly hoarding—something better than diamonds or gold, if you ask me right now.
I findclothes.
Shoved in the far corner of a shelf, previously hidden behind my newly beloved blankets, sits a small stack of large T-shirts. Clearly Fox’s, but freeze if I care. They’re coverage, when I have so little.
