“Yeah, well, you don’t really help with that, either, do you? He needs to eat real food and not get away with all these tantrums. A psychologist could—”
“No.” She has turned primal, her teeth sharp. “No shitty doctor is going to root around in his head and pathologize him and tell me he isbroken. He just needs more time. I’ll make him believe he’s four.”
She will tear out throats before someone touches Jude, talks to him, pries open his chest and plunges vicious fingers around in the softness of his guts to pull out every horrible thing he’s been through. No one can know.
He’s just a baby. He’sher baby.
Bren swivels to face her, and the cool annoyance on his face ignites her most vulnerable fears.
“You sound unhinged.”
“Oh, fuck you,” she snaps.
“Or maybe listen for a goddamn second instead of always attacking anyone who suggests—”
“Suggests I’m not doing mybestfor my kid?”
“I didn’t even say that!” His ears flush red, muscles in his jaw rippling in a way that screamsdanger.
She doesn’t care. Her voice is rising, anger a throttling force that upends her words and fills them with something white-hot. “You don’ttrust me. You don’t think I’m capable or smart or—or remotely able to save myself.”
Something dark flashes in his eyes, a molten fury that would burn to the touch. “You couldn’t save yourself or Jude and you fucking know it. Don’t act like anything was under control, because it wasn’t.”
“I didn’t need you torescue me.”
“Youdid.” It’s a snarl. “You needed me then and you need me now, so take a second to remember you havenothingwithout me.”
She could strike him. Her bruised hand rises, though there is no energy in it, and when he grabs her wrist, he is all steel and iron edges. She wants to throw herself against him, to cut and be cut, to bleed out in pure vindictive pleasure. Her fury is a bottomless well, and she wants to let loose, to rage in a way she has never allowed herself to in front of him.
Only, she isn’t meant to be angry. She is sweet Elodie January, delicate and quiet and reserved, no fractures showing on her porcelain veneer.
Bren tightens his grip on her. “No one is going to take him from you unless you keep acting deranged. Calm. The hell. Down. Don’t make me fix this in ways you won’t like.”
“Then let me put him in preschool!”
“Fine! Fuck.Fine.But I’ll enroll him. I’ll do the paperwork so you don’t screw it up. And in return you are going to let me handle him. You clearly can’t do it, so I will. And”—his voice turns rusted and rough—“you will trust me. Stop fighting me. Stop destroying my house.”
“Threaten me again,” she whispers, “and I will kill you.”
He yanks her closer and she cries out. His mouth is so close to hers. “Then stop being hysterical.”
The angle of her chin is regal, almost haughty, and she brings her free hand up to wrap about his throat. Her skin is so cold, his a furnace.
“What if I say no?”
“You won’t say no,” he says.
She shoves him back against the pillows and he goes down easily, his grip on her wrist loosening only so he can take hold of her hips as she straddles him. When she kisses him, there is only fury as their teeth crack together, as he snarls something appreciative and hungry into her mouth, and then takes a fistful of her hair. Too tight, too hard. Everything between them is cut glass and black frost, and she loves him, shehates him, as she yanks down his pajama pants and makes him groan. His anger is already morphing into enamored want, and she knows he likes this. When she is feral. Blood in his mouth. Bruises forming where she bit.
“Just know this,” she says. “I will always love him more than you.”
“Oh, I know.”
Bren is breathing fast as he pushes her off and then rolls so their positions are reversed. He on her this time, his weight suffocating, maddening, addicting.
“You always do this when we fight,” he murmurs into her neck. “You don’t have to. Arguments don’t have to end in sex.”
But she needs to know he still wants her.
