"Have you found anything yet?" she demands. "Anything at all? Or did you just disappear again?"
Again?
The word lands harder than a slap.
"I'm working on it," I growl, irritated with her attitude.
Her mouth twists. "Working on it," she repeats, disbelief sharpening every syllable. "That's what this is to you? A delay?"
She shoves my chest. Not hard. Enough.
"You promised me," she nearly shouts, and now her eyes shine, furious and wet. "You looked at me and promised me you would bring him back."
I did no such thing, but I'll entertain her for a moment. Because even I know a mother can be irrational in a situation like this. "I will," I vow instantly, without hesitation.
She laughs, short and bitter. "Then why are you standing here with nothing?"
The jacket slips from my arm and hits the floor. I don't look down.
"I haven't gone after anyone yet," I chose my words carefully, deliberately. "Because I don't know who hasthem."
I stretch thethembecause, for some reason, she seems to be forgetting about her husband. I wish I could do the same. Carter fucking Whitford.
Her breath stutters. "So you don't have him," she states flatly.
"No."
The word costs me. Her shoulders rise and fall once. She doesn't scream. She doesn't cry. She just looks at me like I'm something she's deciding whether to trust or break.
"I don't care what you have to do." There is a fire in her eyes I've never seen before, not even after she killed Coach and threatened to kill me next. "I don't care how ugly it gets." She steps closer, close enough that I feel heat through my shirt, close enough that my body reacts before my mind can stop it, recognition, possession, memory. The instinct to pull her in hits hard and fast, immediately followed by the urge to shove her away. "Just don't come back without my son."
My son.
The words slam into me, delayed, violent.
Myson?
The thought fractures outward, splintering through everything I've been holding together. How dare she? How fucking dare she stand here—barefoot, inmyhome, wearingmyshirt as if it belonged to her—making demands like I haven't already lost ten years I didn't even know were mine. She didn't just keep Amauri from me. She erased him. No, worse. She erasedme. I didn't know she was pregnant. I didn't get a choice. I didn't get a chance to protect him, to claim him, to failorsave him. She decided all of it for me, and now she's standing here invoking him like a weapon.
My jaw tightens until it aches. She doesn't get to do that. She doesn't get to withhold my blood from me and then tell me how to bleed. Anger roars up, fast and vicious, hot enough to scorch everything in its path. A decade of absence crashes into me all at once, first steps I never saw, nights I never guarded, a childhood lived without my name backing it. And still?—
I want her.
That's the part that almost breaks me. I want her even as I resent her. Even as the wordsondetonates inside my chest and rearranges my entire sense of self. Even as every instinct I have screams to take control, to assert ownership, to remind her exactly who she's standing in front of. She looks at me like she's daring me to say it. Like she's daring me to deny him. Something ugly coils low in my gut, not just rage, but fear. A new kind. Sharp. Exposed. Because now there's something I can't afford to lose.
And she fucking knows it.
I step closer, not touching her, not yet. Just close enough that she has to tilt her chin up to keep looking at me.
"Myson," I repeat quietly, tasting the words like they might cut me back.
Her breath stutters. Just once. Good.
I hate her for this.
I need her for this.
Somewhere beneath the fury, beneath the entitlement and the loss, something irreversible locks into place: Whoever took Amauri didn't just declare war on my empire. They touched my blood. And there will be no version of ugly I won't embrace to get him back. But first, I need to deal with the man waiting for me in the warehouse. The man who has no idea what's coming for him, because my fury is unleashed as it has never been before, and nobody will have mercy on him, least of all me.
