I tilt my head. “I am Grayson’s fiancée, and this is his son. You are nothing more than a stranger. So back off.”
Her hand comes up.
I’ve only got a second to take in what I’m seeing because what I’m seeing doesn’t match the world I have built around myself for the last twenty-six years. Her nails are extending, lengthening as I watch, dark, curved, sharper than nails should ever be, until what is on the end of her fingertips is no longer a hand.
The thought that surfaces is small and stupid: Oh.
That’s all I get before her arm comes down.
I lift my forearm to shield my face. Her claws catch me across the inside of my arm, ripping through the white sleeve of my shirt in three jagged lines from elbow to wrist. The pain is immediate and shocking, with blood coming dark and fast, soaking the fabric.
I stumble back a step.
Behind me, Ethan screams.
“Leave Miranda alone! You bad woman! Leave her alone!”
My sleeve sticks to my skin where the cuts are, three red lines pulsing in time with my heartbeat, the pain catching up to me in a wave that makes the corners of my vision go grainy.
Vanessa lifts her hand again. Her face turns toward Ethan, teeth pulling back from her gums in something not quite a smile. “Be quiet. She is not your mother.”
The next blow is coming.
I see it lift, see her shoulder move into it, see the angle. The blow is not aimed at me. It’s aimed at the small, sobbing, terrified boy on the bench behind me.
My body moves before thought catches up. I turn my back to her, throw myself over Ethan, curl my body around his, then close my eyes to wait for it.
A roar splits the air above me.
I have never heard a sound like it in my life. Not a shout, not a word. It bypasses my ears and arrives somewhere lower in my body, in the place where my pulse lives, stopping everything it touches.
No, wait. I’m wrong.
I have heard it before.
When I had been clinging to life, bleeding in my apartment. This sound is the same as back then, vicious, enraged, and it calms me when it should terrify me.
There is the thud of a body hitting the boards.
I don’t lift my head. Ethan is wailing into my chest, both arms locked around my neck. My uninjured hand is at the back of his head, holding him there. The other arm bleeds into the rubber matting beneath us, painting it dark.
“Stay the fuck away from them!”
It’s Grayson. I look over my shoulder at him. His back is to me, and Vanessa is sprawled on the ground in the distance as if someone tossed her there.
No. Not someone.
Him.
My heart slams against my ribs. He’s freshly showered, hair still damp at the nape, plain black T-shirt clinging in patchesto skin he hasn’t fully dried. The cotton stretches across his shoulders, and the muscles down his back are rigid.
Vanessa is twenty feet away. Maybe more.
How did he throw her so—?
My pulse climbs into my throat.
Then he looks over his shoulder at me.
