His jaw tightened. “Brinley didn’t mean anything.”
“And Gage did?”
“No.” His voice dropped. “That’s the point.”
The words should not have hurt. They were aimed at him as much as me, a confession wrapped in cruelty, but they cut anyway because he was right.
Gage had not meant anything. Brinley had not meant anything.
They were bodies we dragged into the room because neither of us knew how to touch each other without drawing blood anymore.
I stepped around the island, closing enough distance to make Cade shift. “You don’t get to decide what means something to me.”
Easton laughed beneath his breath. “You spent a year making sure I knew I didn’t.”
“That’s not true.”
“Then say what is.”
My chest tightened. “Don’t start demanding truth from me after seven months of public punishment.”
“Public punishment?” His eyes flashed. “You think that’s what this has been?”
“You make sure I see them.”
“Good.”
He stepped into my space before the word finished cutting through the air. His eyes moved over me with lazy, brutal familiarity, and my stomach turned because I knew that look.
I had seen it in the dark, against his sheets, and beneath his body. I knew what it meant when it was hunger, when it was want, and when he was two seconds from putting his hands on me and ruining my ability to think.
The word came out so fast and honestly that the kitchen went quiet in a different way.
Bliss whispered, “Easton.”
He ignored her. For once, there was nothing controlled in his face. The cold remained, but it had cracked apart, exposing heat and hurt in rough, ugly pieces.
“Good,” he said again, rougher now. “I wanted you to see them. I wanted you to know I could let someone touch me and not fall apart. I wanted one minute where you looked at me like losing me cost you something.”
My breath caught before I could stop it.
Easton saw.
His mouth twisted, and he laughed. “There. That. That’s what I wanted.”
I hated him.
I hated him so much in that moment it felt exactly like wanting him, which made the hate worse.
“You’re disgusting,” I said.
“No, I’m tired.” He leaned closer, and Cade’s hand rose without touching him yet. Easton didn’t even look his way. “I’m tired of being the idiot who played your game by my rules and got fucked in the end.”
“Your rules?” I laughed, mean and humorless. “Do you think that makes you a martyr?”
“No. Did you think having your ‘rules’ made you innocent?”
He made air quotes around the word, and the gesture struck too close to the center.
