“Can I take my skates off?”
“Move, or I’ll get Jane and her team in here.”
I’m deposited at Tate’s office, which is good, I guess—it’s not his underground lair. I lift my palm to the handle and then drop it a couple of times before glancing at Ethan. Not that I expect him to feel sorry for me, but a little help would be nice.There’s enough apprehension running through me to freeze my veins.
“Any chance you’ll tell me what to expect?” He glares, refusing to open his mouth. Yeah, okay, he’s gonna be pissed at me for a while. Maybe forever. I take a breath and walk inside with my eyes closed. The door slams shut behind me, Ethan making a point, and my lids jolt open.
It’s like a fucking category five moved through here. Books are scattered like broken leaves, the coffee table is flipped on its side, surrounded by a sea of glass that used to be the tabletop. The windows overlooking the brewery, usually pristine, are obscured—a Picasso of blood red. The leather couch is an island, the only thing untouched and standing. Even Tate’s desk looks like it had a fight with a grizzly bear. Or no, an ax. There’s a fucking ax sticking out of the side. My heart rate kicks up a couple of paces, as if I’m racing down the ice.
“Lock the door,” a cool voice says from Tate’s tall leather chair. He’s spun facing away, toward his bloody Picasso of handprints and smears.
Taking a last gander at the ax—should I move it somewhere safer? Like, another planet?—I draw a breath, lock the door, and secure myself inside with the angry psychopath. He won’t hurt me.
I think.
Pretty sure.
He doesn’t spin, doesn’t face me, the silence carrying eerie weight. Weight that feels like ending, which I know has to be impossible. Tate’s too obsessed with me to let me go. But so many things other than our marriage agreement can end.
Trust.
Intimacy.
I shift side-to-side on my skates. Wish I’d taken them off. If he doesn’t say anything soon, maybe I will.
“Did you do this because of what I told you?” he finally says. There’s something broken in his voice. That familiar echo of annihilated hope.
What is he talking abou—oh. My brain shuffles through the many possibilities—we’ve had so many conversations since that day—landing on his breakdown in Coach Bruce’s office. Tate thinks he’s the monster, and I guess if anyone saw the state of his office, they’d agree. But his uncle was the real monster. All I wanted to do while he told me his story was reach into his past and kill Jasper VanCourt.
“Tate, no. Fuck. Never.” I can only fucking imagine what he’s thinking if that’s the conclusion he landed on.
He spins around, and he’s unlike I’ve ever seen him. Shirt torn, skin poking through, his usually perfect hair wild, shrouding an eye, his brows drawn together like an eagle about to swoop. Little seams of red stain the cracks of his knuckles.
I take another sweep of the destruction, this time with different eyes. This is what Tate’s insides look like.
He wipes his thumb across his face, a thin ridge of red rises to the surface, a fragment of glass piercing his skin. He still hasn’t said much, and I can’t get a read on him. Well, other than the frostiness.
“Did you bring me here to tell me our deal’s off?” Is that the brand of ending I’m sensing? I don’t fucking know, but it’s something.
“Come here,” he says.
My heart’s about to jump out of my throat, but I trudge toward his desk, my skates sloshing through the mayhem. This mess is just as much mine as it is his. Tate stands abruptly, leaning over his desk, his thumb finding that space between my chin and bottom lip. Something sharp pierces, and wetness dribbles against the pad of his thumb.
“Do you want the deal to be off?” he says, his voice a terrifying softness.
“No,” I breathe, danger swirling around me. But I’m with the eye of the hurricane, and he won’t let the danger touch me—even if he is the danger. I lick my lips, searching for a hint of the blood I know is on his thumb.
“We’re never off. You belong to me.” For a second, I think he might kiss me, but he doesn’t. He pulls away instead, leaving a hollow ache in my chest. So that’s it, huh? He’s keeping me, but he’s not mine anymore. A knife twists through my guts. “I wanted to murder them all, Ryan. For touching you. It drove me to … to this, watching you get beat to shit down there.”
That’s a bit of an exaggeration. I wasn’t getting beaten. I was doing a lot of the beating. But it’s semantics, and he’s not going to be convinced.
“I’ve been doing this all wrong. We need to set rules and boundaries,” he says.
Shit. I’ve royally fucked up. Tate told me about his uncle, and I heard every word, but I didn’t quite understand the depth of his uncle’s reach.
Until now.
Tate’s nervous system still carries Jasper’s fingerprints. Every decision he makes is filtered through that old conditioning.
