Chapter Nine
Mute
I was going to die.
How ironic. Of all the nightmarish traumas I’d somehow survived, falling off a ladder hadn’t even been on my end-of-life bingo card. Embarrassing, really.
The bellow that had cracked out as suddenly as a gunshot still echoed around the cavernous showroom as my whole body startled. Instinctively I clutched at the ladder, but it seemed to suddenly go sideways out from under me. My sock-covered foot slipped, and to my horror I fell backwards.
Oh God, oh God, oh God, oh God…
My throat locked up, that terrible silence choking me. I flailed, one hand scraping along the ladder as I fell to help slow my momentum, but there was no denying this was going to hurt—a lot—when I did my meteor-crash into the ground. I balled up, trying to protect my head, just as my back hit something hard—but not hard enough to be the floor.
What…?
“ Idiot .” Fierce arms clamped around me with all the gentleness of a hydraulic vise, crushing the breath from my lungs. My legs, now useless things filled with what felt like unset gelatin instead of bone and muscle, couldn’t seem to hold my weight. Helpless, I sagged against the man who had put me in horrible danger, then heroically saved me from it.
Tyr.
Because of course.
“You’re a menace, you hear me? A goddamn menace.” The words were nothing more than an enraged growl, splashing the whole showroom with palpable fury. Then he turned and half-dragged, half-carried me back toward his office, while my useless legs did an uncoordinated dance trying to keep up.
“Tyr, that wasn’t Ginger’s fault,” Shiloh, bless her, barked out, sounding downright irate. “For God’s sake, you scared the crap out of that poor girl.”
“She wasn’t in any danger,” Misty added, and if I could have walked I would have rushed over to hug my two girlies with all my might for their unwavering support. “She had everything under control until you showed up and—”
Tyr ignored them, refusing to slow his roll toward his office. Once inside, he kicked the door shut behind us and all but threw me deeper into the room. My jelly legs responded as expected—which was not at all—and I slammed to my knees, coming to within a hair of faceplanting straight into his desk. My gasp mingled with his half a second before I was hauled back up and spun around to face him, and I inwardly braced to face his unbridled fury.
“My bad, baby girl,” he breathed even as his mouth closed over mine.
It was a wonder that cartoony question marks didn’t materialize out of thin air to pop up all around me.
Too much, my brain babbled incoherently. The past minute of my life had been too much—too much near-death experience. Too much relief at still being alive. Too much outrage at being blamed for something that wasn’t my fault. Too much Tyr. Too much confusion. God, so much fucking confusion, I didn’t know what to expect from this powerful man from one moment to the next.
Having grown up in a world filled with chaos and instability, that was more terrifying to me than a dozen falls off a ladder.
I didn’t know how to respond to Tyr’s kiss, extraordinary though it was. The heat of his lips was something that was now becoming familiar, and I welcomed it with an eagerness I couldn’t explain. I could all but feel the thrum of tightly leashed emotions surging just beneath the surface, like a current of electricity that would fry me to a crisp if he ever dared to let his control slip. Tyr had never lost control in front of me, even when things were at their worst, and in that moment I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. I didn’t even know that particular Tyr, the one with no brakes and a raging volcano hidden inside. That Tyr felt wild and dangerous, like he could devour me with one gulp.
Just the thought filled me with a strange, heart-pounding sensation that could either have been fear or exhilaration, and I was too rattled to figure out which it was.
When he at last raised his head, I stared into his stormy eyes like a deer caught in the high-beams, wishing I could say something. Anything. But I couldn’t. The automatic reaction to life-threatening fear had been beaten into me long ago. Be silent and still, and maybe the gods around me would forget to smite me for pretending to be one of them. I couldn’t stop this reaction from happening any more than I could stop the sun from rising.
“My baby girl, you’re shaking like a leaf.” His plate-sized hands were hard on my waist, almost spanning it. He ducked his head so that his eyes were level with mine, and his gaze was so laser-focused on me I couldn’t look away. “Are you hurt? Did you hit your head on the desk?”
All I could do was shake my head and hope he’d leave it at that.
But, of course, this was Tyr we were talking about. Leaving things alone and making my life easier had never—as in ever —been a concern of his.
“Oh fuck, you’ve gone quiet. I hate it when you go quiet.”
Yeah, it’s no picnic for me either, pal.
His hands tightened on my waist almost painfully, like he thought my MIA voice could be somehow squeezed out of me. “Look, don’t do this, okay? Just fucking say something, Snap. Come on, you’re freaking me out here.” When I could only shake my head before glancing back at the closed door in the vague hope of escaping until my throat finally unlocked, he bent and picked me up. No joke, he literally swept me off my feet and carried me princess-style to his desk chair, where he sat and held me on his lap with arms wound around me so tight it was clear I wasn’t going anywhere until he said so.
“It’s all right.” To my utter shock he began to gently rock in the chair as if I were a baby, his mouth coming to rest against my temple. What the hell’s happening to him? To us ? “You hear me, Gingersnap? You’re okay, I promise. We’re just going to sit here in my office, being safe and okay, and eventually it’s going to sink in that everything’s going to be all right, and you’ll be able to talk again. I mean, you’re probably going to cuss me out, but that’s cool. I’ll just sit here with you and wait for that to happen.”
By degrees the tension drained out of me, until I sagged against his chest like a deflated balloon. He made crooning little noises of approval, another thing I never imagined I’d hear from him, before he started rubbing my back in a soothing rhythm. This was just so flipping weird, was all I could think. Maybe I’d actually crashed to the floor, and now this was my damaged brain coming up with some alternate reality where Tyr was both my protector and my comfort, and I was happily there to soak it all up like a damn sponge.
Weird.
But was it, really?
I closed my eyes and tried to think clearly. We’d been the closest of friends when his father Odin had been the head of the Chicago Gravediggers, while Hades had still been somewhat sane and caring toward me and my mother. But that had been a lifetime ago. Tyr and I had changed so much, twisted by Hades and his torture of pitting us against each other until hatred and resentment were all we knew.
How could I be okay while sitting on the lap of the man who let me get punished because of his bad behavior? How could I allow myself to feel safe and protected in his arms?
Because that’s what I was—safe and protected. The world’s worst monsters could burst through the door right now and I knew instinctively that zero harm would come to me. They’d have to get through Tyr first, and there was no monster on earth greater or more terrible than him.
Man, I had to be losing it if I thought Tyr was a safe harbor for me.
“I can’t believe I forgot this odd little glitch you’ve got.” The sound of his voice startled me, and I looked up to find him staring off into the middle distance. Whatever he was seeing was dark and terrible, if his expression was any clue. “I remember it now, though. The first time I noticed it was a couple years after my old man got his ass locked up. I guess that would’ve made you about… what, fourteen or so? Hades had been going on this power-drunk kick of sadistic insanity to prove to the club just how hardcore their new leader was, and every day seemed to be worse than the last.”
Yep. That was how I remembered it, too. Hades, never the most stable of men, lost every shred of human decency he had the moment he became president of the Chicago Gravediggers, and my world became a nightmare.
“Then one day he decided to make you stand up against the wall of the Rumpus Room while holding a pitcher of beer in each hand.”
Oh God, I remembered this. I didn’t want to, but I remembered it as if it had just happened.
“He had Radar and Popcorn hold me in place, forcing me to watch while he threw billiard balls at you. Ostensibly to teach me a lesson because I’d done something wrong. But really it was just to torture both of us. You know, for fun.”
I closed my eyes. That day had been a nightmare, like so many others I had endured. That was the day everything changed with the only family member I’d had left, leaving a raw wound on my soul that had never healed.
“You didn’t spill a single drop when he threw those balls at you so damn hard he broke the wood paneling behind you. The sound of those balls crashing into the wall was so sharp, so jarring, yet you never even whimpered. Then…” I heard him swallow, and I wished he would shut the hell up, just stop and let the past stay in the past because I hated remembering it. “Then he hit you. Right in the stomach. I thought he’d killed you because you just sort of… folded onto the ground. And all the while you never made a sound.”
I thought Hades had killed me too, the pain had been so great. As I’d watched that red number-three billiard ball roll away while I lay in agony on the floor, I remembered how I’d actively tried to die. I held the breath that had been knocked out of me in the hope that I would just stop being alive, because I didn’t want to be in pain anymore. Hours later, when I’d come to with a broken rib and spitting up blood, I wept out of sheer disappointment that I was still stuck in Hades’s hell.
That had been the first time I’d been badly injured by Hades. It had also been the first time my mother seemed to fully realize that I, her only child, wasn’t in a safe environment. Yet, as much as she seemed to genuinely care about the agony I was forced to endure at the hands of her man, she hadn’t cared enough to separate from that psycho in order to save me. She’d even refused to take me to a damn doctor out of fear of losing Hades, her heroin connection.
That terrible day was what had done it for me and my mom. In fact I never called her “Mom” again, crystalizing the final, toxic stage of our relationship. Audrey had come to love her fix more than me, her own goddamn daughter. That was the day we’d both been forced to face it. I’d burned with an unforgiving rage, and I never let an opportunity go by without letting Audrey know exactly how I felt about her.
Even now, years later with the mind and maturity of an adult, the ocean of guilt I carried nearly drowned me if I thought about it for too long.
“That was the first time I noticed how you’d go mute, but it wasn’t the last,” Tyr went on, dragging me from that remembered pain. “Whenever Hades would terrorize you or Audrey, you’d just go so… fucking … silent. Like, unnaturally so, with not even a peep or a whimper escaping you. It’s like…I don’t know. You go to a place so far down deep inside yourself that not even your voice can find you. But your eyes are a different matter. No matter how silent you’d become, your eyes would always scream at me to help you. To save you. To fucking do something . But I never did.” A sigh heaved the chest I rested against. “I guess it tracks that you’d hate me for never saving you when you needed me the most.”
“You were only sixteen when I got hit with that number-three ball.” Whew. Finally. I’d be whispering for a while, but that was to be expected. “A baby against a monster who was trying to provoke you into a fight so he could justifiably murder you. Loki would have been next, and then Hades probably would have sold Hel to sex traffickers. That’s what he said he wanted to do with her to get her out of his hair. And you did kill for me,” I added, swallowing in the hope of making a bigger noise than the weak-ass whisper I currently had going on. “Four years later, you killed Popcorn because you knew what I was going to do to myself. Though I still don’t know how you knew.”
“I could see in your eyes that you were just so fucking done . Done with all the stupid bullshit my uncle was putting us through, done with waiting for things to somehow get better. Just… done . I’ve always been able to read your eyes.” The arms around me tightened and he turned to press his mouth against my brow. “Welcome back, by the way.”
Aww . “Thanks.”
“Where do you go when you go so quiet?”
“I’m right here. It’s like… When I get scared, I don’t want to be noticed by any of the gods around me, so everything in my throat sort of freezes up. I can’t help it. It just happens, and it takes a while for everything to thaw out.”
“The gods?” A frown began to darken his expression, like a thunderstorm rolling in. “Is that how you think of Hades?”
“My mother taught me to think of all you Colgraves that way.”
His eyes widened. “Even me?”
I nodded. “In the beginning, before Audrey became a hardcore junkie and still cared that I existed, she told me stories about all the gods—Odin, Hades, Loki, and Ares or Tyr, depending on the pantheon she was focused on. She also gave me a book about the old gods to show me how real they were. Sure, it was one of those kid-level Golden Book types, but it left an impression. At that age it’s hard to distinguish fantasy from what’s real, and to make it all the more confusing I knew an Odin and a Tyr and a Hades, the very same gods that were in that book. For a long time, I really believed that’s what you all were.”
“You don’t believe that now.”
I nearly laughed at the typical Tyr response. It was more of a command than a question, like he expected me to jettison that crazy shit from my memory banks on his say-so. “There was a lot my mother taught me that wound up being pure garbage,” I said without really answering. How could I explain that while the grown-up me understood the Colgraves were human and far from godlike, the child I’d once been still reacted on a visceral level with fear and awe? It was crazy and I knew it, just as I knew it would only piss him off, so I was better off keeping it to myself. “I guess it was around puberty when I began to realize I was on my own, since Hades had turned Audrey into his official zombie sex slave. I’d look around the Clubhouse and Odin’s bar, Rooster Juice, trying to study what worked when it came to survival in Hades’s hell. Ultimately I decided the only way to live life was to act like the gods around me. I wasn’t one, but if I yelled enough and got in people’s faces, and threw my weight around like it meant something, it usually did the trick. Being a pretend-god was almost as good as being one.”
He stared at me as if he’d never seen me before. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
I shrugged.
“ That’s why you lose your shit when things go sideways?”
“Hey, watch it. I never lose my shit, thank you very much. I always know what I’m doing. I call it being a pretend-goddess.”
“Holy fuck. Holy fucking fuck.”
“I don’t think you can say holy fucking fuck without being laughed at.”
“I can say whatever the hell I want,” he muttered absently, still staring at me like he was in some kind of shock. “I’ve got a news flash for you, Snap. I’m not a god, and you’re not a goddess. You’re the hottest, most beautiful woman I’ve ever known or will ever know in my lifetime, but you’re mortal, just like everyone else on the damn planet, you got that? You can get hurt. You can be killed. If you fall off a ladder, you could break your fucking neck.”
Oh, wow. He thought I was beautiful. And hot. Will wonders never cease. “To be fair, the ladder was your fault. I was doing just fine, hanging Grimmy up without a—”
“ Grimmy ?”
“We named him Grimmy. The point,” I went on when he just stared at me, “was that I was perfectly safe until you barged in and nearly killed me. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“Picturing you with your beautiful head splattered all over the floor is what’s wrong with me.” The hand stroking my back moved up under my hair to cup the back of my head. It fit so perfectly into the bowl of his palm I could almost believe I was made for his hands to hold. “Imagining your perfect body bent and broken is what’s wrong with me.” His other hand holding my legs in place roamed up the outer line of my thigh until it landed on my ass while I just sat there, stunned, my entire body flushing with a fever he could surely feel. “Seeing your eyes silently screaming at me to help you, to save you, is what’s wrong with me.”
Oh.
At his words, something bigger than the lust his touch ignited moved through me to settle deep into my soul. This poor man, I thought while my eyes stung with tears I’d never let him see. I wasn’t the only one drowning in past traumas. When it came to me, Tyr was a never-ending, twisted-up, Gordian knot of trauma. As much as I had suffered being his whipping girl, he had suffered, too.
Another thing we could lay at Hades’s feet.
“So.” With a gentleness I had never felt before when it came to him, I reached up to cup his beard-covered cheek, delighting in how the short whiskers tickled my palm. “Is this your way of telling me that I should always expect wild overreactions from you? Because while I understand it, navigating everyday struggles like ladder-climbing and tire-changing is going to be that much more difficult with you popping up to make things worse.”
His scowl was a work of ominous art. “I do not wildly overreact.”
“Of course not,” I soothed, keeping my voice light. “My mistake.”
“If you need a tire changed or a fucking Grimmy hung from the rafters, all you have to do is text me and I’ll be there.”
I huffed out a soundless snort. “Tyr, I know how busy you are. You really want to be bothered with that kind of random crap?”
“It’s not bothering me. Anything that keeps you in one piece doesn’t bother me.”
“What if you’re busy?”
“Then you’ll be patient and wait for me to get to you. But make no mistake, I will always find time to get to you. Always .”
Since that statement shattered my decade-old worldview of his place in my life, I could only shake my head and set it aside. I’d figure it out later. “That’s a nice theory, but you’ve already proven it doesn’t work. I came over here to talk—on your invitation, mind you—but you weren’t here. I’m assuming it was because you were busy?”
“Busy, yes,” he acknowledged, and something shifted in his eyes, like part of his brain zoomed off to travel down another path while the rest of him stayed here. “But not too busy for you. You should’ve texted to let me know you were coming over.”
“Next time I will.”
“Good.” His hand was still in my hair, his fingers absently caressing while I could see all the wheels turning in his head. “What do you know about that girl who almost pushed you into a head-on collision? Olive. What’s her last name?”
I blinked. Talk about a question out of left field. “I don’t know, I never caught it.”
“Would Roxie know it?”
I stared at him. “I have no idea. Why?”
“No reason.”
“Liar.”
“No reason that I’m willing to share right now,” he corrected in a mild tone while his gaze slid over my face. And just like that, his attention seemed to zero in on my lips. “You know, you’ve got a spicy mouth for someone who almost died a few minutes ago.”
“Do you want me to go back to being mute?”
“Hell, no. Give me all that delicious spice, Snap. I can’t get enough of it.” With a guiding push of his hand in my hair, he brought me up to meet the hungry descent of his mouth.