Chapter Twelve
A Shot at Beautiful
“Condom!”
It wasn’t the most picturesque way to wake up the morning after the best night of sex I’d ever had. After Tyr gave me three—three!—orgasms on the dining room table, he at last untied me and helped me to my feet. At the time, I’d been blissed out and so flummoxed by the weird turn in my life of having Tyr become my lover that I’d barely registered his semen leaking out as I went to shower, where he’d joined me.
Then he’d claimed that turnabout was fair play when it came to oral sex, and that I needed to get on my knees double-quick. I did so only because that sounded like a ton of fun, and by the time we’d fallen into bed—oddly the one place where we hadn’t had sex—sleep had claimed me almost before my head hit the pillow. Sleeping peacefully with someone in the bed with me was another first. I hadn’t had a significant other in years, and even then I hadn’t been big on having someone else in the bed with me.
With Tyr, though, I hadn’t given it a thought as he pulled me to him as if I were his favorite snuggle pillow, and drifted off to sleep with him half-lying on top of me.
But I was awake now. Horribly, terribly awake.
“Ginger. Baby.” Sounding more asleep than awake, Tyr stirred against the pillows and reached out a long, muscle-padded arm. “Come back here, the sun’s not even up yet.”
“I can’t, I’ve got to get to a drugstore.”
In the gloom, I saw his eyes shoot open, instantly awake. “What’s wrong? Are you sick? What do you need? Say it, and I’ll have it here for you in minutes.”
A fleeting warmth bloomed inside, almost distracting me from my mission. “No one’s picking up for me the one thing I need.”
“What do you need?”
“The morning-after pill. Or a time machine, whichever works. I’m not picky.” I made to push off the bed, but he caught me by the waist before I could take off like a rocket. “Tyr—”
“You’re not going anywhere.” His sleep-gruff voice did wacky things to my nervous system, making me shiver when the room was nice and warm. “Nothing’s open at five in the morning. Come back to bed.”
“There’s such a thing as 24-hour pharmacies, and I’ve got all the motivation to find one.” I took a deep breath and dived in. “I’m not on birth control, Tyr. And the timing of having unprotected sex… I mean, it’s not perfect for baby-making shenanigans like it would be a few days from now, but there’s still a possibility I could get pregnant from last night’s… whatever that was.” Temporary insanity fit the bill quite nicely.
The arm around me tightened until it felt like living steel. “In the long, long history of humans fucking each other, last night was the absolute pinnacle.”
He wasn’t wrong. “Yeah, but now I’ve got to take care of the consequences. So let me go so I can do that, okay? I’ll pick up some condoms for you while I’m at it,” I added, then was a little stunned and a lot turned on by my brazen assumption that lots of future sexy-times with him was going to happen. “Any preferences?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a preference.” In a shocking flex, Tyr suddenly hauled me backwards, pushed me flat onto the mattress and rolled over on top of me so that we were almost nose to nose. “My preference is none.”
“What?”
“None, as in no condoms. Not with you. And not when your biological clock is coming up on prime baby-making time.”
Either my ears were playing tricks on me, or I was still asleep and stress-dreaming about all the unprotected sex we’d just had. “Okay, I don’t think you understood what I said, so let me explain how things work. You see, a healthy woman’s body cycles roughly every twenty-eight days, so that means—”
“I know exactly what it means, Doctor.” A husky chuckle sounded before he kissed me lazily, then shimmied down my body so that he could fit his face into the curve of my neck. “You’re the one who’s not understanding me, but I’ve got faith in you. You’ll get there eventually.”
I stared up at the ceiling, beyond baffled. “Tyr, if I don’t take care of this, right now, we could be in serious trouble.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Baby-creating kind of trouble. Me-being-pregnant kind of trouble.”
“I’ve always liked the name Gus, short for Augustus. Or Augusta, if it’s a girl. No more god names, but I think the names of various Caesars are kind of cool. What do you think?”
Oh, my God . “I think one of us has lost their mind.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself, baby girl. You’ve always been a little weird, especially when you’re in pretend-goddess mode, but I’d never say you were crazy.”
I gave his shoulder a thump. “Will you take this seriously? I’m talking about a baby here, Tyr. An actual, brand-new human being that you’re responsible for, not some abstract concept. Not some squirming, crying, living thing that you can beat your chest about in a macho frenzy, but otherwise take no interest in. Not a trophy you receive nine months later for getting laid. I’m talking about a baby .”
“A sex trophy.” His snort of laughter feathered my skin. “Weird way to look at kids, but okay.”
“No, it’s not okay, because I’m not ready for a sex trophy.” Then again, I was almost twenty-nine and not getting any younger… Frantically I shook my head. “No. Seriously, no . We’re not doing this, and I’m not playing around. Let me up so I can take care of this.”
“I can’t let you up because I’ve already taken care of it. And I’ll continue to take care of it until this—” he moved just far enough to one side to place a hand on my flat tummy, “grows big and round with my son or daughter. I can’t wait to see you like that, Snap. You’re going to be so fucking majestic, just thinking about you all swollen with my baby makes my dick throb and my chest clench.”
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
“You’re serious.” It was nothing more than a faint whisper as I stared up at him through the gloom. “You’re really serious.”
“I am.” His hand slid up from my stomach to the valley of my breasts. “Your heart’s racing so much it’s shaking your whole body. You’re not going mute on me again, are you?”
His tone made it plain that I’d better not go mute on him now, or ever again. “Tyr, we’re not like that, you and I.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re not like Romeo and Shiloh, or even Ashtray and Mabel. We… we can’t.”
“Tell me why you think we can’t be exactly like that.”
“Because.” It seemed so obvious that we would never work, that my one-word denial was all I could come up with.
He waited a beat, apparently thinking there would be more. When there wasn’t, he huffed out a laugh that had nothing to do with humor. “Jesus fucking Christ, Ginger.”
Uh-oh. He used my real name. That meant I was in trouble. “What?”
“You’re still so fucking brainwashed from all the shit Hades poured into you that you still can’t see the world you live in, can you? But I guess I get it. Scars don’t ever really go away, after all. We just learn to live with them. And Hades, that evil motherfucker, made sure he scarred you every goddamn day of your life.”
For no reason I could fathom, the backs of my eyes began to sting. “I survived.”
“Barely. And you’re a fucking wreck because of it.”
“Fuck you.”
“You will soon enough.”
Damn it . “Let me up.”
“There’s no reason for you to be mad at me for pointing out how that piece of shit blinded you, at least when it comes to seeing me. He made me your enemy every time he beat you or burned you or broke you, all the while claiming he was punishing you for something I had done. But here’s the truth, Ginger—it was all bullshit. He hurt you whenever he felt like it. Because he fuckin’ liked it. He also liked hurting me, but he couldn’t lay a finger on Odin’s son without risking losing a good portion of the Chicago Gravediggers. I’ll bet my old man told Hades how I wanted you as my back-warmer when I was a little kid, because that bastard seemed to know right from the beginning that hurting you was a way to keep me in line.”
“But you never stayed in line, Tyr.” The bitter accusation shot out of me before I could stop it, and the poison of rage from so many years of being brutalized because of Tyr—and his rash, selfish ways—tainted the air between us. “You never once stopped to think about what your actions were doing to me, did you? You never once protected me, because you never gave a shit about me. I lost blood because of you. I had bones broken because of you. I lost fucking teeth because of you. And now you think it’s okay to just knock me up because you still think I’m some sort of Chicago Gravedigger vessel you can do whatever you want with? You can’t, you selfish sonofabitch. You can’t , you can’t …”
I honestly didn’t know when I started hitting him.
All I knew was that I was suddenly screaming in his face while my fists pummeled him wherever I could. The vast reservoir of misery from our time growing up—the pain, and the terror that more pain would come—flowed out of me in a single torrent I didn’t even know was there. It was like a geyser finally blowing its way up through layers of denial that I’d buried it under.
Maybe it wasn’t fair, but I wasn’t feeling fair. I was more than a goddamn thing to be used by these Colgrave men, and I would never allow myself to be treated like that again.
Fierce arms crushed me to him, smothering both my attack and the breath out of me. Or maybe I couldn’t breathe because of what sounded like hysterical sobbing coming from somewhere, and it took me a shocking amount of time to realize it came from me. That realization quieted me immediately, because I didn’t cry. I felt the need to, of course, just like everyone else. But I never gave in to that need. Never. Hades taught me long ago that my enemies thrived off my tears. So fine. My enemies could suck it, because I never let my tears fall.
Yet here I was, bawling my damn eyes out in front of Tyr.
Worse yet, I couldn’t stop.
What the hell did that mean?
It took me a while to calm down, something else I couldn’t explain, because while I was in an emotional state like this I was utterly vulnerable. Yet Tyr seemed to take it all in stride, making small crooning noises and rubbing my back, and completely not destroying me when I was defenseless.
Weird.
When I finally did manage to put a cork in the worst of the sobs, the realization that I’d hit him— again —made me gasp out loud.
“Oh no, I’m sorry.” The words hitched out of me on a trembling breath, weighed down by the apparently unending river of tears still inside me. Geez. If I didn’t get a handle on this soon I’d shrivel up and blow away. “I’m so sorry, Tyr. I can’t explain… I mean, I shouldn’t have hit you. I understand if you want to, um, to punish me.”
“Oh, I’ll punish you, but it’ll be more along the lines of what we shared last night than anything my shit stain of an uncle did to you. I’m not even going to mention his name when we’re in bed together, because he doesn’t belong here with us.”
“I-I know. I’m so sor—”
“Shh, don’t be sorry.” With a breathless tenderness I hadn’t known he was capable of, Tyr turned his head and caressed my brow with his lips, while his arms still had me in a death lock. “No more apologies, okay?”
I took another shuddering breath, and tried to calm my shit down. “Okay.”
“That’s my good girl.” He kissed my temple, and gave me a squeeze that made my bones groan, though it also felt strangely reassuring. “Now, I know I just said I didn’t want to mention his name, but if we’re going to get to the fun of your punishment, we need to talk about the things you said. You need to be up for this kind of talk, Snap, so tell me you’re good. If you’re not, I’ll just hold you like this until you are.”
Talking about Hades, or staying in Tyr’s arms. Hmm . “I’m all for repressing any and all emotions for the rest of my life.”
“Until they blow up like they just did?”
I winced. “Yeah, um… I don’t know what to say. I didn’t even know that was inside of me. I’m just so s—”
“Don’t apologize.” Those amazing arms of his squeezed again, and this time I felt the rebuke along with the reassurance. “Here’s the thing, baby girl. We have to work our way through the darkness you’ve got going on inside you. You understand that, yeah? Because what we can have… I think it can be beautiful, Gingersnap. And we deserve a shot at beautiful, but that means we’ve got to fight our way through that darkness and make it go away. Yeah?”
“Yeah.” My voice had never sounded smaller, but damn it, the man made sense. I did have this terrible weight inside my chest, crushing me down whenever I was near a Colgrave—near Tyr —and it wasn’t fair. He didn’t deserve that, and neither did I. “I’m sick of feeling like… like I’ve never escaped H’s shadow, Tyr. That I somehow got poisoned by him. I’ve tried ignoring it. I’ve tried putting distance between me and everything having to do with him, including you, but… It’s like that poison is still inside, trying to kill me from the inside out. So… okay. Maybe talking about it will help. Nothing else has.”
“Talking will help, yeah.” His lips were in my hair, so I couldn’t see the look on his face. If the savage growl in his tone was any indication, I should probably thank my lucky stars that I couldn’t. “Killing my uncle and bringing you the gift of his head would be a big help, too. A dead man can’t hurt you, after all.”
Maybe the Colgrave world had twisted me, because I nodded before I caught myself. “Don’t kill him on my account. Do it because no one we know and love is safe with him breathing. Especially any future Colgraves you might want to bring into the world.” Annnd just like that, we were back to babies. Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut? Why?
He shifted so that we laid on our sides facing each other through the lightening gloom of pre-dawn. “You got triggered in a big way when I talked about making babies with you. I need to dig to the bottom of why that happened.”
“Because babies are forever, Tyr.” I just managed to stop from saying duh right in his face. “When you decide to bring a child into the world, that’s… fucking… it . You don’t get to say a few years down the road that you want to do something else with your life, something that’s not conducive to having a kid around. You don’t get to ignore a child’s desperate need when all you want to do is focus on your own. As a parent, you have to become second-fiddle to a child—and be overjoyed to make that sacrifice—or there’s no point to it. There’s absolutely no point in bringing a child into the world if you know they’re never going to mean shit to you.”
Goddamn it, the tears were starting again.
“Okay. I’m hearing you, baby girl.” With a minimum of fuss that I could have kissed him for, he wiped away my tears. “You know your mom didn’t care about you. Not as much as she cared about getting her next hit, anyway. That’s a hard truth for anyone to swallow, much less a kid.”
“We’re not talking about me right now.”
“Trust me, we’re both talking about you, and how Audrey didn’t love you. Straight-up, Snap, she. Did. Not. Love. You. And we both know that, because… why? Say it, baby girl. Get that poison out by saying it out loud.”
“Because Audrey wouldn’t leave Hades to save me.” I heard the weariness, the defeat, wilting the edges of my tone. And the hurt. Oh, how it hurt to say the truth out loud. If my mother couldn’t love me, how could I be loved by anyone? How could love even be real? “She wouldn’t even take me to the hospital when I coughed up blood and couldn’t move without pain for weeks. She didn’t want the cops to know I was abused, because she was afraid she’d lose her supplier-slash-lover.”
“That’s right.” His arm loosened so he could brush a hand over the bedhead-tangle of my hair with such gentleness I half- believed he thought I’d break. Which was silly, of course. I was already broken. “It sucks, Snap, but that’s exactly right.”
“She didn’t get that having a child is a lifetime commitment. And I don’t think you get that either, Tyr.”
It was still dark in the room, but I swore I saw storm clouds move into his eyes. “What makes you say that?”
“Because you’re at war with a madman. That’s no time to think about bringing babies into the world.”
“That’s the best time to think about bringing babies into the world. Anything could happen to me, or you, at any time,” he went on when I made a sound of outraged astonishment. “Something that has nothing to do with war. A traffic accident. A gas leak in the workshop. A fucking meteor dropping out of the sky. Or nothing at all might happen, Snap. Wouldn’t it be a damn shame if we lived fearing that something might happen, and forget to live?”
“Well, yes—”
“You not wanting to have my kid has more to do with what you said earlier—that you believe I never protected you. You believe I’d leave you knocked up and on your own without any support. Don’t you?”
The sheer relentlessness of his gaze made it impossible to look away. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Frustration flashed across his expression. “When that fucker threw those billiard balls at you, he told you it was because I had done something wrong, and you were receiving my punishment. Remember?”
I nodded stiffly. How could I forget?
“Do you know what I did wrong?”
“No one told me.”
“No one told you what I did wrong that day, because I didn’t do a goddamn thing.”
My breath halted in my throat, and in some dark corner of my mind the resentment that had existed from that horrible moment began to dissolve. The relief of it leaving me was so heady I nearly passed out. “What?”
“My uncle H is a top-tier sadist, and he was in a mood that day to flex on us both. Oh, he later made up some horseshit about how I’d been late on a run I’d made to Detroit, but it was a lie. Yeah, I rode along with someone to Detroit, but I was only sixteen at the time, remember? I wasn’t in charge of shit. He just wanted to torture us.”
Another tear trickled out as I stared at him. “Really?”
He nodded and again wiped away my tear with a gentle swipe of his thumb. “And when he sucker-punched you so hard he knocked out your front teeth? He said it was because I wouldn’t hit his bitches stabled at the Barracks. The truth is that he never ordered me to fucking hit them to keep them in line. That was just him moving the damn goalposts to make me the bad guy in your eyes. He did it to isolate you, and to make me feel like an impotent piece of shit who was helpless when it came to protecting his woman.”
The raw pain in his tone hurt me so much I almost missed the meaning of his words. “I was never your woman.”
“You’ve been my woman from the time you were seven years old and you gave me the gift of your very first kiss. And I’m your man, who’s so insane when it comes to protecting you that I bought up real estate to house you and keep you in business. I will never—and I mean never —allow anyone to make me feel like I can’t protect what’s mine. You are mine, Ginger Sisko. So if you ever dreamed of someday having a family of your own, the only babies you’re ever going to make are going to be mine.”
Wow.
Oh… wow.
“That’s some kind of choice,” I managed weakly, because the intensity of his gaze took my breath away. “Die old and alone, or be your baby-making factory.”
“If you get right down to it, every family that ever got started made that choice. I’m just stating it out loud so there’s no confusion.”
“What if I want some other daddy for my babies?” I didn’t, but a girl had to fight for her independence.
The look on his face turned savage. “I told you—no talentless tattooist or California delivery prince get to touch what’s mine.”
At last, the light went on. “I know you evicted Draco, but did you do anything to Jake Anderton?”
“What the fuck, woman. You still remember that loser’s name? Forget it and forget him. He doesn’t exist for you.”
“I asked you a question. Did you do anything to him to make him leave?”
“I didn’t.”
I relaxed a fraction.
“Loki did it for me.”
I sucked in a sharp breath and pictured my head exploding. “Why?”
“It had only been a couple years since I split from the Chicago Gravediggers and started up my own chapter—a bold and obvious move against my uncle. I didn’t want his spies clocking me as I rolled up on your soft-boy delivery guy to kick him out of Chicago. That would’ve told H you were still a weakness that he could exploit. That’s why I sent my brother to take care of it for me.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh my God, Tyr, I’m not asking why you had Loki do your dirty work. I’m asking why you did it in the first place.”
“Are you really asking me this?” He looked at me as if he doubted I had enough intelligence to tie my shoes, much less comprehend his answer. “There’s no way I’d ever let some unworthy daddy’s boy have you. He didn’t have any right to even look your way.”
“That’s not for you to decide.”
“The hell it isn’t. Did he ever break a man’s neck with his bare hands just so he could get to you? No, he didn’t. I did that. Did he ever suffer countless petty humiliations on a daily basis the way I did while not reacting, because you’d be punished if I stood up for myself? No, he didn’t. I did that. Did he ever lose sleep watching over you to make sure you were safe? No, he didn’t. I did that. I did all of it, and I’ll continue to do it whether you like it or not, because that’s what keeps you breathing. I’ll walk in and out of here like I own the place, because I do , and I’ll keep an eye on you with every piece of tech I can get my hands on to make sure no one touches what’s mine. Blame Hades for making me a fucking paranoid freak, I don’t give a damn. Whether you were aware of it or not, this is how your life has been for years, and this is how it’s always going to be. The only difference is now you know about it.”
I prided myself in being strong, but in that moment I couldn’t even begin to find the words. So many odd moments of my life—from Jake just up and leaving, to a delivery ramp being built at Vixen’s Den, to things being slightly out of place in my own home—all of it now made sense. And as much as I knew I should immediately look for a new place to live and work, all I felt was sorrow at how badly Hades had damaged Tyr during his formative years. He’d been made to feel powerless—hell, he’d had his powerlessness shoved down his gullet every damn day when we were under Hades’s thumb. And while Hades played every psychological card in the deck to make me hate Tyr, Tyr had still done all he could to keep me safe.
Was it any wonder this man had become a raving, insane control freak?
“I’m not going to thank you for trying to take control over every aspect of my life,” I told him, looking him in the eye so he knew how serious I was. “But I’m not going to fight the way you have things set up for me now. More than that, I’m going to do what I can to adjust to this new reality, because I need you to focus on the war, and not on me. I don’t want to be a distraction for you.”
Something seemed to relax in his body, and we were so close I could feel it. “That’s my good girl.”
“But I need to make something clear. You don’t own me.”
“Oh, my sweet little Gingersnap. I don’t need your permission to think I own you.” He moved in close until his brow rested against mine, and while the gesture was loverlike, his eyes burned with possessive fire in the semidarkness. “After all the shit we’ve been through to get to where we are right now—lying naked in each other’s arms in bed—it’s clear that I’ve earned you.”