16. RYAN #2
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.
Control is a reflex, not a choice. He thinks he’ll get that through distance. But that’s not what I want. I want him. All of him. He’s staying with me, and he’s slipping away at the same time. My insides panic, brain searching for some way to keep him with me.
“What I did was fucking stupid, I see that now. Don’t do this, Tate.” My voice is all strangled and frayed, stretched tight with desperation.
Tate stands to full height, putting distance between us anyway. “I’m not doing anything,” he says in that voice I hate. The fake one. The act he puts on for everyone else. The one he never does with me. “I got carried away, and I’m rectifying that.”
Why’s the air so stale in here? Like it’s depleted of oxygen. One breath isn’t enough. Two isn’t either.
“Don’t I get a say in this? Or am I just meant to be your dutiful husband?”
“That was the deal,” his voice thunders. “My protection, your obedience. You weren’t very obedient tonight, were you?”
My face burns. God, I’m so fucking stupid.
I thought I was more to him. Sure, I tried to talk myself out of thinking like that, but I did.
I thought like that. He’s not fucking blameless, though.
All his flirting and swoon-worthy gazes.
Counting my heartbeats, watching me breathe.
He abducted the man who touched me wrong and tortured him.
But Tate is a narcissist, and that’s what narcissists do—hoover you in. Love bomb you. Make you love them. Gaslight. Distance. I should know. I’ve been surrounded by them my whole life.
Fuck him.
If he thinks I’m letting him out of this, he’s fucking wrong. I’m staying with him. No matter what. Even if we hate each other.
“Fine, what happens to me now? Do bad husbands get punished? Do your worst, Tate. I’m used to it.” Nothing can hurt as badly as the cavern hollowing my chest.
He clenches his fist until blood drips from it like it’s a lemon. “I wish it were that simple.”
“Why can’t it be? Don’t you believe me? My friends needed my help—it was that simple. That’s all I was fucking doing.” There’s a plea in my voice, but I’m not sure he hears it. His body might be here, but his mind is somewhere else.
“I believe you,” he says. “But it doesn’t change anything.”
While I was down there playing hockey, he was imagining a betrayal far beyond playing a little hockey. He was vulnerable with me; he thought I was using it against him. Maybe something his uncle or Clarence would have done.
I didn’t do the thing, but it reminded him why he keeps careful controls in place. I can only imagine how twisted the roads of Tate’s mind are. Brambles bury him, thorns latched so deep that fighting his way out means ripping off his skin.
It’s easier to have control than free himself.
“What’s mine obeys. Do you understand?”
If he expects a yes, sir out of me, he shouldn’t hold his breath. But I nod, flushing with heat the whole time. “Understood.”
He squeezes his hand again. Does he want the pain? The blood? Maybe both. I need the glass shards out. Want to pick them out. Would he let me help him? That’s gotta be some kind of husbandly duty.
“Your friends are disqualified from tonight’s game. They don’t get a payout if they win.”
“What the fuck, Tate?”
“They knew you weren’t supposed to play; they’re just as guilty as you are. Maybe they won’t do it again. Get cleaned up and changed, and maybe I’ll have calmed down enough by then not to ban them completely.”
My brain fills with a flood of what I could say to him, but he really does look ready to pull them all off the ice.
“You don’t get to be here when I’m not, since you can’t be trusted,” he continues. “Every member of security will be notified about this rule upon penalty of death.”
That is so over the fucking top, but I don’t dare say that out loud. “You can trust me.”
“Trust is for idiots,” he snarls.
I broke the only place he ever let himself be vulnerable.
I wipe at the tears threatening to well over my bottom lids.
“Can I at least … your hands, Tate.” I move to touch him, something he would have allowed before, but it looks like I’ve lost that privilege, too. He flinches, backing away. No. No, no, no. Okay. It’s okay. He needs a little security.
But it can’t be words; it has to be an action.
“Marry me tonight.”
“Here?”
That’s interest I detect. I can work with interest. “Yes, here. You said you applied for the marriage license—did you get it?”
He studies me as if he’s unsure if it’s really me. “I have it.”
“And you made Ethan get ordained online.”
“I did.”
“What are we waiting for then?”
He grits his teeth. “You. You’ve been resistant.”
“Well, I’m not now.”
“I’m not above taking advantage of your moment of weakness, dollface, so be fucking sure.”
“I’ve never been surer.” I’m not even shaking. My jaw’s set.
He nods slowly. “I need a minute. Go change.”
Yeah, fuck. I need a minute too. But I’d also like to know if that’s a yes or a maybe. It’s not a no. Know what? I’m going to assume that’s a fucking yes. I’m not letting tonight pass us by without tying myself to him.
Tying him to me.