The color drains out of her face. “You didn’t just threaten me.”
“I did. I know it was you who had someone try to kill Miranda tonight. Listen carefully because I won’t say it twice. Stay away from my woman and my son. If you come for them, I’ll come for you, and not in daylight. I’ll come in the part of the night when your husband’s dead asleep and the security feed goes very, very quiet for thirty seconds. You won’t see me coming, and they won’t find enough of you to bury.”
She’s taken a step back without meaning to, her heels scraping the asphalt as she steadies herself. “You can’t speak to me like that. I was your wife once.”
“You were, past tense. The day you walked out of our home and left a six-month-old in a crib to find another man’s bed, you stopped being anything to me except the woman whose name was on his birth certificate.”
“That brat ruined everything.” Her voice cracks. “We were fine before he came along.”
I go very still. “That brat.” I bring the word out soft, which is worse than if I’d raised my voice. “He’s my son and yours. You stood in a parking lot just now and called your own child an inconvenience.”
“We were fine, Grayson.”
“We were never fine. I gave that marriage everything I had, and you climbed into Brent’s bed anyway. He wasn’t even asurprise. I’d known for months before I caught you. It got under my skin at first. Then I decided to ignore it because the marriage was already dead inside me and I’d quit your bed long before. By the end, I was only tolerating you. The cheating I could swallow. Leaving Ethan alone in that crib I couldn’t.”
Her face is red with anger, and I continue, “I’m a lenient man about most things.” The words go lower. “I don’t give a damn about your marriage, about Brent, about which alpha is whispering in your ear or what your new pack wants out of my son. But Miranda and Ethan are my bottom line. One of them is sitting on a couch right now with a bullet hole through her shoulder, and the other one watched it happen. I’ll rip your heart out before I let anything touch either of them. They’re mine, Vanessa.”
Her jaw works. She knows what those words mean in our language.
“Understand this. If anything happens to either of them, ever, by your hand or by anyone you’ve spoken to about them, I won’t go to the Council or your alpha or anyone else. I’ll come for you myself, and I’ll finish it myself.”
“Grayson.”
“Make one more move.” I turn and reach for the car door. “Just one more, and then it’s over.”
“You think she’s some prize.” Her voice rises behind me, climbing higher with every syllable. “She’s taking my leftovers, Grayson. I threw you away. She’s picking through what I dumped in the trash, and she doesn’t even know it.”
I open the driver’s door, look at her over the top of it, and let the wolf show in my eyes for the first time tonight. “You can think anything you like about her. It won’t change what she is to me. Now get back in your car. Drive home to the man who’s going to use you up and throw you out. And every time you reachfor your phone with my son’s name on your tongue, remember what I told you tonight.”
She opens her mouth.
I close the car door.
The engine turns over, and the sound of it is enough to make her flinch back a step. I watch her in the rearview as I pull out of the lot, a tall, pale figure alone in the wet streetlight with her fists curled at her sides, getting smaller as the distance opens between us.
I make it three blocks before I have to pull over and breathe through it. My hands are shaking on the wheel. The wolf in my chest is pacing in tight, angry circles, claws still under my skin, his gold catching in the rearview when I lift my head. I press my palms down hard against my thighs and force my breathing to slow until the color bleeds back to amber. I sit in the car another two minutes before I trust my hands enough to drive.
Derek is on the front porch when I pull up, a cigarette he isn’t smoking held between two fingers, his shoulders silhouetted against the warm light from inside. He pushes off the post the second I’m out of the car and meets me halfway across the gravel.
“How is she?”
“She’s sitting with Ethan. He’s asleep in her lap.” Derek says it calmly. “She wanted to wait up for you. He wouldn’t let go of her, so she took him to your room. I sent Linda home an hour ago, and your enforcers got here twenty minutes back to work the perimeter.”
I move toward the door. Derek’s hand comes down against my chest, not hard, just resting there.
“Grayson.”
“Move your hand.”
“You’ve got murder all over your face. The wolf’s right behind your eyes.” His own gaze holds steady on mine. “She doesn’t need you walking in like this. Neither does the boy.”
“She can handle me.”
“She shouldn’t have to.” His hand stays where it is. “Sit. Take a minute.”
The growl that rises in my throat is more reflex than threat, but Derek doesn’t move, and I respect him enough to swallow it. I drop onto the porch steps and brace my forearms across my knees, my head hanging.
Derek lowers himself onto the step beside me, turning the unlit cigarette between his fingers without speaking.
