“I’m getting really sick of everyone trying to tell me what to do. He’s my son. I created him. None of you have a say in what I do where he’s concerned.”
“Just because you gave birth to him doesn’t mean you can hurt him! You beat Linda half to death as well!”
“She wouldn’t let go of him, so I made her.” Her eyes glitter under the bare bulb. “Everyone gets in my path. The old woman did, the boy does, you most of all. Grayson should never have thrown me out. He should’ve crawled back begging. I handed him everything: the pack, the name, the legacy, the son, and he tossed me out for a child I never even wanted.”
“You were cheating on him.”
“I wouldn’t have strayed if he’d been less of a disappointment. All that whining and moping. He never stopped!”
“His brother had just died,” I hiss.
“And?” Her voice drips contempt. “I had a newborn on my hip, a husband who couldn’t drag himself out of bed, a public calendar that never paused. I had to build a life for myself, Miranda. He gave me no other option.”
“You’re unbelievable.”
“I’m a realist.”
“You’re unbelievable. Your husband was burying his brother, and you blame him for ruining your social calendar? Do you even hear yourself?”
She steps over Ethan without looking down. A sound rips out of me before I can stop it.
“Don’t you dare act horrified. You’ve known him for what? A few months. I was his wife for years. I know exactly what he is, exactly what he wants.” Her smile comes slowly. “And let me tell you. Once I have Ethan back, he’ll never choose you. You think you’re his. You’re a placeholder, easy and quiet, doing what you’re told while he licks his wounds. The minute I tell him he can have the brat back if he gives me the mark, what do you think he’ll do?”
My stomach turns over. “You’ve lost your mind.”
“I’m the mother of his child.”
“You’re not taking Ethan anywhere. And you’re not blackmailing Grayson into anything!”
I take one step toward her. My shoulder screams in protest.
I measure the room without moving my head. Ethan sits crumpled against the back wall, six feet to my left, too far for me to reach before she does. The bulb overhead throws the only light there is. The door waits at my back, my single way out, useless with a four-year-old too drugged to stand. Whatever happens in here, I’m on my own, one good arm and the dagger hidden at my back, the last card, if it comes to that.
Ethan stirs on the concrete, his lashes dragging up. He sees me, and his whole small face crumples around a sound that breaks something open in my chest.
“Mama.”
“I’m here, baby. Hold still for me, I’ve got you.”
I try not to think about what he just called me. Not right now.
Vanessa’s head whips toward him, her hand raised. “She is not your mother, you ungrateful little wretch!”
I’m between them before I’ve thought it through, every part of me narrowed to the sound her palm made against the child’s cheek.
I shove her back. “Don’t you dare touch him!”
“He’s my blood.” Her voice shakes now, rage stripping the polish off, the magazine face gone, raw fury staring back at me. “I’ll do whatever I please with what’s mine. I made him, I bore him, he belongs to me.”
“He doesn’t belong to anyone.”
“And you.” Her teeth bare. “You’ve been a splinter under my skin too long, human, and I’m done leaving it in.”
She lunges. I drop. My body knows the move from three months in a locker room studying how Grayson shifts his weight, from years of ER nights with people swinging closed fists at me. Isink low and twist so that her hand sweeps through the space my throat filled half a second ago. Her claws are out. They weren’t a moment ago.
She comes again. “You’re why it all went wrong. He’d have come back to me. He’d have come back.”
I’m scrambling backward, Ethan’s small body on the floor between us. She doesn’t even glance at him. Her eyes lock on me alone, burning gold now, the partial shift rippling across her face in patches. She charges a third time. This time her shoulders are already cracking into something that isn’t human.
