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“Go over there,” I ordered.

But he didn’t listen, just kept coming, forcing me to walk backward until I hit the wall and he crowded up against me.

“Put your hands on me.”

“We should sleep,” I said, even as I pressed my hands to his chest, flattening them over his pecs and staring up into his eyes. “Don’t you think?”

His frustrated huff made me smile.

“I sleep closest to the door, so you can have the other⁠—”

“No,” he grumbled, hurling his sweater at the chair, which had a matching ottoman, before he stalked to the bed and stood on one foot, then the other to peel himself out of his black jeans. He left his socks on as he threw back the covers and crawled into my king-sized bed. “I sleep closest to the door in case someone comes in.”

I nodded, darted around the bed, and got under the covers on the side I never slept on, then told him he had to turn off the lamp. After a moment, he did.

There was moonlight coming in through the skylight, so the room wasn’t pitch black.

“Sorry it’s not super dark in here,” I said, rolling to my right side so I could see his back and his dark hair on the pillow that was normally mine.

“I usually sleep with a light on, so it’s fine.”

“Why?”

“Habit.”

“Why is that a habit?”

He didn’t answer.

“Deacon?”

“You don’t wanna know all my secrets tonight. We won’t have anything to talk about tomorrow,” he quipped.

“It already is tomorrow. Tell me now, please.”

After a moment, he sighed. “When I was young, sometimes, my father would come home late… and if things hadn’t gone his way at work, if someone had beaten him at golf, or a woman he wanted to screw had turned him down—anything where he didn’t win—I paid for that. He would come to my room, yank me out of bed onto the floor, and knock me around a bit.”

I didn’t scream. I was very proud of myself for that.

“We had a really big house, and my mother and our staff, they were at the other end. It turned out my mother never wanted kids, but the deal was, when they married, that she would have at least one. That was me. To her, I was his alone.”

“So she didn’t care.”

“No.”

“And you’re an alpha, so you healed the damage.”

“I did.”

There was more, I could hear it in his voice. “But?”

“But… sometimes, it took more than a few days to heal it all.”

Which meant the man had broken bones, caused internal bleeding, and ripped open his son’s skin with tooth and claw. I took a deep breath in, then exhaled slowly so I could speak without my voice spiking. Or crying. “He must have done it a lot if you got used to sleeping with a light on,” I said, scooting over to him.

“Yeah.”

“Was there always blood?”