Wildblood

Chapter 23

23

Wakefulness seized Kai like a rat trap to the dick. He bolted upright with a strangled shout, the walls a mural of ghoulish silhouettes and phantom teeth. His hand flew to his thigh, searching for his wallet and the enclosed lilac birthday card, though both rested by the lamp. The afterimages of his nightmare stuck to his vision like a thick dye. He hadn’t relived his parents’ deaths in over a decade; he could barely remember their damn faces. But the man on the train with eyes like his own…

Miya’s touch on his back was his first reacquaintance with reality. He flinched, the sudden contact a jolt of lightning. She’d awoken with a start; he heard the rapid thrum of her pulse, smelled her concern—a mawkish sibling to fear.

“Kai?” She shifted closed, her fingers threading through his sweat-slicked hair.

He clamped his jaw, forcing every inhale and exhale through his nose. His breaths came fast and shallow despite his efforts to wrangle his body into submission. Closing his eyes, he banished the shapes that danced across the room, but the visions didn’t stop—the train, the soldier, the hunters, the wolves, and the boy…

Miya’s gasp jarred him from his spiral. Her hand trembled against the back of his neck, and her eyes guiltily flew to his.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured, the apology doubling as a confession. She’d seen the vestiges of the nightmare casting shadows on the walls of his mind.

Kai shrugged off her touch, realization curdling into anger. He tamped it down, but it seeped through the cracks, corroding his self-control. He whirled on her, face twisted into a snarl. “I told you to stay the fuck out of my head.” The outburst verged on a feral growl.

Miya recoiled like he’d flung scalding water at her. Shock skittered across her features before her brow knit, and hurt sharpened into ire. “Fuck you.” The rebuke was quiet, hissed through withheld tears. She threw the blankets off her legs and stormed from the bed.

But there was nowhere to go. Their apartment was tiny—five hundred square feet of simmering claustrophobia. Caelan occupied the bedroom, leaving only the bathroom and the kitchenette. Miya paced the six feet of tile, her eyes glassy with moisture. Hiccupping on a sob, she braced against the counter, her urge to flee through the front door palpable as she rocked on her heels.

Mordant guilt abraded whatever wrath lingered in Kai’s system. Rubbing his hands over his face, he cursed under his breath, aching to rewind the last thirty seconds. A harsh, humorless laugh clawed up his throat at the thought.

If only he could rewind his whole damn life.

He felt the sting of tears, but the sensation was gone as quickly as it’d come—exiled to the dark pit that homed all his vulnerabilities. He wasn’t stupid enough to call them weaknesses, but they left him raw, exposed.

Sodden with shame, Kai crawled from the bed and gingerly approached Miya, her back turned to him. His forehead dipped to her shoulder, and he pressed his nose to the crook of her neck. She was shaking still, anxiety wringing through her body when the stress had nowhere to go—when she had nowhere to go. That he was the cause of it knotted him up worse than his nightmare.

Miya rounded on him, her eyes ablaze, her voice like a quiet blade. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? Living with a man so traumatized, his pain bleeds out of him while he sleeps? And when I wake up bloodied, he looks at me like I’m the one who’s crossed a line?” Her mouth clapped shut, a futile attempt to trap the indictment that followed. “A man who, after five years together, can’t even tell me he loves me.”

Kai bowed his head and swallowed his pulse. “Miya?—”

“Shut up and listen. You think if you keep it all inside”—she jabbed his chest—“it’s not going to affect me, but you’re wrong. All that shit you have locked away rules you, dictating how you feel and behave, how you relate to people. How you relate to me. And if you think that doesn’t impact me, then you’re—” she faltered, her voice breaking. “You’re a goddamn idiot.”

Unthinking, Kai wrapped both arms around her, a suffocating fusion of terror and desperation propelling him to act—to cling to this person who’d extended her entire life to him. She’d abandoned her home for him, and he was fucking everything up.

“I’m sorry.” He held on like she was a ballast, muttering his useless apology. Relief swept through him when the rigidity in her spine gave way, and she slumped in his hold.

She sucked in a ragged breath. “You need therapy.”

His head snapped up. “What?”

“Therapy,” she repeated into his shoulder. “You need to go to therapy.”

Kai stepped back, the declaration gouging his relief.

Her expression was grim, her tone somber. “The past will eat you alive if you don’t. And frankly, I’m not sure I want to stick around to watch that happen.”

She was being serious. Dead as a fucking fish in the desert serious. Therapy. For Kai Donovan. Or a slow, agonizing trudge to losing his best friend. It wasn’t an ultimatum; she’d merely voiced what they both knew. His demons were shearing away pieces of what he’d thought was an iron-clad bond. Eventually, he’d lose her, and it would be his own fault.

His mouth worked, half-formed sounds leaking out as incoherent thoughts pummeled him harder than his regrets. “Who the hell is qualified to deal with”—he swept his arm in front of him—“ this degree of bullshit.”

“Even if they can deal with a tenth of your bullshit, I’ll take it.” Miya glared, unimpressed. “The fact that you recognize how difficult it’ll be to find a qualified professional just proves my point.”

Fuck her nerveless retorts. She was right, and there was nothing he could say to weasel his way out. He couldn’t pledge an earnest effort to do better because he was doing his best, but his best wasn’t enough. He was a trash fire rolling toward a chockful daycare, rancid pieces of him trundling every which way.

The thought of sitting across a therapist made his balls shrivel up in revulsion. He didn’t want to talk to a shrink; he’d been down that road with Alice, and it hadn’t ended well. He’d narrowly avoided a damning diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder by ditching the clinic while he was still a minor, and he refused to be a case study in a textbook. Scorn burned on his tongue, but he thought better than to give it form. He was hurting the only person who mattered—was incapable of telling her how much she mattered. Even in his most mulish moments, he couldn’t deny that she deserved better. He owed her the effort.

With a defeated sigh, Kai slouched his shoulders and nodded. “Fuck me, fine.”

“You’ll do it?” She perked up, her lungs filling with a hopeful breath.

“You sound surprised.”

“Just thought it would take more convincing.”

Agitated, Kai averted his eyes and scratched roughly through his hair. “I don’t want you to look at me like that ever again,” he said quietly, then dropped his hand.

“Like what?”

He clenched his jaw, grinding away his self-reproach. “Like I tore out a piece of you.”

She cupped his face between her palms, nudging him to meet her gaze. “Thank you.”

His fingers trailed up her arm, and he covered her hand with his own. “Don’t thank me yet. The shrink won’t.”

“Do you want me to come with?—”

“No.” Too quick. Too stern. He squeezed her fingers as though it would temper the rebuff. “I don’t want you there.”

He hadn’t meant it as a rejection, but Miya shrank away, withdrawing her hand. Kai snatched it back, regret choking him. He reeled her in and smothered her against his chest. “I’ll deal with it.”

She nodded against him, the bitter undertone of stress and fear melting away. Kai traced the line of her spine, up the nape of her neck, and tangled his fingers in her hair. A sigh slipped from her lips, her gentle curves snug against the rigid plane of his body. It stirred that animal part of him that wanted her on her knees, moaning his name. He hiked up her shirt, roaming her skin with a greedy touch as he walked her back and pinioned her to the counter.

The hard ridge below the cut of his hips pressed against her core. She glanced up, eyebrow raised. “You can’t whore your way out of trauma, Kai.”

“No shit, Lambchop. If that were possible, I would’ve fucked my way to enlightenment by now.”

The sudden uptick of her pulse betrayed her, but she wore a mask of perfect composure. “Then why bother?”

A wicked smile curved his mouth despite the heaviness in his chest. “I like making you come.”

“Does it make you feel better?”

His mirth dissipated, but his lips brushed tenderly over hers as he cradled the back of her head in his hand. “Yes,” he half-whispered, half-growled, then devoured the space between them. He meant what he’d said—she was everything to him. The least he could do was show her.

His teeth clipped her lower lip, his mouth a brand on her own. She gasped against the sudden contact, nails raking over the bare skin of his shoulders, his arms, his chest. A low sound rumbled in Kai’s throat as he grabbed her by the waist and lifted her onto the counter’s edge, his hand smoothing over her thigh.

Miya abruptly broke away. “This isn’t getting you out of therapy.”

“I know.” The challenge in his eyes met the scrutiny in hers. “I just don’t want to feel like shit right now.”

Her expression softened, and he dreaded glimpsing pity there. Before he could decipher it, her gaze dropped to the scabbing bullet wound in his abdomen, her fingers lightly circling the raised skin. “What about Caelan?”

“What about her?”

“She’s in the other room,” Miya reminded him.

“And out cold.”

“But—”

“Miya, if she so much as farts, I’ll hear it.”

She took a moment to consider him. “I guess that’s true…”

“I can keep quiet.” A smirk tugged at his mouth. “Can you?”

Narrowing her eyes, Miya kicked off the counter and corralled him toward the pullout. She shoved him down, and his eyebrows shot up as he fell onto the mattress. Her underwear dropped to the floor, and she climbed onto the bed after him, then gripped his waistband as he propped himself up against the couch’s backrest. Wordlessly, she straddled his hips, then snaked her arms around his neck as his hands skidded up her sides and over the swell of her breasts. He couldn’t fuck his way out of trauma, but it sure as hell made everything hurt less.

He let Miya take her pleasure, relishing her ragged breaths, her fingers raking through his hair, her mounting arousal as she chased release. Neither of them bothered removing their remaining clothes—Miya draped in her oversized T-shirt and Kai half-clad in sweatpants. Urgency hooked them both, their desire fueled by woundedness and remorse. If there was a rift between them, their bodies were none the wiser.

Kai didn’t care if shame engulfed him whole come the morning. All that mattered was Miya’s lips moving in the shape of his name as she unraveled in his arms, and he could, for a moment, allow himself to believe he’d done something right.