Page 94 of Heat Lightning

My mind spun around and around. As quietly as possible, I extricated myself from the bed and padded into the bathroom, snagging the mask I’d discarded in my fervor to show him just how much I wanted him.

Even that short distance from my unclaimed mate tugged at my skin, stretching me thin. My head pounded, and my chest burned. I was sure if I turned the lights on I’d see black spots dancing in my vision.

Splashing water on my face, I accepted the reality I feared most.

It didn’t work.

We’d culminated the heat without a claim, and it didn’t work. The bond was incomplete but intact, and I was still in rut.

Mate him, mate him, mate him! my alpha growled, dragging its claws down my back. The fire in my veins stoked to a roaring heat, demanding I listen to my mate who begged for my mark.

I shook my head to clear it and considered my options.

I could either tell Max everything, beg him to forgive me, and seal the bond out of necessity, or go back on suppressants and hope for the best. Honestly, I couldn’t decide which scared me more—the possibility of losing Max after finally calling him mine or dying from slow, painful organ failure.

Or, was it confronting the reality that I did need him that frightened me most?

I don’t need⁠—

Yes, you do!

It was a long time ago, but I’d needed someone, once. When I was too young to understand the significance of watching my father hit my mom until she stopped moving, too young to understand she wouldn’t ever get up again, I’d needed someone.

Someone to trust. Someone who cared. I’d thought all I had to do was tell them what happened, and help would come. The police would save us.

That was what they were meant to do, right? Protect the innocent? The downtrodden? Those who couldn’t fight for themselves?

My reckoning with the way the world really worked happened when I was nine years old, locked in our room, banging my hands against the window as the police drove away, taking my mother’s body with them and leaving me and my brother alone.

With him.

No one had listened when I told them what’d really happened. Their faces turned away from my tears once money was exchanged, passed from blood-stained hands to dirty ones. I didn’t understand until long after just how much power money held, even when a mother was dead.

But when he unlocked the door of our room and found me yelling and screaming, I did understand why it was better to stay quiet. My father’s fists, belt, and whatever else he could find to beat me—and then my brother—were effective teachers.

Saint had already figured that out. He was the stoic, unbending mountain to my raging, violent storm.

And I hated him for it.

How could he be so calm, so quiet, when the only way I knew how to release the pressure valve on the days our father was home was to scream until the sky came down?

How could he sit quiet and behave, when words like depression, suicide, and “It’s selfish, really, for her to leave you alone with the boys. You’re such a devoted dad,” were whispered behind the hands of adults who thought we couldn’t hear?

Eventually, after that storm inside me was tempered into submission again and again and again, I finally saw through my brother’s cold facade.

While my rage was hot lava pouring down a hillside, consuming everything in its path, his was ice, freezing the ground we stood on solid until nothing remained alive. Together, his quiet words and secret plans honed my wrath like a weapon, sharpening it into something useful.

Something deadly.

But that didn’t come until much later, when we were taller and stronger than our father ever was. And when it finally did, we both got the revenge planted in us all those years ago.

To this day, that rage still simmered in my chest; an endless bed of coals that would never be extinguished. For the longest time, I was certain it was the only thing that kept me alive.

Now, though… I peered into the mirror, startled by the reflection of my true face. Even cloaked in darkness, it felt like I’d come home.

Which meant letting go of Max was never an option.

On silent feet I slipped out of his bedroom. It wasn’t the first time I’d snuck around while he slept. Out on the balcony so I wouldn’t wake him, peering over the moonlit bay, I called my brother.