Page 56 of Malice

“And you’re okay with it? With everything that comes with it?”

The question hangs between us, weighted with everything my mother isn’t saying, the danger, the violence, the particular brand of loyalty that demands everything and offers the same in return. She’s not judging. She’s checking. The way she’s always checked my whole life, making sure I understand the weight of what I’m choosing.

I think about the look on Carter’s face when he turned from that man in the alley. The cold, controlled fury that lived beneath the panic. The way his hands shook as he pulled me against his chest. The sound he made was barely human, ripped from somewhere deep and primal when he realized I was still there, still whole, still his.

“He called me his ole lady,” I say slowly, “because after today, there’s no other word for it. It’s what I am.” I turn my head, meeting her eyes. “And yes, Mom. I’m okay with everything that comes with it.”

Something shifts in her expression, relief or recognition. She nods once, a small, decisive movement. “Then that’s that.”

Mia returns with the tea, moving carefully through the room with a steaming mug in each hand. She sets one on the coffee table in front of me and presses the other into my mother’s hands before settling on the floor at our feet, her back against the couch, her knees drawn to her chest.

“Peppermint,” she says. “Mom keeps it in the first aid kit. Says it’s good for shock.”

I wrap my bandaged hands around the mug, feeling the heat seep through the gauze and into my aching palms. The warmth is grounding, pulling me back into my body, into the present moment where I’m safe and surrounded and the only sounds are the murmur of conversation from across the room and the steady rhythm of my own breathing.

“Thank you,” I say.

Mia nods, her eyes still bright with that fierce, protective anger. Her anger feels immediate, uncomplicated—the threat, the response, the need to act. I recognize it because I was the same at her age, before the hospital taught me about patience, about the long game, about surviving the moment so you could fight again tomorrow.

“You fought back,” she says, not quite a question. “In the alley. Mom told me.”

“With a plunger,” my mother adds, and there’s something almost proud in her voice. “She beat him with a toilet plunger.”

Mia’s eyes go wide. “Seriously?”

I manage a small smile. “The rubber cup stuck to his face. It made a sound, this wet, sucking pop, and he just… stood there, clawing at it.” A laugh bursts out of me, surprising in the quiet room.

The memory should horrify me. It should trigger something dark, some flashback to the trauma that lives in the back of my mind like a sleeping animal. But instead, I feel something warm, pride or the quiet satisfaction of having moved my body the way I meant to, without hesitation, without going somewhere else inside my head.

Mia lets out a sound that’s half laugh, half gasp. “That’s the most badass thing I’ve ever heard.”

“It was pretty impressive,” my mother agrees, and her arm tightens around me.

Mia tells a story about one of her college classes, her voice animated. My mother chimes in, and I focus on the cadence of their words. The easy, normal rhythm of it feels like an anchor in the storm. The tea warms my hands, and the violent shaking in my limbs finally subsides, replaced by a bone-deep exhaustion.

But I can’t sleep. Not yet. Not until he returns.

The door to the back room opens.

I sense it before I hear it, the shift in the air, the sudden attention of everyone in the main room turning toward the sound. My mother’s arm tenses around me, and Mia sits up straighter, eyes locked on the hallway.

Carter comes out first.

He looks rough. His knuckles are wrapped in gauze, Myra’s work, but fresh blood is already seeping through in dark, spreading stains. His jaw is clenched, neck muscles pulled tight as steel wire beneath his skin. There’s a smear on his cheek that could be dirt or blood, or both.

But it’s his eyes that undo me.

They find me immediately, scanning the room with methodical precision until they lock onto mine. What I see there makes my breath catch. The cold fury is gone, burned away by whatever happened in that back room, leaving behind something exposed, terrified, and tender. He looks at me like I’m something precious he almost lost, held together by sheer willpower and a desperate hope that it’s enough.

I set the tea down and stand.

My knees protest, scrapes burning beneath bandages, muscles trembling with exhaustion. I ignore them. Carter is already moving toward me, closing the space with a focused intensity that narrows the room to just us.

He stops in front of me, close enough that I can feel the heat radiating from him, see the fine tremor still running through his hands. His gaze drops to the bandages on my palms, the gauze on my knees, the compress on my scalp, and something dark flashes across his face—anger, grief, guilt so profound it looks like pain.

“Trix,” he breathes, voice wrecked, raw. “You’re⁠—”

“I’m fine.” I reach for his face, my bandaged fingers finding the rough stubble along his jaw. “I’m right here, Carter. I’m okay.”