Page 34 of Grave Curse

“Picturing you with your beautiful head splattered all over the floor is what’s wrong with me.” The hand stroking my back moved up under my hair to cup the back of my head. It fit so perfectly into the bowl of his palm I could almost believe I was made for his hands to hold. “Imagining your perfect body bent and broken is what’s wrong with me.” His other hand holding my legs in place roamed up the outer line of my thigh until it landed on my ass while I just sat there, stunned, my entire body flushing with a fever he could surely feel. “Seeing your eyes silently screaming at me to help you, tosaveyou, is what’s wrong with me.”

Oh.

At his words, something bigger than the lust his touch ignited moved through me to settle deep into my soul. This poor man, I thought while my eyes stung with tears I’d never let him see. I wasn’t the only one drowning in past traumas. When it came to me, Tyr was a never-ending, twisted-up, Gordian knot of trauma. As much as I had suffered being his whipping girl, he had suffered, too.

Another thing we could lay at Hades’s feet.

“So.” With a gentleness I had never felt before when it came to him, I reached up to cup his beard-covered cheek, delighting in how the short whiskers tickled my palm. “Is this your way of telling me that I should always expect wild overreactions from you? Because while I understand it, navigating everyday struggles like ladder-climbing and tire-changing is going to be that much more difficult with you popping up to make things worse.”

His scowl was a work of ominous art. “I do not wildly overreact.”

“Of course not,” I soothed, keeping my voice light. “My mistake.”

“If you need a tire changed or a fucking Grimmy hung from the rafters, all you have to do is text me and I’ll be there.”

I huffed out a soundless snort. “Tyr, I know how busy you are. You really want to be bothered with that kind of random crap?”

“It’s not bothering me. Anything that keeps you in one piece doesn’t bother me.”

“What if you’re busy?”

“Then you’ll be patient and wait for me to get to you. But make no mistake, I will always find time to get to you.Always.”

Since that statement shattered my decade-old worldview of his place in my life, I could only shake my head and set it aside. I’d figure it out later. “That’s a nice theory, but you’ve already proven it doesn’t work. I came over here to talk—on your invitation, mind you—but you weren’t here. I’m assuming it was because you were busy?”

“Busy, yes,” he acknowledged, and something shifted in his eyes, like part of his brain zoomed off to travel down another path while the rest of him stayed here. “But not too busy for you. You should’ve texted to let me know you were coming over.”

“Next time I will.”

“Good.” His hand was still in my hair, his fingers absently caressing while I could see all the wheels turning in his head. “What do you know about that girl who almost pushed you into a head-on collision? Olive. What’s her last name?”

I blinked. Talk about a question out of left field. “I don’t know, I never caught it.”

“Would Roxie know it?”

I stared at him. “I have no idea. Why?”

“No reason.”

“Liar.”

“No reason that I’m willing to share right now,” he corrected in a mild tone while his gaze slid over my face. And just like that,his attention seemed to zero in on my lips. “You know, you’ve got a spicy mouth for someone who almost died a few minutes ago.”

“Do you want me to go back to being mute?”

“Hell, no. Give me all that delicious spice, Snap. I can’t get enough of it.” With a guiding push of his hand in my hair, he brought me up to meet the hungry descent of his mouth.

Chapter Ten

Rules of Engagement

There were so many reasons to fight this major shift in my relationship with Tyr. First and foremost, I didn’t trust it. I didn’t trust it, because I didn’t trusthim. Month after month, year after year, Hades had convinced me through pain and torture that Tyr didn’t care enough about me to keep me from being punished for whatever misdeeds he pulled. There was a time when I’d hated Tyr with a mad and glorious passion. Once or twice there had even been a moment where I’d actively wished him dead, just so my torment would come to an end.

That was some heavy-duty brainwashing to overcome, to say the least.

And, of course, there was the knowledge that Tyr had come to resent how Hades had used me as a weapon to bludgeon him time and again. I had no doubt that he’d come to hate me just as much, because I had been forced to become a constant source of pain for him for years.

So I didn’t trust him. I couldn’t help but keep wondering what his true motives were when it came to trying to seduce me. Logically I knew I shouldn’t encourage this… this whatever-it-was with Tyr. My life was complicated enough. He was a headache I didn’t need.

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