Page 45 of Grave Curse

Weird.

When I finally did manage to put a cork in the worst of the sobs, the realization that I’d hit him—again—made me gasp out loud.

“Oh no, I’m sorry.” The words hitched out of me on a trembling breath, weighed down by the apparently unending river of tears still inside me. Geez. If I didn’t get a handle on this soon I’d shrivel up and blow away. “I’m so sorry, Tyr. I can’t explain… I mean, I shouldn’t have hit you. I understand if you want to, um, to punish me.”

“Oh, I’ll punish you, but it’ll be more along the lines of what we shared last night than anything my shit stain of an uncle did to you. I’m not even going to mention his name when we’re in bed together, because he doesn’t belong here with us.”

“I-I know. I’m so sor—”

“Shh, don’t be sorry.” With a breathless tenderness I hadn’t known he was capable of, Tyr turned his head and caressed my brow with his lips, while his arms still had me in a death lock. “No more apologies, okay?”

I took another shuddering breath, and tried to calm my shit down. “Okay.”

“That’s my good girl.” He kissed my temple, and gave me a squeeze that made my bones groan, though it also felt strangely reassuring. “Now, I know I just said I didn’t want to mention his name, but if we’re going to get to the fun of your punishment, we need to talk about the things you said. You need to be up for this kind of talk, Snap, so tell me you’re good. If you’re not, I’ll just hold you like this until you are.”

Talking about Hades, or staying in Tyr’s arms.Hmm. “I’m all for repressing any and all emotions for the rest of my life.”

“Until they blow up like they just did?”

I winced. “Yeah, um… I don’t know what to say. I didn’t even know that was inside of me. I’m just so s—”

“Don’t apologize.” Those amazing arms of his squeezed again, and this time I felt the rebuke along with the reassurance. “Here’s the thing, baby girl. We have to work our way through the darkness you’ve got going on inside you. You understand that, yeah? Because what we can have… I think it can be beautiful, Gingersnap. And we deserve a shot at beautiful, but that means we’ve got to fight our way through that darkness and make it go away. Yeah?”

“Yeah.” My voice had never sounded smaller, but damn it, the man made sense. I did have this terrible weight inside my chest, crushing me down whenever I was near a Colgrave—nearTyr—and it wasn’t fair. He didn’t deserve that, and neither did I. “I’m sick of feeling like… like I’ve never escaped H’s shadow, Tyr. That I somehow got poisoned by him. I’ve tried ignoring it. I’ve tried putting distance between me and everything having to do with him, including you, but… It’s like that poison is still inside, trying to kill me from the inside out. So… okay. Maybe talking about it will help. Nothing else has.”

“Talking will help, yeah.” His lips were in my hair, so I couldn’t see the look on his face. If the savage growl in his tone was any indication, I should probably thank my lucky stars that I couldn’t. “Killing my uncle and bringing you the gift of his head would be a big help, too. A dead man can’t hurt you, after all.”

Maybe the Colgrave world had twisted me, because I nodded before I caught myself. “Don’t kill him on my account. Do it because no one we know and love is safe with him breathing. Especially any future Colgraves you might want to bring into the world.” Annnd just like that, we were back to babies. Why couldn’t I keep my mouth shut? Why?

He shifted so that we laid on our sides facing each other through the lightening gloom of pre-dawn. “You got triggered in a big way when I talked about making babies with you. I need to dig to the bottom of why that happened.”

“Because babies are forever, Tyr.” I just managed to stop from sayingduhright in his face. “When you decide to bring a child into the world, that’s… fucking…it. You don’t get to say a few years down the road that you want to do something else with your life, something that’s not conducive to having a kid around. You don’t get to ignore a child’s desperate need when all you want to do is focus on your own. As a parent, you have to become second-fiddle to a child—and be overjoyed to make that sacrifice—or there’s no point to it. There’s absolutely no point in bringing a child into the world if you know they’re never going to mean shit to you.”

Goddamn it, the tears were starting again.

“Okay. I’m hearing you, baby girl.” With a minimum of fuss that I could have kissed him for, he wiped away my tears. “You know your mom didn’t care about you. Not as much as she cared about getting her next hit, anyway. That’s a hard truth for anyone to swallow, much less a kid.”

“We’re not talking about me right now.”

“Trust me, we’re both talking about you, and how Audrey didn’t love you. Straight-up, Snap, she. Did. Not. Love. You. And we both know that, because… why? Say it, baby girl. Get that poison out by saying it out loud.”

“Because Audrey wouldn’t leave Hades to save me.” I heard the weariness, the defeat, wilting the edges of my tone. And the hurt. Oh, how it hurt to say the truth out loud. If my mother couldn’t love me, how could I be loved by anyone? How could love even be real? “She wouldn’t even take me to the hospital when I coughed up blood and couldn’t move without pain for weeks. She didn’t want the cops to know I was abused, because she was afraid she’d lose her supplier-slash-lover.”

“That’s right.” His arm loosened so he could brush a hand over the bedhead-tangle of my hair with such gentleness I half-believed he thought I’d break. Which was silly, of course. I was already broken. “It sucks, Snap, but that’s exactly right.”

“She didn’t get that having a child is a lifetime commitment. And I don’t think you get that either, Tyr.”

It was still dark in the room, but I swore I saw storm clouds move into his eyes. “What makes you say that?”

“Because you’re at war with a madman. That’s no time to think about bringing babies into the world.”

“That’s thebesttime to think about bringing babies into the world. Anything could happen to me, or you, at any time,” he went on when I made a sound of outraged astonishment. “Something that has nothing to do with war. A traffic accident. A gas leak in the workshop. A fucking meteor dropping out of the sky. Or nothing at all might happen, Snap. Wouldn’t it be a damn shame if we lived fearing that somethingmighthappen, and forget to live?”

“Well, yes—”

“You not wanting to have my kid has more to do with what you said earlier—that you believe I never protected you. You believe I’d leave you knocked up and on your own without any support. Don’t you?”

The sheer relentlessness of his gaze made it impossible to look away. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

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