Page 90 of Things We Burn

My heartbeat thrashed in my throat, and I had the vague feeling I might vomit up my insides.

“You didn’t want it,” I replied, putting my hands over my stomach protectively.

A gesture that Kane instantly caught and made him stiffen, likely because he thought I was protecting the baby fromhim.

“I didn’t want it?” he repeated quietly. “I didn’t fucking know it existed!” He was back to roaring again, gesturing violently toward my stomach.

I recoiled, though I hated myself for it.

“Don’t you dare fucking back away from me like I’m going to hurt you,” he snarled, getting in my face. “You know I’m not going to hurt you. I’d never harm a hair on your fuckin’ head.”

I bit my lip harder, the metallic taste of blood grounding me.

“That doesn’t make sense,” I muttered, mostly to myself. “I tried to tell you. I mean, I did tell you, but you didn’t want to see me.”

“Who in thefucktold you that?” Kane asked, fingers at his temples.

I wrung my hands. Everything I’d built my life around these past few months was slowly falling apart. Not that the proverbial building itself was structurally sound in the first place.

“Brax,” I said in little more than a whisper, the thunder drowning out his name.

“What? I can’t hear you?” his voice was harsh, still much too loud, much too cold.

“Brax,” I said louder, my throat thick. “He, um, I told him, and he told me that you wanted me to … get rid of it.”

Kane’s mouth fell open, the tips of his ears going fire-red. I’d thought he was angry before. No, I hadn’t seen anything yet. My stomach curdled with true fear. Kane was pissed off at me before, he’d been furious. But I was never in danger. I’d never seen a truly violent or deadly side to him, not even that day in the kitchen.

Until right that second.

“Well, Brax is going to fucking die,” he seethed, almost to himself.

I shivered at his tone, what he said. He was not speaking in metaphors.

“Back to this.” He motioned to my bump. All hardness rapidly left his gaze, a … tenderness in place that almost brought me to my knees.

I was already having a hard time being upright, but that tenderness? That was ten thousand times harder to handle than his wrath.

“You know what we had, Avery,” he shook his head. There was no tenderness in his voice. It was cold. Goose bumps erupted on my arms.

What wehad.

Past tense.

Needless to say, I’d already mourned what we had. Or thought I had. My version of mourning was cursing his name throughout the day and hating myself for longing for him during the night.

But seeing him in that moment, understanding that there had been some kind of miscommunication and that he hadn’t said what Brax told me made me mourn him all over again.

Because he had been mine. When I’d seen the two lines. When I’d been scared but also excited—deep, deep down. About having something with Kane. Something permanent. In that second, I’d imagined a snapshot of a life I could have.

With Kane.

Then reality came in and kicked our asses.

That life was gone, no matter what came after this. Because of me.

“You know what we had,” he repeated, his eyes filled with emotion as he looked over my shoulder. “Yet you let Brax convince you it was nothing inone fuckin’ conversation.”

There was accusation there. Some of which I might’ve deserved. I definitely shouldn’t have made such a big, permanent decision based on secondhand information from an unreliable source.

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