Page 25 of His Custody

“Mr. Andersson?”

“Yes, Ada?” He scanned the figures on the screen. Not good. This investment was not going well. Not for him or anyone else. And what was he going to do about it? The answers weren’t any prettier and he drummed his fingers on the desk as Ada approached. She drew up next to his desk and waited for him to acknowledge her. God love that woman, she knew how to deal with him and over the years she’d worked for him, they’d come to an understanding.

He read to the end of the section, determined anything he could do was going to take more than the couple of minutes he was willing to keep Ada waiting. This shitshow would still be here when she was done.

“You needed something?” Jasper turned, giving her his full attention. If she was willing to interrupt him during these hours—especially when Keyne had started seeming more settled at school so he could get some goddamn work done—it wasn’t to check if meatloaf was okay for dinner. Her round face pinched, and he was suddenly more interested. “What is it, Ada?”

Ada wasn’t intimidated by him, couldn’t be and do her job so well, but he regretted the sharpness that had crept into his voice. The terse tone wasn’t a manifestation of anger, but of anxiety. His first thought was what it always was these days: Keyne.

Her sleep had regressed when she first started school, which was to be expected with all the reminders of Gavin, or really, reminders of his permanent absence, but several weeks in and it had gotten better. As far as he could tell, she wasn’t crying quite so much, but on the other hand, she also seemed... flatter. It was hard to tell if this was getting back to a more normal state of being for her without quite so much drama and tears and panic.

Keyne had always been volatile, though. Less so since she’d grown up some, but now... it was like the troughs of her sadness had gotten shallower, but the crests of happiness hadn’t gotten any higher. If he could even find them at all. Sometimes he had to stop and think when the last time she smiled was, and he didn’t like it.

It was, of course, possible Ada was here about something else. Maybe she’d blown up the stove or the washer had flooded the basement. But if that were true, he couldn’t imagine her wringing her hands when she had to tell him. The microwave had broken beyond repair last year, and she’d informed him and was happy to pick out another one without his input. This was not an appliance issue.

“I went to replace Miss O’Connell’s linens, and her door was closed. I knocked and she told me to come in. She happened to be getting out of the shower, but told me to do whatever I needed to do. I was hanging up some towels when she dropped her comb and when I picked it up...” The woman took a deep breath and set her jaw. What the hell? “When I picked it up, I noticed a cut on Miss O’Connell’s leg.”

The gears in Jasper’s mind were turning, but not quick enough, they weren’t up to speed. He did his best to come up with a reasonable explanation. “She had just showered, right? She could have cut herself while she was shaving.”

The image of Keyne soaking wet, gliding a razor up her calf and then to her thigh while one foot was propped up on the bench in the shower was enough to derail his mind again.Jesus, Andersson, shut that shit down.Where the hell was this even coming from? It made him want to dig his own brain out of his skull and send it through the garbage disposal.Knock it the fuck off, you sick bastard.

It had been hard enough watching her at Alice’s gym trying to think of her as a girl and not a woman. Normally her slight curves were hidden underneath her clothes, but in those black pants that had clung to her subtly rounded hips, and the sports bra that covered up her small breasts—when she was punching and kicking for all she was worth, the sweat beading and then pooling in the arches of her body...

He would’ve murdered anyone else in that place for the thoughts he’d been having himself. Ada saved him from any more improper fantasies and subsequent self-recriminations. For the moment.

“It looked too long to be from shaving and it wasn’t the only one. There were half a dozen of them, stacked, spaced evenly. The ones farther down looked newer.” Ada made small chopping motions in the air in a vertical row, like lines on composition paper.

The picture in his head turned from sensual to sinister as he imagined Keyne taking a blade to her own flesh and violating her body, cutting herself open. If he had to guess, it would be that she was trying to feel something, anything. The idea that she’d resorted to cutting made the acid in his stomach roil. He’d thought she was doing better. Turned out she was just doing better at hiding from him.

The thing was, it wasn’t so much the act of cutting that bothered him. It was the motivation. He’d been with a few women who liked blood play and one of his girlfriends had been really into it. It wasn’t his favorite, but she loved it, so he’d indulge her on special occasions.Happy birthday, kitten. I’m going to cut you.

He understood what she liked about it; the rush she got from him holding her life in his hands while he teased her by running the flat of the blade all over her body before selecting his sites: the underside of her collarbone, below her breasts, along the peak of her bottom ribs so the rivulets of blood would run down the slope of her solar plexus and pool in the hollow of her belly. She’d liked her inner thighs, too, and the memory made him acutely ill.

Ada might have still been talking, but he couldn’t hear her. His vision was clouded by red like someone had poured blood down the insides of his eyelids, and his own thudding heartbeat was sending blood pumping through his ears.

Shit. This was what happened when you had no business being responsible for a teenager. One who deserved the best, but had ended up with him as the lesser evil. And what the hell did that say about the world he lived in? If something happened to her, if he let her destroy herself, whether it was inch by inch with a blade or maybe with drugs... God, was she into drugs and he hadn’t noticed that either? How long had she been cutting? And what the fuck was he going to do about it?

He could only think of one thing. It might be fucked-up and wrong, but it also might work. He’d been telling the truth when he said he would do anything to keep her and he would. That tiny angelic Judge Pollard on his shoulder narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms, her iridescent wings shimmering on either side of her black robe. The figment his imagination had conjured wasn’t thrilled, but she was going to watch this play out before handing down judgment. He couldn’t wait.

It was possible it would’ve been wiser to sit down and think this through, maybe call her therapist or, god, anyone else, but patience wasn’t his strong suit. Action was what was called for here. He pushed past Ada and into the hallway, stalking to his room and grabbing a small locked box from the top shelf in his closet. A minute later, he was banging on Keyne’s door.

“Hold on!”

He clenched a fist so he wouldn’t break down her door and counted the seconds before the door swung open. Ninety-three.

“Hey Jasper, what’s—”

Her eyes were glossy. She looked high and he wondered if he’d been right about the drugs. But her words weren’t slurred, she didn’t seem agitated or out of it. Puzzled, since he’d barged into her room and was holding her above the elbow and pushing her down into the chair that was pulled out from her desk. She was wearing those damn sleep shorts again, the ones with the tiny blue and white flowers that had no business being that short and he wanted to tell her to change, but not yet.

She sat with her ankles crossed and tucked between the legs of the chair and he dropped the box on the table next to her with a clatter. He stood back and she crossed her arms over her chest, her small breasts making soft rising suns above the too-low neckline of her camisole.

Her wardrobe hadn’t bothered him at first because it was what she’d always run around in. Hell, what she had on covered more than the bikinis she’d sported on the boat and on the beaches where they’d dock. It shouldn’t have registered at all because it never had before, but now it was temptation. Stimulus for a part of his brain he’d rather not acknowledge.

He was going to have to set half her clothes on fire. Or send her to a convent.No. What he was going to have to do was fucking control himself. He wasn’t one of those puritanical men who blamed women for not being able to exercise any restraint themselves. And enough time at the club had solidified and put a name to something he’d already known and believed: there was no way he’d slut-shame Keyne O’Connell. Her clothes weren’t the problem, it was his fucking filthy mind that was, and he wasn’t going to make her feel like it was her fault he couldn’t get his shit together.

Jasper did his best to arrange his body so it wasn’t threatening, but the best he could come up with was hands on his hips. Not his finest work. “Are you cutting yourself?”

Her eyes went wide and alert, and an angry red blush crept across her collarbone, leaked up her neck into her cheeks until she was a vivid pink everywhere above the shoulders. “Jasper—”

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