Page 26 of His Custody

“Answer me.”

Keyne clamped her mouth shut and glared at him. Crap. Gavin was always the one to give in. Keyne would take secrets to her grave. He wasn’t going to get a word out of her and fuck if that didn’t set his brain on fire.

“Uncross your ankles.” A few seconds ticked by, but she didn’t move. “Do it now or I will do it for you.”

Her glare softened and her eyes glinted. “I don’t think that counts as beyond reproach, do you?”

And now she was going to throw Judge Pollard’s words in his face? The robed and bewinged figure on his shoulder agreed, and gave him aWell, do you?raised eyebrow look.Thanks a fucking lot, Keyne, for giving her ideas. How could such a small person be so infuriating? “Just fucking do it.”

Her mouth swung to one side and her strawberry brows inched up her forehead, considering. She let out a breath and then slowly, deliberately, looking him in the eye, she unhooked her feet and slid her legs apart.

Above her knee on the inside of her thigh, as Ada had said, there were cuts. Not big. An inch and a half across maybe, a quarter inch apart. She’d started mid-thigh and worked her way down judging by how healed the cuts were. She’d been lucky, or careful; nothing looked inflamed or infected, but god knew what she was using to do it.

Jasper sunk to his knees in front of her, sitting back on his heels and putting his hands on her knees. He didn’t spread her legs any wider, didn’t want to, but held her so she couldn’t close up again. There were light golden freckles dusting the tops of her kneecaps and the contrast with the horizontal red lines on her skin made him come undone.

She’d looked away when he knelt and when he looked up at her, she was turned to the side, nose in the air, breathing hard as a tear ran down her cheek.

“Why?”

Keyne didn’t answer him, didn’t look at him, closed her eyes tight enough that another tear squeezed between her lids and followed the track of the first.

“Is it that bad, Keyne? That you need to make yourself bleed to feel anything? Are you doing penance? Because you think it was your fault? Or is this a slow suicide? Are you hoping one of them will get infected and you’ll go septic and die? Is that what you want?” His voice had climbed from calm to pleading to an angry plateau. He wasn’t shouting but he wasn’t far off, and she was vibrating with strain under his hands. “Did you think how I would feel if I lost you?”

Her eyes snapped open and she turned to him “I—”

“I know. You think I don’t have feelings. You think I’m a heartless machine.” His thumbs dug into her inner thighs. He knew enough to know he was bruising her, but he didn’t care. If she wanted to hurt, let her hurt. “I don’t feel guilty about what happened to our parents and Gavin. It cracked my chest wide open and I’m still bleeding because it hurts but I don’t blame myself. There was nothing I could have done. But you... If I lose you, I don’t think I could live with myself. Because that’s something I do have power over. I am responsible for you.”

In a swirl of damp red hair, she turned on him, fury lighting her eyes. “You don’t—”

“I don’t have power over you? Don’t kid yourself. Look at what you’re letting me do.”

They both looked at his big hands on her slim knees, holding her thighs open.Sex. The charge ran through him, and he hoped it didn’t leak into her body. He could control himself. Would control himself. She didn’t need to know. She wouldn’t know. The thoughts, the urges, the dreams he had about her. He’d take that secret to his goddamn grave.

Now he needed to fix this. Or near enough as he knew how. Which was far away enough from what any sane person would do that he was probably going to hell. Or jail. Okay, yeah, jail first and then hell. But if it might help? Then he was going to give it a shot, metal bars or eternal fires be damned.

“Look. I’m not going to tell you to stop. I wish you would, but I understand compulsions. Like if you don’t give in this very second, any hope you have of feeling that way again is going to shrivel up and die.” He’d ceased to crave alcohol or coke as much as he had when Keyne first came to live with him, and it had always been easy for him to drop weed when he felt like it. But the euphoria that cocaine brought was frigging exquisite, and in that moment his yen for it was a tangible thing. Same with the slow descent and numbing a good amount of booze could give. And hell, he’d be a cheap date with three months of sobriety under his belt. Yes, he understood the hunger of compulsions, and how useless it could be to fight against them, especially if you didn’t want to, and Keyne already had enough things to fight. “So I’m going to offer you a compromise.”

“You’re going to compromise? On me cutting myself?” Her tone was a mix of disbelieving and disdainful, her wrinkled nose offering the same.

He sighed, nodded helplessly. He should’ve stuck with psych as an undergrad. Maybe then he wouldn’t be fucking this up quite so badly. He only understood the psychology of a certain kind of woman and he wasn’t sure whether to hope the games he knew how to play would work on Keyne or not.

“I’m not going to stop you. I don’t know how.” Not without physically restraining her or getting her locked up in a psych ward, neither of which he was going to touch with a ten-foot pole. “So here’s the deal. You want to cut yourself? You’re going to do it in front of me.”

He took his hands from her thighs, leaving red marks where his fingers had dug into her and picked up the box, setting the dials in the lock until the catch released. After he’d urged her knees together, he laid it on her lap before opening the lid.

Her eyes bugged at the contents before she looked up at him. “What the hell—”

“Asking questions is not part of the bargain.” It was his blood play kit. The one thing he hadn’t given to Ryan to keep because Ryan had a major squick about blood play. Alcohol swabs for before, autoclaved knives for the act, sterile cloths for cleanup, antibacterial ointment and medical tape for bandaging. Right. Not everyone happened to have a blood play kit lying around, and she was going to be awfully goddamn suspicious about why he’d have a box like this: half instruments of torture, half first aid kit. Well, let her wonder. Too late to think better of it now.

Her gaze skated back and forth over the contents, darting to meet his every few passes. He didn’t offer anything except a stony façade. When she met his eyes for more than a few seconds, it was with an angry sneer. “What kind of sick fuck are you, wanting to watch me cut myself?”

There was a long list of things he’d rather be doing than watch Keyne O’Connell take a knife to her freckled skin, her blood trickle down her inner thigh. But he didn’t think that would get him anywhere. “What kind of sick fuck areyou, wanting to cut yourself?”

Calling your ward a sick fuck was likely against the rules inThe Good Guardian’s Handbook, but since when had he played by the rules? He was clearly not cut out for this, but all he had to do was keep her alive through her senior year. If he could do that, no matter the means, he was going to call it a win.

Keyne smiled then, a tiny rise in her cheeks, a puff of air escaping though her nose in the ghost of a laugh. “You don’t get off on this? You’re not some kind of vampire?”

She was teasing him and his relief was palpable. “No. We could get you some garlic to hang around your doorframe if you’re concerned though.”

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