BROKEN BLOOD

Chapter Five: Unraveling

Angel noticed before I did.

That's the part I wasn't ready for — that I could think I was managing this, compartmentalizing it, keeping my two lives in separate rooms the way I'd promised myself I could, and still not see the exact moment my wife started watching me differently.

"You're distant," she said one night, not accusing, just tired, curled up on the couch with her knees pulled to her chest, a pint of ice cream going soft in her lap that she wasn't eating. "Where do you go, Blake? Even when you're sitting right here."

"I'm right here," I said, and hated how easily the lie came out now. Practice makes anything easier, even the things that should be hardest.

"You used to tell me things." Her eyes found mine, and there was no anger in them yet, just a kind of quiet grief that was somehow worse. "Now I feel like I'm married to someone who's renting space in his own life."

I didn't have an answer that wasn't a confession, so I gave her nothing, and she let it drop the way she always did, trusting me to come back to her eventually. That trust should have gutted me. Some nights it did. Most nights, by the time I got in bed beside her, I'd already buried it under the memory of Paige's voice saying my name like it was the only one that mattered, and the guilt just... didn't reach me the way it should have anymore.

I was becoming someone I didn't recognize, and the terrifying part was how little that seemed to bother me.

Paige called me over on a Thursday when Dustin was out of town for work — three days, a conference in Denver, Sarah dropping him at the airport that morning with a kiss I'd watched from across the street like some kind of ghost haunting my own family.

"You have him for three whole days," Paige said when she opened the door, already reading my face, already knowing exactly what that fact did to something possessive and unhinged in me. "No pretending tonight. No watching the clock. Just—"

"Just me," I said, finishing it the way I'd taught her to over the last month.

"Just you."

I didn't wait for an invitation past that. I had her up against the wall of her hallway before the door had even fully shut, her legs wrapping around my waist on instinct, both of us already gone past the point of slow. There was something different in it tonight, something rawer — three days of Dustin being gone had unlocked a kind of freedom in both of us, like we could finally stop performing careful and just be as consuming as we actually wanted to be with each other.

"Tell me you thought about me the whole time he was still here," I said against her ear, carrying her toward the bedroom, her fingers already tearing at my shirt. "Tell me you thought about this instead of him."

"Every time." She gasped it out as I laid her back on the bed, dragging her dress up over her hips, impatient, hungry. "Every single time, Blake, I swear to God—"

I didn't bother being gentle. Neither of us wanted gentle tonight. I stripped her bare in seconds, my own clothes gone just as fast, and when I finally settled between her thighs there was no teasing left in either of us, no slow build — just two people who'd spent three days pretending they weren't starving for exactly this.

I drove into her hard enough that she cried out, nails scoring down my back, her whole body arching up to meet mine like she wanted to disappear into the collision of it. "Blake — God, right there, don't stop, don't you dare stop—"

"I'm not stopping." My voice had gone rough, wrecked, something feral in it I didn't recognize as my own. "Not until you forget every other name you've ever said in this bed. Just mine. Say it."

"Yours." She was sobbing it now, broken and desperate, hips rising to meet every thrust like her body had made a decision her mind hadn't caught up to yet. "God, Blake, I'm yours, just yours—"

I flipped her onto her stomach without warning, pulling her hips up to meet mine, and the sound she made when I drove back into her from behind was loud enough that some distant, rational part of my brain worried about the neighbors and I found I genuinely did not care. My hand fisted in her hair, pulling just enough that her back arched into a perfect curve, and I f****d her like I was trying to erase every other man who'd ever touched her, like sheer force of possession could rewrite eight years of history if I just tried hard enough.

"Who owns you right now," I growled against her shoulder, feeling her clench around me at the words, feeling how much she wanted exactly this kind of unhinged, possessive claiming. "Say it."

"You." Barely words anymore, just sound. "You do, Blake, just you, please—"

She came apart with a scream muffled into the pillow, her whole body shaking, and I followed right behind her, both of us collapsing into the sheets wrecked and gasping, chests heaving, the room smelling like sweat and s*x and something that felt dangerously close to obsession.

We lay there a long time afterward, tangled together, neither of us in a hurry to fill the silence.

"I'm late," she said finally, into the quiet, so soft I almost didn't catch it.

"Late for what?"

She didn't answer right away, and something about that hesitation made my stomach drop before my brain had even finished catching up.

"My period," she said. "I'm almost two weeks late, Blake."

The room went very still. I sat up on my elbow, looking down at her, at the way she wouldn't quite meet my eyes.

"Whose—" I started, and hated myself for the question even as it left my mouth, because there were three of us who could be the answer to it, and every single possibility detonated something different in my chest.

"I don't know," she said, and for the first time since this whole thing started, I heard real fear in her voice, unguarded, no performance left in it at all. "I genuinely don't know, Blake. And I don't know what I'm going to do if it's—"

She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to.

I lay back down beside her, staring at the ceiling, feeling the whole architecture of every lie I'd been telling start to groan under new weight it was never built to hold.

"Whatever it is," I said finally, quiet, and I meant it in a way that scared me. "It's mine now too. However this goes."

She turned to look at me, something raw and searching in her expression, like she was trying to figure out if I meant that as comfort or as another kind of ownership entirely.

Honestly, lying there in the dark with her, feeling that possessive thing in my chest coil tighter instead of loosen at the idea that she might be carrying a child that could be mine — I wasn't sure I knew the difference anymore either.