BROKEN BLOOD

Chapter Four: Things That Don't Add Up

Three weeks in, and I'd become an expert at living two lives at once.

There was the life Angel knew about — dinner at six, her laugh filling our kitchen while she told me about her day, my hand finding the sumall of her back out of pure muscle memory, love that didn't need to announce itself because it had never had to fight for space. I still loved her. That was the part that should have scared me more than it did — how easily I could sit across from my wife, kiss her goodnight, and feel almost nothing shift in my chest, like the two versions of me had learned to exist in separate rooms of the same house.

And then there was the other life. Paige's apartment on nights I claimed were work. Her mouth against mine before I'd even gotten the door shut. The particular, addictive high of being wanted by someone who was supposed to be forbidden twice over — once for being family, once for belonging, at least on paper, to my brother.

I told myself I'd figure out an endgame eventually. I didn't yet. I didn't want to.

It was a Tuesday when the first crack in a completely different direction showed up, and it happened somewhere I wasn't even looking for it.

I'd stopped by my dad's place to drop off a tool set I'd borrowed months ago, expecting the house to be empty — Henry usually golfed Tuesday afternoons, Julie taught her pottery class until five. I let myself in with my key, called out an unnecessary "hello" to the empty foyer, and was halfway to the garage when I heard a sound from upstairs that stopped me cold.

A voice. Paige's voice. Low, familiar in a way that sent ice through my veins, coming from the direction of my father's home office.

My first thought was absurd — some innocent explanation, she'd stopped by to see Julie, she was on the phone. I almost turned around and left it alone.

Almost.

Instead I climbed the stairs quiet as I could manage, following the sound to a door left open just enough to see through the gap, and what I saw rearranged something fundamental in my understanding of my own family.

Henry — my father, sixty-one years old, married to Julie for going on fourteen years — had Paige pressed back against his desk, one hand fisted in her hair, kissing her with a familiarity that told me instantly this wasn't new. This wasn't a first time. This was choreography, muscle memory, the kind of intimacy that only comes from repetition.

"We shouldn't do this here," Paige was saying, breathless, not even sounding like she meant it, her hands already working at his belt. "Julie could—"

"Julie's at pottery for two more hours." Henry's voice, low and rough in a register I'd genuinely never heard from him before, not once in thirty years of being his son. "I've missed you. Three weeks is too long, sweetheart."

Three weeks. The same three weeks I'd been buried inside this woman, telling myself I was the only complication in her life besides Dustin.

I don't know how long I stood there. Long enough to understand this wasn't new — the ease of it, the specific tenderness in how Henry touched her, tenderness you don't develop overnight. Long enough to feel something in my chest curdle into a kind of rage I didn't have a name for yet, tangled up with a jealousy so ugly I almost hated myself more than I hated either of them.

I left before I saw anything more. I don't know if I could have handled seeing more.

I sat in my car in my father's driveway for twenty minutes, hands shaking, staring at nothing, running the math obsessively. Dustin — six years. Now Henry, God knows how long. Two men in this family who I'd apparently completely misjudged, both of them tangled up in the same woman I was now also tangled up in, none of us saying a word to each other about any of it.

I drove straight to Paige's apartment without calling first.

She opened the door already looking rattled — some instinct telling her something was wrong before I said a single word — and I didn't give her time to ask.

"My father," I said. "How long."

The color drained out of her face exactly the way it had the first time I'd confronted her, except this time there was something else underneath the fear. Exhaustion. Like some part of her had been waiting for this exact moment to arrive and was almost relieved it finally had.

"Blake—"

"How long, Paige." I stepped inside, shut the door harder than I meant to. "You're sleeping with my father. You've been sleeping with my brother for six years. And you're sleeping with me. Do you understand what you are right now? Do you understand what this family actually is?"

"Don't." Her voice cracked, and for the first time since this started, I saw something other than defiance in her — something closer to shame. "Don't act like you get to stand there and judge me from some moral high ground, Blake. You blackmailed me into your bed three weeks ago. You don't get to be disgusted by what I am when you're one of the reasons I am it."

That should have shut me down. It didn't. If anything it made the thing twisting in my chest sharper, more possessive, uglier.

"How long," I said again, quieter this time, and something about the quiet made her finally answer.

"Eight years." Barely a whisper. "It started before Dustin. Before I even understood what I was letting happen to me. Henry was— he was kind to me, Blake, when nobody else in this family was paying attention, and it turned into something I didn't know how to stop, and once it started I didn't know how to be normal around men anymore. Any of you. That's the truth. That's the ugly truth you wanted so bad to hear."

The room went silent except for both of us breathing too hard, and I stood there trying to hate her and failing, because underneath the fury was something even more dangerous — the realization that I didn't want to walk away from this. I wanted her more, not less, now that I understood exactly how much of her had already been claimed by other men in this family before me.

"Does Dustin know?" I asked. "About Henry?"

"No." Her eyes came up, pleading now. "Nobody knows. Just you. Just now."

"Good." The word came out before I'd fully decided on it, low and possessive in a way that surprised even me. "Keep it that way. That's mine now too."

I crossed the room and kissed her before she could respond, rougher than the first time, all of that jealousy and rage and twisted-up wanting pouring straight into it, and she met it with the same intensity, like she needed to be claimed by someone right now more than she needed to feel guilty about any of it.

"Blake—" She gasped against my mouth as I lifted her onto the kitchen counter, hands sliding up her thighs, pushing her skirt out of the way with none of the patience I'd had the first time.

"I don't want to hear his name," I said against her throat, working the buttons of her blouse open with hands that had gone graceless with need. "I don't want to hear Dustin's either. Right now there's just me. Say it."

"Just you." Her head fell back as my mouth found her collarbone, her fingers digging into my shoulders. "God, Blake, just you—"

I took her right there on the counter, fast and hard in a way that had nothing gentle left in it, both of us chasing something that felt less like desire and more like a fight neither of us wanted to lose, her nails raking down my back, her voice breaking apart into sounds that filled the whole apartment, my name the only thing either of us said until we were both wrecked and shaking and spent, foreheads pressed together, sweat cooling between us.

"This is going to destroy everyone," she said finally, into the quiet, voice hollowed out. "You know that, right? Whatever this is. It's going to come out eventually. Things like this always do."

"Not yet," I said. "Not until I say so."

I didn't tell her the other thing sitting heavy in my chest as I said it — that some sick, possessive part of me had started to hope it never came out at all, because that would mean I got to keep this. Keep her. Even knowing exactly how many hands had already been on her before mine.

I should have felt like a monster.

Mostly, I just felt like I finally understood exactly what my brother and my father had both been chasing for years.

Chapter 5 — cranking the heat and the unraveling both up a notch.